Books like Daisy Jones & The Six

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is Reid's other masterwork, and while it trades rock music for old Hollywood, the underlying engine is the same: a famous woman telling the real story behind the public myth. Evelyn Hugo, a fictional golden-age movie star, selects an unknown journalist to hear the truth about her seven marriages, each one a strategic move in a career built on beauty, ambition, and a secret she has kept for decades. Like Daisy Jones, Evelyn is magnetic and maddening, a woman who uses the system that uses her.

Reid writes both books with the same structural confidence, using the interview format to control the flow of information and keep readers questioning whose version of events to trust. The themes of public persona versus private truth run through both novels, and both feature complicated women who refuse to be reduced to a single narrative. If Daisy Jones & The Six made you want more Reid, this is where to go next.

It is arguably her best book.

Emma Brodie's Songs in Ursa Major is a fictionalized version of the early 1970s folk-rock scene, following a young singer named Jane Quinn who catches the attention of the biggest male star in music during a festival performance. The parallels to real figures like Joni Mitchell and James Taylor are intentional, and Brodie uses them to tell a story about what happens when a woman's talent threatens the ego of the industry built around her.

Like Daisy Jones, Jane is brilliant and difficult, and the novel tracks how the music business rewards men for the same behavior it punishes in women. The period detail is immersive without becoming costume drama, and the songs Jane writes feel real enough to hear.

Both novels capture the specific energy of the early 1970s rock scene, when the music felt like it could change the world and the drugs felt like they might end it. Readers who want more of that era will find Songs in Ursa Major operating at the same frequency.

Dawnie Walton's The Final Revival of Opal & Nev uses the same oral history format as Daisy Jones & The Six to tell the story of an interracial rock duo in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Opal is a Black woman from Detroit with a singular aesthetic and an uncompromising artistic vision; Nev is a white British folk singer who wants to make music without confronting the politics of the era. Their partnership produces extraordinary art and exposes the fault lines that run through American culture.

Walton adds a layer Reid does not: the journalist compiling the oral history has her own connection to the story, and her investigation reshapes the narrative in real time. Like Daisy Jones, the book uses its format to show how memory and self-interest warp the truth, and the music feels tactile and alive on the page. But Walton pushes harder on questions of race, appropriation, and who gets credited for cultural movements.

This is the book for readers who want the oral-history format with sharper teeth.

David Mitchell's Utopia Avenue follows a psychedelic rock band in late-1960s London through their formation, brief rise, and spectacular unraveling. Mitchell gives each band member a rotating point of view, creating the same kaleidoscopic effect as Reid's interview format but from the inside rather than retrospect.

The period detail is staggering: the band interacts with real figures, plays real venues, and navigates the same counterculture landscape that produced the bands Daisy Jones & The Six draws from. Mitchell writes about music with a specificity that makes you hear the songs, and his characterization of each band member is deep enough that you understand why this particular combination of people creates something none of them could make alone.

Where Reid keeps things tight and propulsive, Mitchell gives himself more room, and the novel rewards patience with some of his most emotionally direct writing. Readers who want a deeper, more literary take on the same territory will find Utopia Avenue an excellent match.

Reid's own Malibu Rising takes place over a single night in 1983 as the four Riva siblings throw the party of the year at their Malibu mansion while their family fractures under the weight of their famous father's legacy. Like Daisy Jones & The Six, the novel moves back and forth in time, gradually revealing the secrets and resentments that have been building for years.

The coastal California setting is vivid and specific, and Reid writes about sibling dynamics with the same precision she brings to band dynamics. Both novels understand that families, whether biological or chosen, run on a volatile mix of love, competition, and unresolved grievance.

The pacing is tighter here, compressed into a single evening that serves as the pressure cooker for decades of accumulated tension. If you loved Daisy Jones for Reid's ability to make you feel like you were watching a band implode in real time, Malibu Rising does the same thing with a family at a party.

Isabel Banta's Honey is set at the turn of the millennium and follows Amber Young, a singer-dancer who gets the call to join Cloud9, a manufactured girl group in Los Angeles. The novel captures the specific machinery of late-1990s pop music: the choreography sessions, the image consultants, the producers who treat young women as products to be shaped and sold.

Like Daisy Jones, Amber is talented and determined but unprepared for how thoroughly the industry will try to control her. Banta writes the Y2K era with the same loving detail Reid brings to the 1970s, and the group dynamics within Cloud9 mirror the tensions within The Six.

Both novels are ultimately about what happens when creative people become commodities, and both track the cost of fame on the bodies and relationships of the women at the center. If you loved Daisy Jones for its music-industry immersion, Honey offers a different era but the same addictive energy.

V.E. Schwab's The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is not about the music industry, but it shares the same emotional preoccupation as Daisy Jones & The Six: what it means to leave a mark on the world.

Addie LaRue makes a deal with the devil in 1714 to live forever, but the price is that no one can remember her. The novel follows her across three centuries as she learns to live in the margins of history, influencing art and culture without ever receiving credit. Like Daisy, Addie is a woman whose brilliance is inseparable from the systems that try to contain it.

Schwab writes about artistic legacy and the desire to be remembered with the same intensity Reid brings to her rock stars. The dual timeline between past and present gives the novel a structural echo of Reid's oral history, and the love story at its center is just as complicated and consuming. This is a lateral recommendation for readers who loved the thematic DNA of Daisy Jones rather than just its setting.