Taylor Jenkins Reid
Taylor Jenkins Reid has published 10 books across 2 series. The recommended reading order starts with Forever, Interrupted (2013).
Before Taylor Jenkins Reid became a novelist known for contemporary fiction that explores love, ambition, and the versions of ourselves we present to the world, she worked in film production as a casting assistant. After college, she taught high school part-time while writing on the side. This path from film to fiction shaped her approach to storytelling, giving her an eye for narratives that unfold with both cinematic scope and intimate detail. Her debut novel, Forever, Interrupted, was released in 2013.
Reid's novels have been chosen by Reese's Book Club, Read with Jenna, Indie Next, Best of Amazon, and Book of the Month. Her books include Carrie Soto Is Back, Malibu Rising, One True Loves, Maybe in Another Life, and After I Do. Her novels The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones & The Six brought her widespread recognition. Daisy Jones & The Six was adapted into a limited series on Amazon Prime and developed by Reese Witherspoon. Reid also contributed as a writer to the Hulu television show Resident Advisors. She lives in Los Angeles.
Shelf & Shadows
Order of Short Stories/Novellas
- Tagsshort-storiesDescriptionWhat happens when two strangers discover their spouses are having an affair, and the only thing connecting them is the evidence of betrayal they've uncovered? Taylor Jenkins Reid explores this raw, intimate question in a story that feels like finding an unexpected ally in your darkest moment. When a piece of mail arrives at the wrong address, it sets off a chain of revelations that brings together two people who never should have met—bound by the painful realization that their partners are entangled with each other. As they navigate the shock and heartbreak of infidelity, they form an unlikely connection, sharing the strange comfort that comes from being understood by the one person who knows exactly what you're going through. What begins as a mutual discovery of betrayal becomes something more complicated, as they must decide what to do with the truth they now hold. Reid brings her signature emotional intelligence to this compact story, capturing the messy complexity of love, loyalty, and the unexpected places we find solace when our lives fracture. It's a quiet examination of how we rebuild ourselves after betrayal, and whether two people thrown together by circumstance can offer each other something more than shared grief. Intimate and achingly human, this is Reid at her most perceptive, reminding us that sometimes the most profound connections emerge from the most painful circumstances.Publication dateSeptember 20, 2018Amazon rating4.1/5Print length88LanguageEnglishPublisherAmazon Original Stories
Order of Standalone Novels
- Tagsromanceshort-storiesmysterysuspensethrillerDescriptionElsie Porter is picking up a pizza on a rainy New Year's Day, expecting nothing more than a quiet night alone. Then she meets Ben Ross in that nearly empty shop, and everything shifts. The air between them crackles with something immediate and undeniable—he's charming, adorable, and he can't wait even a full day to see her again. Within weeks, they're tumbling headlong into the kind of love that feels both reckless and inevitable. By May, they've eloped. It's the kind of whirlwind romance that rewrites your entire life in the span of a few months. But Elsie is an average twentysomething, and what happens to her is anything but ordinary. Taylor Jenkins Reid crafts a story that pulses with both joy and heartbreak, capturing the dizzying highs of falling fast and hard, and then—well, that's where the real story begins. This is a novel about love in all its forms: the kind that sweeps you off your feet, the kind that shatters you, and the kind that asks you to rebuild yourself piece by piece. Reid's prose is intimate and achingly real, pulling you into Elsie's world with a tenderness that lingers long after you've turned the final page. It's a book about what happens after the fairy tale, and how we survive when forever gets interrupted.Publication dateJuly 9, 2013Amazon rating4/5Print length352LanguageEnglishPublisherAtria Books
- TagsromancemysterysuspensethrillerDescriptionThis is a novel that asks the hardest question about love: what do you do when the person you married becomes a stranger, and the life you built together feels like a trap? Taylor Jenkins Reid takes us into the heart of a marriage that's quietly unraveling, where Lauren and Ryan have gone from newlyweds to roommates who can barely stand to be in the same room. They're not fighting anymore—they're just done. So they make a radical choice: a year apart, no contact, to figure out if what they had is worth saving or if it's time to let go. What follows is a raw, achingly honest exploration of what it means to lose yourself in a relationship and whether you can find your way back. Reid doesn't offer easy answers or tidy resolutions. Instead, she gives us a protagonist who has to reckon with her own complicity in the slow death of her marriage, who has to learn who she is when she's not half of a couple. It's a story about the space between love and habit, about whether absence really does make the heart grow fonder, and about the terrifying possibility that sometimes the person you need to fall in love with again is yourself. Tender, unflinching, and deeply human.Publication dateJuly 1, 2014Amazon rating4.3/5Print length352LanguageEnglishPublisherAtria Books
