Reading List

Authors Like Kristin Hannah

Eleven chapters into The Nightingale (2015), Vianne Mauriac, a schoolteacher in occupied France with a German captain billeted in her house, is asked to write down the names of the teachers at her school who are Jews or Communists. She writes the list, and when he points out that she has left off her best friend Rachel, she adds her. Kristin Hannah, born in California in 1960 and living on Bainbridge Island in Washington, had been publishing novels since 1991; this was the book that changed the scale of her career, and a film of it with Dakota and Elle Fanning is due from TriStar in February 2027. She does the same thing in The Great Alone (2018) in Alaska, in The Four Winds (2021) in the Dust Bowl and in The Women (2024) with an Army nurse in Vietnam: put an ordinary woman somewhere history is happening, and stay with her past the point where most novels would look away. Readers come to her for that, and for the friendships and families of Firefly Lane and Winter Garden. The writers below share one or the other: women carrying a piece of real history, or a family tested past what looks survivable.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Historical fiction · Women’s fiction · Family drama · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Kristin Hannah, read Martha Hall Kelly after The Nightingale, since Lilac Girls is built on the same kind of real wartime record. For The Women, Kate Quinn, who writes the women war histories left out. For Firefly Lane, Taylor Jenkins Reid and her lives told across decades. For a family history most readers have never heard of, Lisa Wingate, and for the mothers and daughters of Winter Garden, Celeste Ng.

10 authors like Kristin Hannah

01
WWII · Closest match

Martha Hall Kelly

American · Novelist

Kelly, born in Milton, Massachusetts, worked as a publicist before she wrote fiction. She found her first subject in a May 1999 Victoria magazine article about Caroline Ferriday, then visited Ferriday's house in Bethlehem, Connecticut, where a photograph of the Polish women experimented on at Ravensbrück still sat on the desk. Lilac Girls braids Ferriday's story with a Polish prisoner's and a German camp doctor's; Lost Roses and Sunflower Sisters follow the women of the same family in the First World War and the Civil War.

The closest match on this list, and not only on subject. Kelly builds from a real archive the way Hannah does, and she keeps three narrators in the air across a decade without letting any of them become a device. Start here if you finished The Nightingale and wanted the next one immediately.

— Lisanne

Every book by Martha Hall Kelly →

02
Espionage · Women at war

Kate Quinn

American · b. 1981 · Novelist

Quinn, from Southern California, wrote novels of ancient Rome and the Borgias before turning to the twentieth century. The Alice Network draws on Louise de Bettignies' real First World War spy ring in occupied Lille; in The Huntress a former Soviet night-bomber pilot and a British war correspondent track a Nazi war criminal hiding in America; The Rose Code follows three women codebreakers at Bletchley Park. The Diamond Eye (2022) is a novel of the Soviet sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko.

Quinn and Hannah are after the same thing: a war story with a woman at the centre who was really there. If The Women left you annoyed that you had never been told about the nurses, Quinn has spent a whole career on that annoyance.

— Lisanne

Every book by Kate Quinn →

03
Contemporary · Love and loss

Jojo Moyes

British · b. 1969 · Novelist

Moyes worked as a journalist at The Independent for a decade before writing fiction full time. Me Before You, about Louisa Clark and the paralysed man she is hired to look after, became an international bestseller and a 2016 film. The Giver of Stars moves to 1930s Kentucky and the Pack Horse Library Project; on publication, the novelist Kim Michele Richardson said it had “alarming similarities” to her The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, and Moyes's US publisher called it a wholly original work.

For the crying rather than the war. Moyes does what Hannah's contemporary novels do — take people who are not remarkable and put them through something that is — without needing an occupation or a dust storm to do it.

