13 Books Like The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Sorted by What You Loved

Vivian Morris flunks out of Vassar in 1940 and is shipped off to her aunt's shabby theatre in midtown Manhattan, where the showgirls teach her about sex, sequins and staying out until the milk arrives. Then she does something stupid enough to reach the gossip columns. The whole novel is addressed to a woman called Angela, who has asked Vivian, now in her nineties, what she was to Angela's father, and Vivian takes four hundred pages to answer her honestly. Elizabeth Gilbert wrote a book about a woman who has a wild youth and is never made to pay for it.

This is the oral history of a band that broke up at the top, assembled from interviews with everybody who was in the room, and it is written entirely as transcript. Daisy is a singer with a voice and a habit, Billy is a frontman trying to stay sober for his wife, and the songs the two of them write together are better than anything either manages alone. Because everyone speaks separately they contradict each other constantly, so you spend the book working out who is lying and who has simply remembered it the way they needed to.

Opal Jewel is a Black singer from Detroit with a shaved head and no interest in being palatable, Nev Charles is a British songwriter with good tunes and no spine, and together they almost became enormous in early seventies New York before a night that went violently wrong. Decades later a journalist assembles their story from interviews, exactly the way a real music book is built, footnotes included. The catch is that she is not neutral, because her father drummed for them and died at that concert. Dawnie Walton keeps interrupting the myth with the cost of it.

Joan Goodwin teaches astronomy in Texas and applies to the space shuttle programme on an impulse that turns out to be the truest thing about her. The book follows her through training with the first class of astronauts to include women, and through a relationship with another woman, in a decade and an institution where being found out ends a career. Taylor Jenkins Reid cuts between the training years and one night in December 1984 when a mission goes wrong, so you read the love story already knowing that something is on fire.

Patroclus is an exiled prince, unimpressive by his father's standards, sent to be raised in another king's court where he meets Achilles. Madeline Miller takes the friendship Homer leaves unexplained and writes it as a love story, from the boys' training under a centaur to the beach at Troy where everybody already knows how this ends. Knowing the ending is the point. You spend the second half watching two people walk toward something you cannot stop, and the last fifty pages are the reason this book keeps getting handed to people in tears.

Yale Tishman works for a Chicago art gallery and is trying to secure a collection from an elderly donor who was in Paris in the 1920s, while around him his friends fall ill and die one by one. The second timeline follows Fiona, the little sister of that group, searching Paris in 2015 for her own daughter and carrying thirty years of funerals with her. Rebecca Makkai writes grief as paperwork and small rooms rather than speeches. It is the most upsetting book on this list and also the one I most want people to read.

Jo and Bethie Kaufman grow up in a Detroit suburb in the fifties, where Jo is the difficult tomboy and Bethie is the good girl who sings. Over the next sixty years they trade places more than once. Jo, who loves women, marries a man and raises daughters in the suburbs with a whole other life folded away in a drawer. Jennifer Weiner runs both sisters through the second half of the American century, and the sharper thread is Jo's, because she never gets a dramatic reveal, she gets decades of quiet accommodation instead.

Elizabeth Zott is a research chemist in the early sixties who keeps being told she is a secretary, a distraction, or somebody's assistant. After her life goes badly wrong she is offered an afternoon television slot and takes the job entirely on her own terms, teaching housewives thermodynamics while pretending to teach them dinner. Bonnie Garmus writes it as a comedy with real anger running under it, and there is a dog with a vocabulary who you will either love or find far too much. The period sexism is not softened for your comfort.

Lakshmi left an abusive husband at seventeen, walked to Jaipur, and made herself indispensable to the wives of the men who run the city. She knows their secrets because she is in their bedrooms with a henna cone, and she quietly supplies the herbs some of them need and nobody discusses aloud. She is saving for a house of her own, which in 1955 is close to unthinkable for a woman alone. Then the younger sister she did not know she had turns up at her door, and the reputation she spent a decade building starts to wobble.

Circe is born to the sun god and is unimpressive by the standards of her family, so she is largely ignored until she discovers she can work witchcraft, at which point she is exiled to an island alone. Centuries pass there. Men land, including one very famous one, and mostly they leave again. Madeline Miller writes immortality as an actual condition, which means loneliness, watching mortals age, and slowly working out what you want your own life to be for. The famous heroes turn out to be minor characters in it.

Desiree and Stella Vignes are light-skinned twins from a small Louisiana town founded on the idea of getting lighter with every generation. At sixteen they run to New Orleans. Desiree eventually comes back with a dark-skinned daughter, and Stella keeps going, takes a secretarial job where everyone assumes she is white, and builds an entire life on top of that assumption, husband included. Brit Bennett follows both women and both daughters across four decades, and she is unusually fair to Stella, who is doing something indefensible for reasons you can follow the whole way.

Addie makes a deal in the dark at the edge of a French village in 1714 to escape a marriage she never agreed to, and the god who answers gives her exactly what she asked for and nothing she actually wanted. She will live as long as she likes, and nobody will remember her once she leaves the room. Three hundred years later a bookshop clerk in New York says her name back to her the next day. The novel is about wanting to be known, and what a person will do to leave a mark when a record is forbidden.

Sunja runs her mother's boarding house on an island near Busan when a rich older man takes an interest in her. He will not marry her because he already has a wife in Japan, so a young minister lodging with them offers his name instead, and she goes with him to Osaka. What follows is four generations of one Korean family in Japan, where they are permanently foreign, permanently registered, and permanently one piece of paperwork away from expulsion. Min Jin Lee writes plainly and covers eighty years without ever letting it feel like a summary.