Sarah Jessica Parker’s reading list feels exactly like you’d hope it would: literary, stylish, emotionally curious, and full of books that seem designed for people who notice everything. Her picks move between intimate family stories, feminist history, literary fiction, memoir-adjacent narratives, and darker contemporary novels, but they all share a fascination with identity, memory, relationships, and the complicated ways people become themselves.
Looking at the books recommended by Sarah Jessica Parker, there’s a strong sense that she reads for character first. These are stories filled with people who are messy, intelligent, wounded, funny, contradictory, and often searching for some version of home. Even the bigger historical or political books on her shelf seem to circle back to personal experience—how ordinary lives are shaped by forces much larger than themselves.
There’s also something distinctly New York-bookish about this list: curious without being showy, sophisticated without feeling inaccessible, and always interested in the emotional life beneath the surface. If Carrie Bradshaw traded one of her cocktail nights for an afternoon in an independent bookstore, this is exactly the kind of stack you could imagine her carrying home.
I Am You by Victoria Redel
Set in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, I Am You transports readers into the artistic and intellectual world of the Dutch Golden Age. Victoria Redel brings the period vividly to life through its bustling streets, elaborate clothing, creative rivalries, and, above all, the artists whose work defined the era.
At its center is a story of art, identity, desire, and the complicated relationships that shape both the person and the artist.
Why You Should Read It
If you love historical fiction that completely immerses you in another time and place, I Am You belongs on your list. Redel doesn’t simply use Golden Age Amsterdam as a beautiful backdrop; she makes its artistic culture integral to the story. It’s particularly appealing for readers fascinated by art history, unconventional relationships, and novels that explore the messy human lives behind periods we now romanticize.
Sarah Jessica Parker’s Take
“I AM YOU is a novel I fell in love with from the moment I read the manuscript… Redel pulled me into the rich period of Golden Age Amsterdam as she described the city streets, the clothing, and most importantly, the artists who made the city what it was.”
What immediately captured Sarah Jessica Parker was the novel’s sense of place. Her recommendation makes I Am You sound less like simply reading about seventeenth-century Amsterdam and more like stepping directly into it. And her emphasis on the artists is especially telling: beneath all that gorgeous historical detail is a story about creative people—their ambitions, relationships, and the world that allowed their art to flourish.
Get Book: I Am You!The Story of the Forest by Linda Grant
The Story of the Forest is a sweeping family saga that begins when a Jewish family leaves Latvia for America in the early twentieth century, only to find their journey unexpectedly redirected to Liverpool.
From there, Linda Grant follows the family across generations as love, displacement, ambition, war, and changing ideas of home shape their lives. It is an intimate family story set against the enormous transformations of the twentieth century.
Why You Should Read It
This is for readers who love multigenerational novels where history is experienced through ordinary people’s lives. Grant captures the small moments that make a family—marriages, disagreements, disappointments, secrets, and celebrations—while exploring larger questions of migration, identity, and belonging. It’s the kind of novel that reminds you that family history is rarely neat, but that’s exactly what makes it worth telling.
Sarah Jessica Parker’s Take
“This novel is such a beautiful achievement. Linda’s captivating characters shepherd you along one family’s story, capturing a time in history laced with both loss and joy.”
Sarah Jessica Parker’s praise gets straight to what makes the novel special: the characters are what carry you through its enormous historical canvas. Rather than history overwhelming the people at its center, Grant makes us experience changing times through one family’s losses, joys, and attempts to build a life. SJP calling it a “beautiful achievement” feels especially fitting for a novel that manages to be both sweeping and deeply personal.
Get Book: The Story of the Forest!The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley
The Palm House is a compact, psychologically sharp novel about family, memory, and the complicated emotional inheritance we carry from childhood into adulthood. Gwendoline Riley turns her attention to the tensions within a mother-daughter relationship, exploring the small cruelties, old wounds, and difficult truths that can exist alongside love.
