“Obviously, Mick Riva is mentioned or featured in all of them,” she adds, but there are “many, many more” connections across the book – “too many to list, perhaps”. There are a lot of people that have gone to the Riva party over the years,” says Reid. “There are little Easter eggs all over the place. Perhaps you were intrigued to see Carrie Soto get her own novel after her incendiary appearance at Nina Riva’s party in Malibu Rising, but she’s not the only character to appear across the four novels. Not only fully formed, but ready to leap into one another’s narratives. So that when I start writing, they are fully formed.”

My research period lasts about four to five weeks when I’m obsessed with trying to create them in my mind, to feel as if I can hear their voice. 'I don’t think I can put one word down without knowing these women and having spent a few weeks thinking about them and what they want and what they would do. Jenkins Reid’s characters, she says, “appear right at the beginning” of her process.

Read more: Daisy Jones and the Six: 5 things fans will love about the Amazon Prime Video adaptation It was a real thrill to look at who Carrie Soto was in Malibu Rising and ask myself, ‘Where can I take her next?’' “I had already created someone I knew well enough to follow on another journey. The decision to give Soto a novel of her own arrived after Jenkins Reid wrote Malibu Rising: “I was thinking of what I wanted to do next, and I realised that I already had the main character,” she tells us. They don’t have to be read in any particular order but they are variations on a theme – and they work in tandem,” Jenkins Reid explains to us.

From the Old Hollywood charm of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo to Seventies rock parable Daisy Jones & The Six, the ocean-misted Eighties of Malibu Rising and, most recently, the fierce competition of top-tier tennis in Nineties-set novel Carrie Soto Is Back, Jenkins Reid’s books cover a particularly alluring part of the 20th Century, where glamour and danger endlessly collide.ĭid you know, though, that the four books exist in the same universe? “I think these four books work as a set. The American author is no stranger to international bestseller lists. Warning: contains spoilers for Daisy Jones & the Six, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Malibu RisingĬhances are, if you’ve read one Taylor Jenkins Reid novel, you’ll probably be eager to read another.

Malibu rising a novel