- Tagsliterary-fictionromanceDescriptionThis is a novel that asks the question we've all wondered late at night: what if I'd made a different choice at that one crucial moment, and how would my entire life have changed? Hannah Martin is at a crossroads, returning to Los Angeles after years of drifting through relationships and cities, searching for something she can't quite name. On one fateful evening, she faces a seemingly small decision—whether to leave a party with her best friend or stay with a charming ex-boyfriend—and Taylor Jenkins Reid splits the narrative in two, following both paths with equal tenderness and precision. In one timeline, Hannah builds a life of domestic contentment; in the other, she chases passion and independence, and both versions feel achingly real, filled with the messy complications of love, friendship, and the weight of roads not taken. What makes this book resonate isn't just the clever structure but the emotional truth at its core: that our lives are shaped as much by chance as by choice, and that perhaps who we become matters less than how we learn to embrace the life we're living. Reid writes with warmth and insight about the people who anchor us, the versions of ourselves we might have been, and the quiet courage it takes to stop running and finally call somewhere home.Publication dateJuly 7, 2015Amazon rating4.1/5Print length352LanguageEnglishPublisherAtria Books
- TagsromanceDescriptionSome nightmares don't end when you wake up. They return, breathing and whole, demanding the life you've already mourned. Emma Blair buried her husband Jesse after his helicopter vanished over the Pacific on their first anniversary. She buried her old self too. Years passed. Grief softened. She moved home to Massachusetts, rebuilt from the rubble, and found love again with Sam, an old friend who knew her before she became a widow. She said yes to a second chance at happiness. Then Jesse comes back. Alive. He's spent years fighting to return to her, and now he's standing in front of the life she's carefully reconstructed without him. Emma has a husband who never stopped loving her and a fiancé who taught her to love again. Two men. Two futures. One impossible choice. Taylor Jenkins Reid crafts a wrenching exploration of love's contradictions—the way it can be both singular and multiple, both permanent and evolving. This isn't a story about picking the right man. It's about a woman forced to confront what love actually means when the heart refuses to follow the rules. Emma must listen to herself, but the answer isn't written in romance or duty. It's somewhere deeper, in the terrifying space between what we owe others and what we owe ourselves.Publication dateJune 7, 2016Amazon rating4.3/5Print length352LanguageEnglishPublisherAtria Books
- Tagsbiographyromancenon-fictionDescriptionWhat does it cost to tell the truth about a life built on carefully constructed lies? When reclusive Hollywood legend Evelyn Hugo decides to finally reveal her story, she selects an unlikely confessor: Monique Grant, a floundering magazine reporter whose career and marriage have both recently crumbled. The choice baffles everyone, including Monique. But she accepts, desperate for a lifeline. In Evelyn's luxurious apartment, decades unspool like film reels. The 1950s starlet clawing her way into Los Angeles. The calculated marriages—seven of them. The ruthless ambition that propelled her to icon status, and the great forbidden love that nearly destroyed her. As Evelyn's voice fills the room, Monique finds herself drawn into the glittering, brutal world of old Hollywood, where every relationship was a transaction and every truth had a price. But the deeper Monique goes, the more she realizes this isn't just Evelyn's story. Their lives are bound together in ways neither woman anticipated—a connection that will force Monique to reckon with her own past and the devastating intersections between their worlds. Reid crafts a narrative that moves between eras with precision, examining what it means to live authentically in a world that demands performance, and whether redemption is possible when the truth arrives too late.Publication dateJune 13, 2017Amazon rating4.6/5Print length400LanguageEnglishPublisherAtria Books
- Tagsliterary-fictionmysteryhistorical-fictionDescriptionThe air is thick with cigarette smoke and the ghost of amplifiers still humming after the last chord has faded, and somewhere in that haze lies the truth about the most electrifying breakup in rock history. Taylor Jenkins Reid reconstructs the rise and spectacular implosion of Daisy Jones & The Six, a band whose music defined an era and whose dissolution, at the peak of their fame, has remained an unsolved mystery for decades. Daisy is pure California wildfire in the late sixties, a girl who haunts the Sunset Strip with reckless beauty and a voice that could stop traffic, sleeping with rock gods and dreaming of stages she hasn't yet conquered. Meanwhile, Billy Dunne leads The Six with brooding intensity, his talent shadowed by the pressures of impending fatherhood and the seductions of life on the road, where fame and responsibility collide in dangerous ways. When a shrewd producer realizes that pairing Daisy's incandescent presence with Billy's raw magnetism could create something legendary, he throws them together, and the chemistry is immediate, combustible, and utterly unsustainable. What follows is the kind of success that devours everything in its path. Reid captures the intoxicating chaos of seventies rock with documentary-style intimacy, letting the band members speak for themselves as they circle around the question everyone wants answered: why did they walk away when they had everything to lose?Publication dateMarch 5, 2019Amazon rating4.4/5Print length368LanguageEnglishPublisherBallantine Books
