Love Island USA season 8 has officially wrapped, concluding six weeks’ worth of chats, challenges, and not-so-covert communal bedroom hookups. It felt like everyone was glued to their screens this season; after all, it shattered viewership numbers, increasing 68 percent from season 7. The reality TV hit even reached new heights beyond the villa and Peacock: Host Ariana Madix even earned the show’s first Emmy nomination for reality television host.
But if you need to fill the Love Island USA-shaped hole in your heart—and to wean yourself off the steady IV drip that an episode a day provides—we’ve curated a list of reality TV-inspired books.
Over the last decade, reality TV novels have essentially become their own subgenre, with a slew of books inspired by dating shows like The Bachelor and Love Island, slice-of-life Bravo staples like The Real Housewives, and competition series all hitting shelves and building on the phenomenon. Below, find the fiction reads you need to add to your TBR list, especially if you need to unplug a bit but always have an appetite for ample drama. Pick up a prescient 1980s Stephen King thriller, a mystery send-up of The Real Housewives of New Jersey, and more. We promise they’re just as binge-able.
When the 17-year-old daughter of a famed Evangelical preacher-turned-reality-TV-star gets pregnant, her mother arranges a meeting not with a doctor but with the show’s producers to talk about how to play it for the cameras. The daughter, in turn, fights for her freedom by pairing off with her high school classmate Roarke Richards and attempting to sell an exclusive of their love story to the conservative media.
Five couples cast on a reality TV show set in a tropical paradise…this mystery from bestselling thriller author Ruth Ware has the makings of Love Island. But instead of hooking up, the stakes are life and death as they flee a killer—who may or may not be one of them.
In this debut dystopian novel, a beautiful woman goes on a popular reality TV show where she must compete to be the last remaining contestant in a remote desert compound. But the only thing messier than the reality show is the real world—and she soon begins to wonder if she'd rather remain on the show forever. That is, until producers raise the stakes in dangerous new ways.
A mother-and-daughter story centered on beauty and destruction, this novel follows a mother addicted to plastic surgery who earns a spot on America’s Beauty Extreme, a reality show featuring people with botched work who compete to win reconstruction surgeries.
This surreal, skewering novel doesn’t center around a reality TV show but on something crucial to the genre: the mythos of a normal girl-turned-household name. The novel follows Lacey Dove Bart, a teen with dreams of fame who leaves Appalachia to become the pop star of a generation—which ends up costing her more than she bargained for.
This psychological novel by bestselling Korean author Miye Lee follows eight office workers who are invited on a new reality TV show called Break Room. What do they have in common? They were all voted by their real-life coworkers as the office villain.
In this moving dystopian novel about the prison-industrial complex, two gladiators must fight for their freedom in a televised competition to raise money for the private prison industry. It’s a far cry from the beaches of Tahiti, but this is about as dark as reality TV can get.
A wealthy Iranian-American family with four daughters and a fast-food empire is on the verge of getting their own reality TV show, centered around their life in their L.A. McMansion—but as the cameras get closer to rolling, they realize all their messy family secrets are about to come pouring out.
For fans of The Real Housewives, this campy, propulsive mystery follows the scandalous lives of the back-stabbing—sometimes literally—cast of the reality TV show Garden State Goddesses. When a murder occurs, one producer sets out to discover the truth.
Originally written under Stephen King’s pen name Richard Bachman, this thriller was prescient in its prediction of reality TV. To care for his sick daughter, an unemployed father signs up for The Running Man, a reality TV competition where he must stay alive for 30 days while being hunted by an elite strike force.
A queer comedic mystery set on a small Pacific Northwest island in the last weeks of Bachelor-style dating show The Catch, this utterly original novel follows the final four contestants, whose lives are upended (even more than reality TV has already) when they come across a strange local living alone in the woods.