It’s intimate rather than sprawling, with much of its power coming from Riley’s precise observations and carefully controlled prose.
Why You Should Read It
This is one for readers who love short novels where every sentence earns its place. Riley doesn’t need hundreds of pages or dramatic plot twists to create emotional intensity; she finds it in conversations, memories, and the uncomfortable dynamics between people who know each other perhaps a little too well. You could easily finish The Palm House in an afternoon, but its psychological observations may stay with you much longer.
Sarah Jessica Parker’s Take
“I think I finished this book in about 3–4 hours. And. I wasn’t rushing. I would never/could never cheat myself of the luxury and the deep pleasure of savoring every sumptuous word in Gwendoline Riley’s The Palm House.”
That might be one of the strongest endorsements on SJP’s entire list. Finishing a book in a few hours usually suggests racing through the plot, but Parker makes a point of saying the opposite: she was savoring it. Calling Riley’s writing a “luxury” and describing the pleasure of “every sumptuous word” tells you exactly where the attraction lies. The Palm House isn’t simply a quick read; it’s a book whose sentences are part of the experience.
Get Book: The Palm House!John of John by Douglas Stuart
John of John takes readers to the remote Isle of Harris in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, where Douglas Stuart explores family, belonging, masculinity, faith, and the powerful pull of home. At the center are characters caught between inherited expectations and the desire to build lives of their own.
Stuart’s vivid sense of place makes the island more than a backdrop; its landscape, traditions, and isolation become inseparable from the people who live there.
Why You Should Read It
If you love literary fiction where setting and character are equally important, John of John is one to pick up. Stuart creates people who feel complicated and intensely real while examining what happens when personal identity clashes with family and community expectations. It’s especially suited to readers who enjoy atmospheric, emotionally rich novels about complicated families and the places we can never quite leave behind.
Sarah Jessica Parker’s Take
“It is a triumph. I will never forget Cal, John or Ella and Innes, nor the vivid details and cinematic descriptions of life on the Isle of Harris. Nor will your readers. I loved every page so.”
SJP’s praise is wonderfully personal here. What stayed with her wasn’t simply the story, but the people and the place. Describing Stuart’s Isle of Harris as “cinematic” suggests just how vividly the novel transported her, while saying she’ll “never forget” its characters is perhaps the better recommendation. This is the kind of book whose world continues to exist in your imagination after you’ve left it—and Parker clearly wasn’t ready to leave.
Get Book: John of John!The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Set in Nazi Germany during World War II, The Book Thief follows Liesel Meminger, a young girl sent to live with foster parents outside Munich. As the world around her grows increasingly dangerous, Liesel finds refuge in stolen books, words, and the relationships she forms with those around her—including a Jewish man hidden in her foster family’s basement.
Narrated by Death, Markus Zusak’s novel explores war and cruelty through the eyes of a child while showing the extraordinary comfort that stories can provide in terrible circumstances.
Why You Should Read It
There’s a reason The Book Thief has remained beloved by readers around the world. It’s heartbreaking without losing its tenderness, and its unusual narrator gives a familiar period of history an unforgettable perspective. At its heart, this is a book about the power of words: how they can manipulate and destroy, but also comfort, connect, and help people survive. Bring tissues.
Sarah Jessica Parker’s Take
“I join you and the community of millions who loved every page of this heartbreaking and unforgettable book. Our tattered and shared copy is now in Tabitha’s fortunate hands. What beautiful work.”
Perhaps the loveliest detail in SJP’s recommendation is that her family’s copy is tattered and shared. This isn’t simply a famous novel she admires from a distance; it’s a book that has clearly been read, passed around, and loved in her own home. And now it’s made its way into her daughter Tabitha’s hands. For a novel about the enduring power of books and the people who share them, it’s difficult to imagine a more fitting endorsement.
Get Book: The Book Thief!Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy by Julia Ioffe
In Motherland, journalist Julia Ioffe examines modern Russian history through a perspective that traditional political histories have often pushed to the margins: the lives of women.
