Books like Malibu Rising

Daisy Jones and The Six comes from the same author and the same obsession with fame, family, and the lies people tell about both. Set in the 1970s music scene, it follows a rock band modeled loosely on Fleetwood Mac through their meteoric rise and sudden collapse. Reid uses the same oral-history format that made The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo so addictive, letting each band member and hanger-on tell their version of events.

The result is a story where truth shifts depending on who is speaking. Readers who loved the sibling dynamics in Malibu Rising will find a different kind of chosen family here, one built on creative chemistry and mutual need rather than blood. The Southern California setting, period-perfect details, and Reid's talent for making you root for deeply flawed people tie the two books together.

I think of this as the companion piece to Malibu Rising, the album that played in the background at that party.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo takes Reid's signature move and cranks it up. An aging Hollywood icon decides to tell the real story of her seven marriages, and the truth is nothing like the tabloid version. Like Malibu Rising, the novel sits at the intersection of celebrity culture, personal sacrifice, and the stories people construct to survive public life.

Evelyn is fiercer and more calculating than any of the Riva siblings, but her motivations come from the same place: the desire to be known fully by at least one person. Reid structures both novels around revelation, peeling back layers until the reader understands what was really happening beneath the glamour. The mid-century Hollywood setting gives this book a different texture than Malibu's beach-party atmosphere, but the emotional core is identical.

If Malibu Rising made you care about a family you had just met, Evelyn Hugo will make you care about a woman who has spent decades making sure nobody does.

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter bounces between 1960s Italy and modern-day Hollywood, following the ripple effects of a brief encounter between a young Italian innkeeper and an American actress. Walter writes with the same sun-drenched intensity Reid brings to Malibu, and he shares her gift for making decades feel like they collapse into a single afternoon. The novel is funny and sad in equal measure, full of characters chasing dreams that keep reshaping themselves.

Where Malibu Rising uses a party as its pressure cooker, Beautiful Ruins uses the film industry itself, showing how the stories we tell about our lives rarely match what actually happened. The Italian coastal setting feels like a Mediterranean cousin to Reid's Malibu beaches. Readers who appreciate Reid's ability to make you laugh at a character one moment and ache for them the next will find Walter operating at the same emotional frequency.

This is the kind of book that makes you want to sit in the sun and feel everything.

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng takes the domestic tension of Malibu Rising and relocates it to a planned community in 1990s Ohio. The Richardson family appears perfect from the outside, but the arrival of an enigmatic artist and her daughter pulls every hidden conflict to the surface. Ng writes about motherhood, class, and the way communities police themselves with a precision that matches Reid's dissection of family loyalty.

Both novels build toward a single dramatic event and then work backward and forward to show how it became inevitable. The structure rewards close attention; details that seem minor early on turn out to carry enormous weight. Where Reid gives us siblings bound by a shared childhood, Ng gives us neighbors bound by a shared geography.

Both authors understand that the people closest to us hold the most power to hurt us. If you want a book that matches Malibu Rising's slow-burn tension and payoff, start here.

The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller takes place over twenty-four hours at a family's summer estate on Cape Cod, and in that single day, fifty years of memory, desire, and regret come pouring out. The novel shares Malibu Rising's trick of compressing a lifetime into a brief window of time, using a party and its aftermath as the catalyst for reckoning. Heller writes about the body and its wants with a directness that Reid approaches more obliquely, but both authors ground their stories in specific, sensory places.

The Cape Cod setting is as much a character as Malibu's beaches. I found this book harder to put down than almost anything else on this list because of the way Heller handles the central dilemma: a choice between two lives, each equally real and equally imperfect. Readers who gravitate toward Reid's willingness to let characters make messy decisions without judging them will appreciate Heller's approach.

This is a beach read that earns its emotional weight.

City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert drops readers into 1940s New York City, where a young woman from a respectable family discovers the wild, theatrical world of showgirls, nightclubs, and sexual freedom. Gilbert writes about female desire and reputation with the same frankness Reid brings to her characters, and the novel shares Malibu Rising's interest in how a single night can define a life.

The narrator tells her story from old age, looking back with wisdom but without regret, which gives the book a warmth that prevents it from becoming a cautionary tale. The setting is gorgeously rendered, full of sequins and cigarette smoke and the particular electricity of wartime New York.

Readers who appreciated Reid's treatment of Nina Riva will recognize the same kind of character in Vivian: someone who refuses to apologize for wanting more than the world offered her. Gilbert's prose style is looser and more conversational than Reid's, but the emotional ambitions are equally high.

The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah drops a family into the Alaskan wilderness in 1974, where a damaged Vietnam veteran drags his wife and teenage daughter to a homestead with no running water, no electricity, and no neighbors close enough to hear screaming. Like Malibu Rising, the novel locks its characters inside a pressure cooker and watches as family bonds stretch to the point of snapping. Hannah writes about a daughter caught between loyalty to her parents and the instinct to save herself, a tension that echoes the Riva siblings' struggle with their father's legacy.

The setting could not be more different from Reid's sun-bleached California coast, but both authors use landscape as a mirror for emotional states. Alaska's brutal winters reflect the family's isolation just as Malibu's waves reflect its restless energy. Hannah matches Reid's willingness to put her characters through real pain without flinching or offering easy resolutions.

Readers who want another novel where a family's survival depends on the strength of its women will find exactly that here.