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Authors Like Kristin Hannah

Vianne Mauriac hands over a list of names. She is a schoolteacher in a village outside Carriveau, the Germans have billeted an officer in her house, and the list is of the Jewish children in her school. That scene is two hundred pages into The Nightingale, and readers still write to Kristin Hannah about it. She does the same thing in The Four Winds with a Texas farm that will not grow anything, and in The Women with a field hospital outside Da Nang: put an ordinary woman somewhere history is happening, and stay with her past the point where most novels would look away. Ten authors below work the same seam.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Historical Fiction · Women’s Fiction · Family Drama · Updated 17 September 2026

Quick answer

If you want the closest match to The Nightingale, read Martha Hall Kelly. For The Women, read Kate Quinn. For Firefly Lane, read Taylor Jenkins Reid. The other seven below split by what you are actually after — the war, the research, the mothers and daughters, or the Pacific Northwest — and each one says which.

Every book by Kristin Hannah →

10 authors like Kristin Hannah

01
WWII · Closest match

Martha Hall Kelly

American · b. 1956

Lilac Girls (2016), Lost Roses (2019), Sunflower Sisters (2021)

Kelly found her subject on a day trip: a magazine piece sent her to Bellamy-Ferriday House in Connecticut, where Caroline Ferriday had kept papers about the Polish women experimented on at Ravensbrück. Lilac Girls braids Ferriday's story with a Polish courier's and a German doctor's, and Kelly spent years on the archive before writing a line of it.

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
02
Espionage · Women at war

Kate Quinn

American · b. 1981

The Alice Network (2017), The Huntress (2019), The Rose Code (2021)

Quinn writes the women the war records lost. The Alice Network is built on Louise de Bettignies' real spy ring in occupied Lille; The Huntress on the Soviet night bomber regiment the Germans called the Night Witches; The Rose Code on the women of Bletchley Park who signed the Official Secrets Act and then said nothing for thirty years.

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

Me Before You (2012), The Giver of Stars (2019), Someone Else’s Shoes (2023)

Moyes was a journalist at the Independent for a decade, and it shows in how she reports a life: Louisa Clark's dead-end job at a café, the exact shape of a small English town, what a family says at dinner when nobody wants to say the real thing. The Giver of Stars moves to 1930s Kentucky and the packhorse librarians, which is the closest she comes to Hannah's territory.

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
04
Historical injustice · Family secrets

Lisa Wingate

American · b. 1969

Before We Were Yours (2017), The Book of Lost Friends (2020), Shelterwood (2024)

Before We Were Yours is about the Tennessee Children's Home Society, which for nearly thirty years took children from poor families in Memphis and sold them to wealthy ones, with the courts and the press looking elsewhere. Georgia Tann ran it until 1950. Wingate puts a 1939 riverboat family at the centre and a present-day lawyer on the other end of it.

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
05
Family drama · Moral complexity

Jodi Picoult

American · b. 1966

My Sister’s Keeper (2004), Small Great Things (2016), Mad Honey (2022)

Picoult's method is to find a decision with no clean answer and give it to a family. A thirteen-year-old sues her parents for the rights to her own body. A Black labour nurse is told not to touch a white supremacist couple's newborn. She researches each one hard — shadowing nurses, sitting in courtrooms — 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 → Authors like Jodi Picoult →
06
Literary fiction · Mothers and daughters

Celeste Ng

American · b. 1980

Everything I Never Told You (2014), Little Fires Everywhere (2017), Our Missing Hearts (2022)

Ng opens Everything I Never Told You with a sentence that tells you the daughter is dead and that the family does not know yet, and then spends the novel on what they had each decided not to say to her. Little Fires Everywhere does it again in Shaker Heights, a planned suburb with rules about the colour of your house.

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 → Authors like Celeste Ng →
07
Pacific Northwest · Women’s fiction

Susan Wiggs

American · b. 1958

The Lakeshore Chronicles (2006–2015), The Oysterville Sewing Circle (2019), The Lost and Found Bookshop (2020)

Wiggs writes the coast Hannah lives on — Puget Sound, the Washington shoreline, towns small enough that the bookshop owner knows what you read. Her novels turn on someone coming home after something has gone wrong, and she is unhurried about the coming home.

