Books Like…

Books Like Daisy Jones & The Six — 9 Reads with the Same Energy

Taylor Jenkins Reid's Daisy Jones & The Six works for three reasons: the oral history format gives you twelve people telling you the same story and none of them quite agree on what happened; the 1970s rock and roll world is rendered with enough specificity to feel real without the book actually being about Fleetwood Mac; and the central dynamic — two people who can make each other's work extraordinary and each other's lives unliveable — is one of fiction's most reliable engines. The books below match one or more of those elements: the format, the world, the creative obsession, or the central tension of people who are made for each other in exactly one context.

Same Author — Start Here

Pick #1

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

Taylor Jenkins Reid • 2017 • Historical Fiction

Hollywood Golden Age Oral memoir format Bisexual love story

If you haven't read this first, it's the better book. Evelyn Hugo is a 79-year-old Hollywood legend who selects an unknown journalist to tell her full story for the first time. The novel unspools through Evelyn's first-person account — her seven marriages, her decades of ambition, and the one love she could never fully claim. Reid uses a similar confession-and-interview structure to Daisy Jones but makes it more intimate. The 1950s–80s Hollywood setting has the same glamour and rot as the rock world, and the central love story is more devastating. This is the book that made Reid a phenomenon. If you haven't read it alongside Daisy Jones, read it immediately after.

Buy on Amazon

Pick #2

Malibu Rising

Taylor Jenkins Reid • 2021 • Historical Fiction

1980s California Fame & family Single-night structure

Four famous siblings — children of a rock legend father who abandoned them — gather for their annual summer party in Malibu in August 1983. The novel moves between the party (told in real time) and the history of how the family arrived at this moment. Reid's third major historical novel, and arguably her most formally ambitious: the single-night structure creates urgency while the backstory sections provide depth. If Daisy Jones is about what fame does to creative partnerships, Malibu Rising is about what fame does to families — specifically the family that gets left behind. The California setting has the same sun-bleached glamour.

Buy on Amazon

Same Format — Oral History Structure

Pick #3

World War Z

Max Brooks • 2006 • Horror / Speculative Fiction

Oral history format Multiple perspectives Not the film

This is here for the format, not the genre. The novel is structured as a series of interviews conducted by a UN employee documenting the zombie war — and Brooks uses the format with the same rigour Reid applies to rock music. Each interview is a different person from a different country and social position, and the cumulative effect of twelve perspectives on the same event is strikingly similar to the Daisy Jones experience: you keep catching contradictions, reframings, things people choose not to say. If you love the oral history format independent of subject matter, this is the most technically accomplished example outside of Daisy Jones. The film is entirely different and substantially worse.

Buy on Amazon

Pick #4

Where'd You Go, Bernadette

Maria Semple • 2012 • Literary Comedy

Epistolary format Brilliant difficult woman Very funny

Bernadette Fox was once one of architecture's most celebrated talents. She is now missing, and her fifteen-year-old daughter Bee reconstructs what happened through emails, FBI documents, invoices, and letters. The epistolary format shares with Daisy Jones the quality of assembling a portrait from fragments — and the central character, a brilliant woman whose genius and difficult personality are completely entangled, is a close relative of Daisy. This is a funnier book than most on this list, wry and warm, but the portrait of creative genius and the cost of suppressing it is serious underneath the comedy.

Buy on Amazon

Same World — Fame, Music & 1970s California

Pick #5

Beautiful Ruins

Jess Walter • 2012 • Literary Fiction

Hollywood & fame Dual timeline Italy & Los Angeles

A young Italian innkeeper meets a Hollywood actress in 1962 on a Cinque Terre clifftop. The novel bounces between that moment and the present day — Hollywood, a failing production company, a Rat Pack-era icon — and the two timelines slowly reveal how a brief encounter shaped multiple lives across fifty years. Walter writes about the entertainment industry with the same understanding of glamour-as-mirage that Reid brings to rock music. The prose is warmer and more novelistic than Reid's, and the comedy-to-heartbreak ratio is characteristic of the best literary fiction about fame.

Buy on Amazon

Pick #6

Station Eleven

Emily St. John Mandel • 2014 • Literary Speculative Fiction

Art & survival Found family Multiple timelines

A flu pandemic collapses civilization in 24 hours. Twenty years later, the Travelling Symphony performs Shakespeare and classical music through the Great Lakes region. Mandel alternates between before and after, centered on an actor who died the night the outbreak began. Like Daisy Jones, this is a book about creative people and the question of what art is for — and like Reid, Mandel is most interested in the human entanglements around the work: who loved whom, who built what, how people's lives intersect in ways they couldn't see at the time. The post-apocalyptic setting sounds unlike Daisy Jones but the emotional frequency is close.