Moving across generations, the book explores how revolution, Soviet rule, war, social change, and authoritarianism shaped women’s lives—and how women themselves participated in, endured, and influenced Russia’s turbulent history.
Why You Should Read It
This is history told through the people who are too often treated as supporting characters. Rather than looking only at leaders, wars, and political systems, Motherland asks what enormous historical transformations actually meant for women’s everyday lives. It’s a compelling choice for readers interested in Russian history, feminism, politics, and books that challenge familiar versions of the past by changing whose experiences are placed at the center.
Sarah Jessica Parker’s Take
“Deserving of all the praise. My fellow greedy readers, grab it. Add it to your pile or start reading this weekend.”
There isn’t much hesitation in this recommendation. SJP isn’t merely saying Motherland is interesting—she’s essentially telling fellow book lovers to go and get a copy. And “my fellow greedy readers” might be the perfect description of the audience for this entire list. Her enthusiasm suggests a history book that doesn’t feel like homework, but rather the kind of nonfiction you immediately want to press into another curious reader’s hands.
Get Book: Motherland!Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead
Cool Machine brings Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Trilogy to its conclusion, returning readers to Ray Carney and the ever-changing streets of New York. This time, the story moves into the 1980s, a decade of enormous cultural, political, and economic transformation for the city.
Whitehead once again blends crime, history, humor, and social observation, using Carney’s world to capture a New York that is changing almost faster than its residents can keep up.
Why You Should Read It
If you’ve followed the Harlem Trilogy from Harlem Shuffle through Crook Manifesto, this is the finale you’ve been waiting for. But beyond the crime and entertainment, Whitehead’s series works as a portrait of New York across decades, showing how neighborhoods, ambitions, loyalties, and ideas of success evolve with the city itself. For readers who love historical fiction with wit, energy, and a strong sense of place, Cool Machine is an irresistible addition to the pile.
Sarah Jessica Parker’s Take
“Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead is a national treasure. When you are inside his pages, you are reminded of why over and over. Cool Machine [is] ‘an exuberantly entertaining novel that brings to life 1980s New York in the magnificent final volume of his Harlem Trilogy.'”
Calling Whitehead a “national treasure” tells you immediately how highly SJP regards him. But there’s another reason this recommendation feels particularly fitting on her bookshelf: New York. Much like Parker herself, Whitehead has an unmistakable relationship with the city, and his Harlem Trilogy captures its personality, contradictions, humor, and constant reinvention. With Cool Machine, SJP isn’t simply recommending the end of a crime trilogy—she’s recommending another chance to disappear into Whitehead’s New York.
Get Book: Cool Machine!Closing Reflection
Sarah Jessica Parker’s 2026 reading list feels wonderfully true to the title: Carrie Bradshaw with a library card, but perhaps with a little more history, a lot more literary fiction, and an overflowing stack beside the bed.
What makes her bookshelf especially interesting is its range. She can be completely swept away by the sumptuous writing of The Palm House, disappear into seventeenth-century Amsterdam with I Am You, pass a beloved copy of The Book Thief through her family, then enthusiastically tell her fellow “greedy readers” to pick up a feminist history of modern Russia. There isn’t one particular genre defining her taste. Curiosity does.
And SJP clearly loves books enthusiastically. She calls authors national treasures, remembers characters by name, devours novels in a matter of hours, and talks about books as things to be shared, passed around, and pressed into someone else’s hands. Her recommendations rarely sound detached or overly literary. When she loves something, you know it.
Perhaps that’s the real charm of Sarah Jessica Parker’s bookshelf. It’s sophisticated without feeling performative and eclectic without feeling random. These are books chosen by someone who genuinely seems delighted by the act of reading—and always ready to discover the next story worth telling everyone about.
So yes, Carrie Bradshaw may have had the shoes. But Sarah Jessica Parker? She has the books.