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
08
WWII · Built on testimony

Heather Morris

New Zealander · b. 1953

The Tattooist of Auschwitz (2018), Cilka’s Journey (2019), Three Sisters (2021)

Morris met Lale Sokolov in Melbourne in 2003, when he was eighty-seven, and spent three years listening before she wrote anything. He had been the tätowierer at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the prisoner made to ink numbers onto the arms of the people arriving. The book has been argued over by historians on points of detail, which is worth knowing before you start it.

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

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (2017), Daisy Jones & The Six (2019), Carrie Soto Is Back (2022)

Reid's trick is retrospect. An old film star finally tells a journalist the truth about seven marriages; a broken-up band is interviewed separately about the same night and does not agree. The reader is always being told a life by someone with a reason to tell it now.

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

A Hundred Summers (2013), The Summer Wives (2018), Husbands & Lovers (2024)

Williams writes money and the women inside it — Gilded Age New York, Rhode Island in the summer of the 1938 hurricane, an island off Long Island Sound where the year-round families and the summer families do not mix. She runs two timelines almost every time 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

Where to start if you loved Kristin Hannah

If you loved The Nightingale, then…

Read Martha Hall Kelly. Same foundation — a real archive, women carrying the occupation, a story that nearly went unrecorded.

If you loved The Women, then…

Read Kate Quinn. Her whole career is about the women left out of the official history of a war.

If you loved Firefly Lane, then…

Read Taylor Jenkins Reid. One life across thirty years, told backwards by someone with a reason to tell it.

If it was the mothers and daughters, then…

Read Celeste Ng. Quieter, more literary, and merciless about the sentence nobody in the house will finish.

If it was the Pacific Northwest, then…

Read Susan Wiggs. The same coast, the same small towns, a gentler hand.

If it was the research, then…

Read Heather Morris. Closer to survivor testimony than anything else on this list.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Kristin Hannah

Who is most similar to Kristin Hannah?

Martha Hall Kelly is the closest match, especially for readers of The Nightingale. Her novel Lilac Girls braids together a Polish resistance courier, an American philanthropist and a German doctor at Ravensbrück, and it is built on an archive Kelly spent years in before she wrote it. For readers of The Women, Kate Quinn is the closer match, because her whole catalogue is about women whose war service went unrecorded.

What should I read after The Nightingale?

Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly is the usual next book, because it shares the same grounding in real wartime records and the same focus on what occupation does to women specifically. The Alice Network by Kate Quinn is the other strong option, built on Louise de Bettignies' real spy ring in occupied Lille.

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

Yes. Jojo Moyes writes contemporary novels with the same emotional pitch as Firefly Lane and no historical setting at all. Celeste Ng writes literary family fiction about mothers, daughters and the things a household agrees not to mention, which is closer to Winter Garden. Taylor Jenkins Reid writes a whole life across decades with a Hollywood or music-industry backdrop instead of a historical one.

Which author writes most like Kristin Hannah in terms of setting?

Susan Wiggs. She writes women's fiction set on the same Puget Sound and Washington coastline where Hannah lives and sets her contemporary novels, with the same affection for small coastal towns and for people coming home after something has gone wrong.

Which of these authors already have a guide on this site?

Celeste Ng and Taylor Jenkins Reid both have a full author guide here, with every book in order and where to start. Kristin Hannah has one too. The other seven authors on this list do not have a guide yet.

Footnotes
  1. Publication years are taken from each book’s first edition.
  2. Martha Hall Kelly has described finding Caroline Ferriday’s papers at the Bellamy-Ferriday House in Bethlehem, Connecticut, in interviews about Lilac Girls.
  3. Historians have disputed points of detail in The Tattooist of Auschwitz; the Auschwitz Memorial Research Centre published a note on this in 2018. It is a novel, and worth reading as one.
  4. Author birth years come from publisher biographies.

Nothing here was suggested by a machine. I picked these ten myself, and the reasons are on the page.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. See more on her personal bookshelf.

More from the shelf

Author guideBooks Written by Kristin HannahEvery novel, in order. Books likeBooks Like The WomenFor the field hospital, not the farm. Reading listBooks About Women in WarNurses, couriers, pilots, spies. Reading listBest Books About SistersThe bonds that hold and break.

From the bookshelf

“In love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.”

— Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale

Ten authors is a start, not a shelf. My bookshelf has the ones I keep pressing on people, with a reason under each.

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