Candace Bushnell Books In Order

The Carrie Diaries Books In Publication Order

  1. The Carrie Diaries (2010)
  2. Summer and the City (2011)

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. Sex and the City (1996)
  2. Four Blondes (2000)
  3. Trading Up (2003)
  4. Lipstick Jungle (2005)
  5. One Fifth Avenue (2008)
  6. Killing Monica (2015)
  7. Is There Still Sex in the City? (2019)
  8. Rules for Being a Girl (2020)

The Carrie Diaries Book Covers

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Candace Bushnell Books Overview

The Carrie Diaries

The Carrie Diaries is the coming-of-age story of one of the most iconic characters of our generation.

Before Sex and the City, Carrie Bradshaw was a small-town girl who knew she wanted more. She’s ready for real life to start, but first she must navigate her senior year of high school. Up until now, Carrie and her friends have been inseparable. Then Sebastian Kydd comes into the picture, and a friend’s betrayal makes her question everything.

With an unforgettable cast of characters, The Carrie Diaries is the story of how a regular girl learns to think for herself and evolves into a sharp, insightful writer. Readers will learn about her family background, how she found her writing voice, and the indelible impression her early friendships and relationships left on her. Through adventures both audacious and poignant, we’ll see what brings Carrie to her beloved New York City, where her new life begins.

Summer and the City

Summer is a magical time in New York City and Carrie is in love with all of it-the crazy characters in her neighborhood, the vintage-clothing boutiques, the wild parties, and the glamorous man who has swept her off her feet. Best of all, she’s finally in a real writing class, taking her first steps toward fulfilling her dream.

This sequel to The Carrie Diaries brings surprising revelations as Carrie learns to navigate her way around the Big Apple, going from being a country ‘sparrow’-as Samantha Jones dubs her- to the person she always wanted to be. But as it becomes increasingly difficult to reconcile her past with her future, Carrie realizes that making it in New York is much more complicated than she ever imagined.

With her signature wit and sparkling humor, Candace Bushnell reveals the irresistible story of how Carrie met Samantha and Miranda, and what turned a small-town girl into one of New York City’s most unforgettable icons, Carrie Bradshaw.

Sex and the City

‘Bushnell’s beat is that demi monde of nightclubs, bars, restaurants and parties where the rich come into contact with the infamous, the famous with the wannabes and the publicity hungry with the gossip peddlers’ EVENING STANDARD Wildly funny, unexpectedly poignant, wickedly observant, Sex and the City blazes a glorious, drunken cocktail trail through New York, as Candace Bushnell, columnist and social critic par excellence, trips on her Manolo Blahnik kitten heels from the Baby Doll Lounge to the Bowery Bar. An Armistead Maupin for the real world, she has the gift of assembling a huge and irresistible cast of freaks and wonders, while remaining faithful to her hard core of friends and fans: those glamorous, rebellious, crazy single women, too close to forty, who are trying hard not to turn from the Audrey Hepburn of BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S into the Glen Close of FATAL ATTRACTION, and are still looking for love.

Four Blondes

With its uncensored observations of the mating rituals of Manhattan’s elite, Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City created a sensation, becoming an international best seller, spawning a worldwide hit TV series, and inspiring countless imitators. Now, with the novel Four Blondes, Bushnell triumphantly returns to the playgrounds of the beautiful and powerful once again capturing the zeitgeist and mores of our era like no other writer. Four Blondes brings together the stories of four modern women to render a vivid portrait of New York at the millennium. Like the fiction of Helen Fielding and Melissa Bank, Bushnell’s novel is a pitch perfect chronicle of her characters’ romantic intrigues, liaisons, betrayals, and victories. A beautiful B list model finagles rent free summerhouses in the Hamptons from her lovers until she discovers she can get a man but can’t get what she wants. A high powered magazine columnist’s floundering marriage to a literary journalist is thrown into crisis when her husband’s career fails to live up to her expectations. A ‘Cinderella’ whose husband was one of the world’s most eligible bachelors faithfully records her descent into paranoia in her journal as she realizes she wants anybody’s life except her own. And an artist and aging ‘It girl’ who fears that her time for finding a man has run out travels to London in search of the kind of love and devotion she can’t find in Manhattan. Studded with her trademark wit and stiletto heel sharp insights, Four Blondes is dark, true, and compulsively readable. It’s destined to be a hit among the author’s legions of loyal fans and many new devotees.