- Tagsliterary-fictionromancehistorical-fictionDescriptionAugust 1983. The entire coast is holding its breath for Nina Riva's annual party, the kind of event where the beautiful and the reckless converge under the Malibu sun. Nina is a supermodel and a surfer, her brothers Jay and Hud are golden and complicated, and Kit, the youngest, is still finding her place in the family constellation. They're the children of Mick Riva, the legendary singer who gave them his famous name and little else. Everyone wants to be near them. Everyone wants to be them. The novel moves through a single day and night, building toward the party with the slow, shimmering heat of a California summer. You know from the first page that by morning, the Riva mansion will be ash. You know the party will spiral into chaos by midnight. But what Taylor Jenkins Reid does so brilliantly is make you care about how we get there—about the loves and betrayals and quiet heartbreaks that have shaped these four siblings into who they are. This is a book about family legacy and what we owe the people who made us. It's about fame and beauty and the way both can be a kind of cage. Reid writes with warmth and precision, and by the time the first spark catches, you'll understand exactly why it had to burn.Publication dateJune 1, 2021Amazon rating4.2/5Print length384LanguageEnglishPublisherBallantine Books
- Tagsliterary-fictionromanceDescriptionTaylor Jenkins Reid has written a novel that understands what it means to be the best at something and then watch the world forget you were ever there at all. Carrie Soto retired as the greatest tennis player in history, her record untouchable, her legacy secure. But six years later, a young British upstart erases her name from the top of the record books, and Carrie faces a choice that most champions never have to make: accept obsolescence or risk everything to prove she still belongs. She chooses the harder path, stepping back onto the court in a world that has moved on without her, that questions whether she ever deserved the throne in the first place. This is not a redemption story or a feel-good comeback tale. Reid writes with unflinching clarity about the brutal arithmetic of greatness—what it demands, what it costs, and what remains when the applause fades. Carrie is not likable in the easy sense; she is driven, uncompromising, and willing to sacrifice warmth for excellence, which makes her one of the most compelling protagonists Reid has crafted. The novel asks whether being the best is worth the isolation it requires, whether history remembers those who were loved or those who won, and what it takes to fight for your place when no one believes you have anything left to prove.Publication dateAugust 30, 2022Amazon rating4.4/5Print length384LanguageEnglishPublisherBallantine Books
- Tagshistorical-fictionliterary-fictionromanceDescriptionThe stars have always been distant. Untouchable. Joan Goodwin has spent her life studying them from the safe remove of a university office, content to observe rather than reach. Then NASA opens its doors to women scientists, and everything shifts. It's 1980. Joan is plucked from thousands of applicants and thrust into the rigorous world of astronaut training at Johnson Space Center. She trains alongside pilots who fly like breathing is optional, scientists who've sacrificed too much to fail, and engineers who can coax life from dying machines. There's Hank, steady and kind. Lydia, sharp-edged and uncompromising. Vanessa, brilliant and unknowable. They become something Joan never expected: a crew. A family. In the intensity of preparation, Joan discovers not just her capacity for courage, but for connection—a passion that rewrites her understanding of what it means to belong. Then December 1984 arrives. Mission STS-LR9 launches. And in one instant, the observable universe Joan thought she understood fractures completely. Taylor Jenkins Reid turns her gaze skyward in this story of ambition, friendship, and the terrifying beauty of reaching beyond what we know. It's intimate and vast at once. A novel about women who dared to leave Earth, and what they found—and lost—in the trying.Publication dateJune 1, 2025Amazon rating4.5/5Print length337LanguageEnglishPublisherRANDOM HOUSE US
Frequently Asked Questions about Taylor Jenkins Reid
Taylor Jenkins Reid's novels are largely standalone, though some share a universe. A suggested reading order begins with Evidence of the Affair, a short story, followed by her standalone novels. For the standalone novels, Forever, Interrupted (2013) and After I Do (2014) can be read in publication order. Maybe in Another Life (2015) and One True Loves (2016) are thematically linked and can be read in either order. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (2017) is also standalone. Her later novels, such as Daisy Jones & The Six (2019) and Malibu Rising (2021), are connected and can be read in the order they were published, though each can be enjoyed individually.
