The best novels set in the orbit of Hollywood or Broadway

I listened to this book, and it’s hard to argue with anything voiced by Meryl Streep—fantastic!— but the story itself had me engaged from beginning to end. I love dual timeline books, and in this one, Lara and her three grown daughters pick cherries on the family orchard as the girls try to wrestle out of their mother the story of her long-ago romance with a man who became a movie legend.

Like Lara’s daughters, I’m hopelessly drawn to anyone touched by the glitter of fame, and this book serves as a great reminder that fame tends to look better from the outside. It also drove me to appreciate those relationships in my life, no matter how “pedestrian,” I cherish most.

This book includes so many of my favorite things: an inn on the coast of Italy, a young innkeeper with outsized dreams, movie stars, an almost-romance, and a chance for rekindled love.

I clung to every page as the story moved back and forth from the 1960s to the present day, from the set of Cleopatra in Rome to Hollywood backlots. This book is like a vacation full of interesting people you want to know better, the kind of vacation you never want to end.

I read this novel just as I was starting to write in earnest, and before I fully understood how hard it is to pull off a feat of complex storytelling as elegantly as Walter does in this novel. It’s a marvel.

I have a pet peeve about books/authors who portray women in the early part of the 1900s as necessarily “old-fashioned,” hopelessly trapped by the rules of propriety set forth by society. This is not one of those books.

A wonderful romp behind the scenes of New York City theater in the 1940s, it follows a young Vivian who gleefully explores sex, relationships, and various unusual career paths thanks to her proximity to the bohemian art scene. This book is full of actors and actresses, some famous, others less so, and ultimately is about the source and endurance of true love outside the trappings of fame. A wonderful story.

This book is a tour-de-force—a beautifully written story about Marian Graves, an Amelia Earhart-type adventurer during the prohibition era, and Hadley Baxter, the actress set to play her in a movie more than half a century later.

I really enjoyed how the two stories are in conversation with each other; both women determined to chart their own courses in very different eras and what they learn about themselves in the process. I was also struck by the intense obligation the actress feels to get this character right and the personal toll it takes as she discovers how similar their emotional lives may have been.

This book provided a true escape just when I needed it most, and I could have kept reading long after I turned the final page.

I was immediately drawn into this story’s premise: former best friends who haven’t seen each other in forty years reuniting in Los Angeles for one night of conversation, a night that will leave each woman changed forever.

Lacey and Edith met and bonded as young girls on the East Coast, but it is Hollywood that tore them apart. I am always interested in stories of female friendship, when ties are strongest, and when they are severed. And, of course, the introduction of a movie star love interest is bound to test even the tightest bond.

This story is especially poignant because it is told by two older women, looking back, who understand the consequences of their decisions and know what they would do over again and what they regret most.