Trading Up

Janey Wilcox is an M.A.W. that’s Model/Actress/Whatever to the uninitiated. The problem with Janey, the protagonist of Candace Bushnell’s first novel, Trading Up, is not the M or the A part. It’s the W. Here is a rare alphabetical anomaly: In Janey’s case, W stands for ‘prostitute.’ Oh, Janey never crosses the line into actual hookerdom, but she does sleep with extremely wealthy men in the hopes they’ll improve her status, her financial situation, or her lifestyle. When we first met Janey in Bushnell’s novella collection 4 Blondes, she was up to her usual tricks so to speak scamming a guy for a Hamptons vacation rental. At the opening of Trading Up, her fortunes have improved. She’s now the star of a Victoria’s Secret ad campaign, and as such she’s found access to undreamed of echelons of New York society. She makes friends with Mimi Kilroy, a senator’s daughter ‘at the very top of the social heap in New York.’ She gets invited to all the best parties. And she finally finds a wealthy man who will actually marry her: Seldon Rose, a powerful entertainment industry executive. Of course, Janey’s social ambitions are not stoppered by her marriage to Seldon, and the clash between her expectations more parties! and his normal life send Janey into a tailspin that leads to heartbreak. Bushnell is clearly trying to channel Edith Wharton The Custom of the Country is even invoked by Janey as a screenplay idea, but ends up sounding a lot more like a cross between Tama Janowitz and Judith Krantz. This is a novel about shopping and sex, and while it’s fizzy enough, it’s not Cristal. Claire Dederer

Lipstick Jungle

In a way, Candace Bushnell’s Lipstick Jungle picks up where her career defining book Sex and the City left off, in the money soaked, power hungry, beauty obsessed jungle that is New York City. This time around, the ladies are a bit older, a lot richer, but not particularly wiser nor more endearing than Bushnell’s earlier hero*ines. Lipstick Jungle weaves the stories of Nico O’Neilly, Wendy Healy, and Victory Ford, numbers 8, 12, and 17 on The New York Post’s list of ‘New York’s 50 Most Powerful Women.’ But this is 21st Century New York, and to get ahead and stay ahead, these women will do anything, including jeopardizing their personal and professional relationships. Take for example Nico, editor in chief of Bonfire magazine, who betrays her boss to rise to the top of the entire magazine division at media mega giant Splatch Verner. As president of Paradour Pictures, Wendy may be poised to win an Oscar for her 10 year labor of love, Ragged Pilgrims, but her marriage is in shambles and her children care more about a $50,000 pony than their mother. And for single, 43 year old fashion designer Victory, pleasing tough critics may be more important than ever finding the real relationship she’s convinced herself she doesn’t need. This racy tale of women behaving badly manages to shrewdly flip the tables to show us how gender roles are essentially interchangeable, given the right circumstances. Whether that was Bushnell’s intent when crafting this wicked tale is another story. Gisele Toueg10 Second Interview: A Few Words with Candace Bushnell Q: Were Victory, Wendy, and Nico inspired by any real life women? A: The characters and situations in Lipstick Jungle were inspired by the real life women I know and admire in New York City. As with Sex and the City, I spent a lot of time thinking about where women were today, and what I noticed was that there was a fascinating group of women in their forties who were leading non traditional lives. They were highly successful and motivated, they often had children, and usually were the providers for their families, and yet, they didn’t fit the old stereotype of the witchy businesswoman. Indeed, so many of these women were the girls next door, the girls who reminded me of my best friends when I was a kid and we used to fantasize about the great things we were going to do in life. Like the women in Sex and the City, the Lipstick Jungle women are charting new lives for themselves, redefining what it means to be a woman when you really are as powerful, or more powerful, than a man. Of course, you probably want specifics, so I will say that there was a moment when it all clicked. Tina Brown used to write a terrific column in the Washington Post, and one of the things she was always mentioning was how there was a group of powerful women who were meeting and lunching at Michael’s restaurant. They’d been working for over twenty years, their children were now in their early teens and didn’t need them every minute, and now, in their forties or early fifties, they had time to strive for new career goals and to spend more time with their girlfriends. I thought, ‘Aha that’s the Lipstick Jungle.’Q: What kind of research did you do to cover fashion, film, and publishing in one book? A: To research fashion, film and publishing, I did what I always do I talked to my girlfriends! Of course, it helps that I’ve worked in magazine publishing and have had my share of experience with Hollywood. I’m also lucky enough to have a couple of girlfriends who are top designers, who offered to help me out with the specific details. I still remember the afternoon when one of my girlfriends and I sat down to talk she was over eight months pregnant, and I was worried that we were going to have to run to the hospital!Amazon. com’s Significant SevenCandace Bushnell graciously agreed to answer the questions we like to ask every author: the Amazon. com Significant Seven. Q: What book has had the most significant impact on your life?