Buy on Amazon

Same Central Tension — Creative Partners & Impossible Chemistry

Pick #7

Rock Paper Scissors

Alice Feeney • 2021 • Psychological Thriller

Relationship under pressure Unreliable narrators Scottish chapel

Adam and Amelia Wright have been married for ten years, and their marriage is failing. For their anniversary they go to a remote Scottish chapel — and the past starts to break through. Feeney writes the dysfunction of two people who love each other and have stopped being able to communicate with a clarity that resembles what Reid does with Billy and Daisy. This is a thriller rather than a rock romance, so the register is darker and the secrets more sinister — but the central question (how do two people who were once extraordinary together become strangers?) is the same one Daisy Jones circles around.

Buy on Amazon

Pick #8

Conversations with Friends

Sally Rooney • 2017 • Literary Fiction

Entangled quartet Creative people Emotional intelligence

Frances and Bobbi are college students and ex-girlfriend poets who perform spoken word together in Dublin. They meet Nick, an actor, and his wife Melissa, and the four of them become entangled in ways that redraw the lines between friendship, desire, and loyalty. Rooney's debut shares with Daisy Jones the interest in creative people and the specific complications their collaborations create — and the entangled four-person dynamic is structurally similar to the web around Daisy, Billy, Camila, and the band. More literary and less propulsive, but the emotional precision is sharp.

Buy on Amazon

Pick #9

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Gabrielle Zevin • 2022 • Literary Fiction

Creative partnership Three decades Love that isn't quite

Sam Masur and Sadie Green meet as children in a hospital, reunite in their twenties at Harvard, and spend the next 30 years making video games together — brilliant creative partners who can never quite become what they might be to each other. Zevin is writing about the same kind of creative partnership Reid writes about in Daisy Jones: the version where the work requires the person and the person requires the work, and personal life and professional life are impossible to separate. The gaming world replaces rock and roll, the prose is richer, and the emotional arc over three decades is more quietly devastating. The consensus pick for the novel most similar to Daisy Jones in emotional register.

Buy on Amazon

Questions About Daisy Jones

Is Daisy Jones and the Six based on a true story?

No — but it feels like it is. Taylor Jenkins Reid drew on the Fleetwood Mac Rumours era for atmosphere and relationship dynamics (specifically the Stevie Nicks / Lindsey Buckingham dynamic for Daisy and Billy), but all characters are invented. Reid has said she listened to the album constantly while writing and wanted to create a band that felt as real as Fleetwood Mac without being them. The oral history format contributes to the documentary feeling.

Is there a Daisy Jones and the Six TV show?

Yes. Amazon Prime Video released a miniseries adaptation in 2023, with Riley Keough as Daisy and Sam Claflin as Billy Dunne. The show maintains the oral history structure and adds a fictional album, Aurora, which was recorded and released alongside the series. Most readers enjoy both — the show adds the music in a way the book obviously can't. Read the book first.

What other books has Taylor Jenkins Reid written?

Her most celebrated novels are The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (2017), Daisy Jones & The Six (2019), Malibu Rising (2021), and Carrie Soto Is Back (2022). All are standalone historical fiction novels. Evelyn Hugo is the most recommended starting point for new readers. Earlier work (Maybe in Another Life, One True Loves) is lighter contemporary romance — enjoyable but less accomplished than her later work.

Do Daisy and Billy end up together?

No — and that's largely why the novel works. The choice is deliberately withheld from the beginning, and what makes the oral history structure so effective is that every narrator tells you what they saw without quite resolving it. The novel is not about whether they end up together; it's about what happens to two people who produce something extraordinary together and can't survive each other as people. Knowing this upfront actually enriches the reading experience.

Books Like Daisy Jones & The Six — 9 Reads with the Same Energy

Same Author — Start Here

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

Malibu Rising

Same Format — Oral History Structure

World War Z

Where'd You Go, Bernadette

Same World — Fame, Music & 1970s California

Beautiful Ruins

Station Eleven

Same Central Tension — Creative Partners & Impossible Chemistry

Rock Paper Scissors

Conversations with Friends

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Questions About Daisy Jones

More Reading Guides