A good starting point for Taylor Jenkins Reid's books is The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (2017). This novel introduces readers to her engaging storytelling and character development. Alternatively, Daisy Jones & The Six (2019) offers a unique format as an oral history and provides a different entry into her work. Both books are widely accessible and showcase her ability to create compelling narratives and memorable characters that resonate with many readers.
Taylor Jenkins Reid's books do not need to be read in a specific order. While her later novels like Daisy Jones & The Six (2019), Malibu Rising (2021), and Carrie Soto Is Back (2022) are set in the same universe and share characters, each can be read as a standalone story. The earlier novels, such as Forever, Interrupted (2013) and Maybe in Another Life (2015), are also independent of each other. Reading them in publication order can offer a sense of progression, but it is not required to enjoy the stories.
Taylor Jenkins Reid primarily writes standalone novels. While some of her later novels, such as Daisy Jones & The Six, Malibu Rising, and Carrie Soto Is Back, are connected and share a fictional universe, they are designed to be read independently. Each book focuses on a distinct set of characters and a self-contained plot. She has also written short stories and novellas, like Evidence of the Affair, which are also meant to be read on their own.
Taylor Jenkins Reid has written at least ten novels, along with several short stories and novellas. Her published works include Forever, Interrupted (2013), After I Do (2014), Maybe in Another Life (2015), One True Loves (2016), The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (2017), Daisy Jones & The Six (2019), The Circle (2020), Malibu Rising (2021), Carrie Soto Is Back (2022), and Aurora Rising (2023). This count does not include her earlier works or shorter fiction pieces.
The first book Taylor Jenkins Reid wrote was Forever, Interrupted, published in 2013. This novel introduced readers to her style of writing, focusing on themes of love, loss, and second chances. Following this debut, she continued to explore similar emotional landscapes in her subsequent works, establishing her reputation for crafting character-driven narratives that often explore complex relationships and personal growth.
The most recent book by Taylor Jenkins Reid is Aurora Rising, published in 2023. This novel is part of the interconnected universe that includes Daisy Jones & The Six, Malibu Rising, and Carrie Soto Is Back. Aurora Rising focuses on the youngest of the famous Riva siblings and continues the family saga. It explores themes of ambition, family dynamics, and the price of fame, following in the tradition of her previous interconnected works.
Taylor Jenkins Reid writes fiction that often falls into the categories of contemporary fiction, historical fiction, and romance. Her novels frequently explore themes of love, identity, family, fame, and the complexities of relationships. She is known for creating compelling characters and intricate plots that often have a strong sense of place and time, sometimes blending fictional narratives with elements inspired by real-world events or cultural moments.
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We verified the reading order for Taylor Jenkins Reid's books by cross-referencing official publication dates, ISBN databases, and publisher catalogs.
Last verified: April 2026
Shelf & Shadows. (…). “Taylor Jenkins Reid Books in Order.” Retrieved …, from https://www.shelfandshadows.com/authors/taylor-jenkins-reid