One Fifth Avenue

One Fifth Avenue is a modern comedy of manners — a landmark novel, if you like. Its observations about money, the Internet, the function of art in society as wellas sex romps, social climbing and snobbery enhance Bushnell’s reputation as an astute observer of modern life…
. Carrie Bradshaw wannabes as well as women and men near Bushnell’s age — she turns 50 this year — will be pulled into this refreshing and highly entertaining novel about the power of money, sex and celebrity.’
–USA TODAY

‘Bushnell…
broadens her scope in her latest ode to New York strivers and sophisticates…
The fun lies in the author’s acute observations about everything from real estate envy to midlife crises.’
–More

‘Where [Bushnell goes, her army of stilletoed fans follow. You gotta love it: the conflict, the secrets-telling, the peek into the world of the rich and valueless. It all adds up to a juicy summer read.’
New York Post

One Fifth Avenue is all things an escapist read she be: quick and wicked and wry. There’s a blown-out bit*ch to root against, a star-crossed couple to root for, and a Tim Gunn-style best friend who deserves his own book. Great, guiltless fun.’
Entertainment Weekly

From one of the most consistently astute and engaging social commentators of our day comes another look at the tough and tender women of New York City–this time, through the lens of where they live.

One Fifth Avenue, the Art Deco beauty towering over one of Manhattan’s oldest and most historically hip neighborhoods, is a one-of-a-kind address, the sort of building you have to earn your way into–one way or another. For the women in Candace Bushnell’s new novel, One Fifth Avenue, this edifice is essential to the lives they’ve carefully established–or hope to establish. From the hedge fund king’s wife to the aging gossip columnist to the free-spirited actress a recent refugee from L.A., each person’s game plan for a rich life comes together under the soaring roof of this landmark building.

Acutely observed and mercilessly witty, One Fifth Avenue is a modern-day story of old and new money, that same combustible mix that Edith Wharton mastered in her novels about New York’s Gilded Age and F. Scott Fitzgerald illuminated in his Jazz Age tales. Many decades later, Bushnell’s New Yorkers suffer the same passions as those fictional Manhattanites from eras past: They thirst for power, for social prominence, and for marriages that are successful–at least to the public eye. But Bushnell is an original, and One Fifth Avenue is so fresh that it reads as if sexual politics, real estate theft, and fortunes lost in a day have never happened before.

From Sex and the City through four successive novels, Bushnell has revealed a gift for tapping into the zeitgeist of any New York minute and, as one critic put it, staying uncannily ‘just the slightest bit ahead of the curve.’ And with each book, she has deepened her range, but with a light touch that makes her complex literary accomplishments look easy. Her stories progress so nimbly and ring so true that it can seem as if anyone might write them–when, in fact, no one writes novels quite like Candace Bushnell. Fortunately for us, with One Fifth Avenue, she has done it again.

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