What To Read

After Carrie Bradshaw's wardrobe, her bookshelf may be one of the most meticulously considered details of the And Just Like That props team, with a significant amount of attention paid by avid reader and book influencer Sarah Jessica Parker herself. Lest we forget amid the sea of Martinis and Manolos, the show’s protagonist Carrie is a writer, after all.

So just how do these books make their way onto the HBO Max hit? During a recent Vogue interview, the show’s prop master Michael Cory opened up on why certain ones make the cut, played a fun game of match-that-book with beloved characters like Miranda, Charlotte and Che, and teased a few more titles that await us in Season 2. Here are 12 brilliant books that we've spotted on the show so far. They're the true stars of the show if you ask us!

Dirtbag, Massachusetts by Isaac Fitzgerald

This memoir-in-essays unpacks the author’s turbulent and abusive past and his journey to self-acceptance. From a south Boston halfway house to side gigs in porn, this tender tough guy takes on the perils of toxic masculinity in a moving confessional debut.

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery

A family flees Jamaica for Miami and embarks on a roller coaster pursuit of the modern American dream. This interconnected collection of stylized, brilliantly told stories marks “a ravishing debut,” raved Katy Waldman in The New Yorker.

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel depicts the unjust sentencing of two boys to a brutal reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. Based on a real-life story, this critically-adored, time-hopping tale sheds a powerful light on the horrors of racial terrorism in American history.

The Life of the Mind by Christine Smallwood

An adjunct English professor in NYC grapples with identity, loss, and the complexities of daily existence after suffering a miscarriage in an intellectual debut that left  New York Times critic John Williams “dazzled”.

Open Water by Caleb Azumah

This poetic debut novel follows two young Black artists falling in love after meeting at a London pub. “It’s Sally Rooney meets Michaela Coel meets Teju Cole,” mused an impressed New York Times review.

Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters

An unplanned pregnancy forever changes the lives of three trans and cis Brooklyn women in this provocative PEN/Hemingway Award Winning debut with plenty of Sex and the City vibes, including a protagonist who The New Yorker notes "might just be a Miranda."

Swing Time by Zadie Smith

In a musical odyssey that The Guardian praised as the celebrated author’s “finest novel yet,” two brown girls from humble origins meet at a community dance class in London and forge a deep yet complicated bond before their lives take them in very different directions.

Quit Like A Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol by Holly Whitaker

A groundbreaking look at alcohol culture from the founder of the first female-focused recovery program. This eye-opening guide challenges societal norms and serves up a feminine-centric approach to shaking addiction.

Who They Was by Gabriel Krauze

Longlisted for the Booker Prize, this autobiographical debut novel explores the double identity of a gang-running former cellist as he balances staid university lectures with an ultraviolent life amid London's underworld.

Catch the Rabbit by Lana Bastašić

Winner of the 2020 European Union Prize for Literature, this novel follows a woman’s return to post-war Bosnia where she embarks on a dreamy Alice in Wonderland style journey to help a childhood friend find her missing brother. 

Fight Night by Miriam Toews

A spirited nine-year-old named Swiv tells the story of three generations of women in a letter to her absent father. This is the eighth novel from a talented author who mines her oppressive upbringing in a Canadian Mennonite community. 

Who’s Black and Why? Andrew Curran and Henry Louis Gates Jr. 

Two celebrated professors compile essays from a bizarre 18th-century contest held in France to determine the supposed cause of blackness. These pseudoscientific works provide a vital record of Enlightenment-era thinking on race and its impact on the enslavement of Black people.

Sex and the City by Candace Bushnell

While this one doesn't actually show up on screen, we would be remiss not to celebrate the book that started it all. Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City, first published three decades ago, has incredible staying power. The book is a collection of essays drawn from her New York Observer column that followed the adventures in love and relationships of New York’s young and beautiful—all in orbit around the magnetic young writer Carrie Bradshaw.