— Lisanne

Every book by Jojo Moyes →

04
Historical injustice · Family secrets

Lisa Wingate

American · Novelist

Before We Were Yours is built on the Tennessee Children's Home Society scandal, in which Georgia Tann's Memphis branch took children from poor families and placed them, for fees, with wealthy ones. Wingate sets a 1939 Mississippi riverboat family at the centre and a present-day lawyer on the other end of it; the novel won the 2017 Goodreads Choice Award for historical fiction. The Book of Lost Friends turns on the newspaper notices formerly enslaved people placed after the Civil War to find their families.

Wingate works the way The Four Winds and The Great Alone work: find a piece of real hardship that has gone quiet, and make a family carry it. The difference is that her history is usually one most readers have never heard of at all.

— Lisanne

Every book by Lisa Wingate →

05
Family drama · Moral complexity

Jodi Picoult

American · b. 1966 · Novelist

Picoult's method is to find a decision with no clean answer and give it to a family. In My Sister’s Keeper a thirteen-year-old sues her parents for the rights to her own body; in Small Great Things a Black labour nurse is told not to touch a white supremacist couple's newborn. Mad Honey was written with Jennifer Finney Boylan. She researches each subject closely and then refuses to let the reader settle.

If what holds you in Hannah is a family being tested past what looks survivable, Picoult gives you that at the same pitch. Her pressure comes from choices rather than from history, so you finish arguing with the characters instead of with the century.

— Lisanne

Every book by Jodi Picoult →

06
Literary fiction · Mothers and daughters

Celeste Ng

American · b. 1980 · Novelist

Ng opens Everything I Never Told You by telling you the daughter is dead and that her family does not know it yet, and then spends the novel on what each of them had decided not to say to her. Little Fires Everywhere does it again in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a planned suburb with rules about the colour of your house, and became a 2020 television series. Our Missing Hearts moves into a near-future America where children are taken from dissenting parents.

This is the one for the mother-daughter ache in Winter Garden rather than for the war novels. Ng is quieter than Hannah and gives you less comfort at the end, but she is exact about the same thing: what a family has agreed not to mention.

— Lisanne

Every book by Celeste Ng →

07
Pacific Northwest · Women’s fiction

Susan Wiggs

American · b. 1958 · Novelist

Wiggs lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington, the same island as Hannah, and began in historical romance, winning several RITA Awards. The Lakeshore Chronicles are eleven novels set around a lake in upstate New York; The Oysterville Sewing Circle is set on Washington's Long Beach Peninsula, and The Lost and Found Bookshop in San Francisco. Her novels usually turn on someone coming home after something has gone wrong.

The pick if it is the place you love. Hannah's contemporary novels are steeped in the Pacific Northwest because she is from there, and Wiggs writes that same water with a gentler hand and a slower clock.

— Lisanne

Every book by Susan Wiggs →

08
WWII · Built on testimony

Heather Morris

New Zealand · b. 1953 · Novelist

Morris, born in Te Awamutu and living in Australia, met Lale Sokolov in Melbourne in 2003, when he was 87, and listened to him for three years until his death in 2006. He had been the prisoner made to tattoo numbers onto the arms of people arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau. In November 2018 the Auschwitz Memorial Research Centre published a fact-check by Wanda Witek-Malicka disputing many details of The Tattooist of Auschwitz; Morris has said the book is a novel.

For readers who care that it happened. Morris is closer to the testimony than anyone else here, and further from the shaping a novel usually does — that is the trade, and some readers will want exactly it.

— Lisanne
09
Decades-spanning · A whole life

Taylor Jenkins Reid

American · b. 1983 · Novelist

Reid's device is retrospect. In The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo an old film star finally tells a young journalist the truth about her marriages; Daisy Jones & The Six, written as an oral history of a 1970s band, has its members contradict each other about the same nights and became a 2023 television series. Carrie Soto Is Back follows a tennis champion returning to the game in her late thirties.

For the sweep of Firefly Lane — a friendship or a life watched across thirty years. Reid swaps the Pacific Northwest for Hollywood and Laurel Canyon, and she is funnier than Hannah, but the shape of the ache is the same.

— Lisanne

Every book by Taylor Jenkins Reid →

10
Historical fiction · Period detail

Beatriz Williams

American · b. 1972 · Novelist

Williams, born in Seattle, writes money and the women inside it. A Hundred Summers is set in a Rhode Island beach colony in the summer of the 1938 hurricane; The Summer Wives on an island in Long Island Sound where the year-round families and the summer families do not mix; Our Woman in Moscow (2021) in Cold War espionage. She usually runs two timelines and lets the older one explain the newer one late.

Take this one for the period without another war. Williams gives you the research and the constraint — a woman up against what her decade expects of her — in a register closer to a summer novel than to The Nightingale.

— Lisanne

Every book by Beatriz Williams →

Where to start if you loved Kristin Hannah

If you loved The Nightingale, read Martha Hall Kelly.

Lilac Girls: a real archive, women carrying the war, a story that nearly went unrecorded.

If you loved The Women, read Kate Quinn.

The Rose Code — women whose war service was kept secret for decades.

If you loved Firefly Lane, read Taylor Jenkins Reid.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo: one life across decades, told by someone with a reason to tell it now.

If it was the mothers and daughters, read Celeste Ng.

Everything I Never Told You — quieter, and exact about what a family will not say.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Kristin Hannah

Who should I read if I love Kristin Hannah?

Martha Hall Kelly is the closest match for The Nightingale: Lilac Girls is built on the real story of Caroline Ferriday and the Polish women of Ravensbrück. Kate Quinn writes women at war in The Alice Network and The Rose Code, Lisa Wingate makes families carry forgotten history, and Taylor Jenkins Reid and Celeste Ng are the closest for Hannah's novels of friendship and family.

What books are like The Nightingale?

Martha Hall Kelly's Lilac Girls (2016) and Kate Quinn's The Alice Network (2017) are the usual next books: both put women at the centre of real wartime history, and Quinn's is built on Louise de Bettignies' spy ring in occupied Lille. Heather Morris's The Tattooist of Auschwitz (2018) is closer to survivor testimony, though its accuracy has been disputed.

Are there authors like Kristin Hannah who don't write about war?

Yes. Jojo Moyes writes contemporary novels with the emotional pitch of Firefly Lane, Jodi Picoult puts families through impossible decisions, Celeste Ng writes literary family fiction about what a household agrees not to mention, and Taylor Jenkins Reid tells whole lives across decades with a Hollywood or music-industry backdrop.

Which author writes about the Pacific Northwest like Kristin Hannah?

Susan Wiggs, who lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington, as Hannah does. The Oysterville Sewing Circle (2019) is set on Washington's Long Beach Peninsula, though much of her work, including The Lakeshore Chronicles, is set elsewhere.

Is The Tattooist of Auschwitz a true story?

It is a novel based on Heather Morris's interviews with Lale Sokolov, who tattooed prisoners' numbers at Auschwitz-Birkenau. In 2018 the Auschwitz Memorial Research Centre published a fact-check disputing many of its details, and it is best read as fiction drawn from one survivor's memories.

Is The Nightingale being made into a film?

Yes. TriStar Pictures has set the film for release on 12 February 2027, directed by Michael Morris from a screenplay by Dana Stevens, with Dakota and Elle Fanning as the sisters Vianne and Isabelle. Firefly Lane was adapted earlier as a Netflix series that ran from 2021 to 2023.

Footnotes

  1. Kristin Hannah — Wikipedia
  2. ‘The Nightingale’ With Dakota and Elle Fanning Sets February 2027 Release — TheWrap
  3. The Nightingale, Chapter 11 — CliffsNotes
  4. Lilac Girls: Historical Inspiration — Martha Hall Kelly
  5. PRH US stands by Jojo Moyes following claims of similarities — The Bookseller
  6. The Tattooist of Auschwitz — Wikipedia
  7. Heather Morris — Wikipedia
  8. Susan Wiggs — Wikipedia

List last reviewed 15 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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