Summer may be ending soon, but for Elin Hilderbrand fans, affectionately known as "Hilderbabes," the season lives eternal. The prolific author has more than 20 titles dedicated to the warmest months of the year that will instantly transport you to the sandy beaches of Nantucket, where the water is clear, the culture is rich, and the views are downright ‘Gram-worthy.
The only problem? Trying to choose just one Elin Hilderbrand book. The author—dubbed "the Queen of the Beach Read"—has written 30 novels over her career that spans over 25 years. However, in a 2021 interview with the Associated Press, she first teased her plans to step back from writing, and, in 2024, she confirmed that she would no longer be crafting books solely set on Nantucket. While 2024's Swan Song was her last title in the beach read genre, her upcoming book, The Academy, which she co-wrote with her daughter Shelby Cunningham and is set to hit shelves on September 16, will mark her next chapter.
As Hilderbrand put it best in an essay for Oprah Daily, "These books will provide a look at Nantucket—and at the notion of an ‘American summer’—in the first quarter of the 21st century."
In honor of the next phase in Hilderbrand's career, and our love for all of her feats thus far, we went ahead and ranked her 10 best books. So, kick back and prepare yourself for plenty of surf, sand, and sunshine—these are the best Elin Hilderbrand books for reveling in the season.
This one’s like The Parent Trap for adults. It’s about two twins living totally opposite lives who wind up switching places after being estranged for more than a decade. And maybe—just maybe—after walking the 11 miles that separate them in the other twins’s shoes, they’ll find more common ground than they ever thought possible. (Spoiler alert: They do.)
Barefoot is the book that put Hilderbrand on the map. While she wrote five novels before its release, none of them landed quite like this poignant tale about three women who travel to Nantucket for the summer to escape their lives, which seem to be falling apart in different ways. According to Hilderbrand, it was her publisher’s move to embrace Barefoot as the “beach read” that it is, ultimately leading to her meteoric success. “They just started taking off from there,” she said.
Where do you go when your life has been shipwrecked through no fault of your own? If you’re Meredith Martin Delinn, whose husband Freddy is found to have defrauded an angry group of rich investors, the answer is Nantucket with your estranged best friend. She may not be able to right Freddy’s wrongs, but she can right a few of her own, both with her bestie Connie and with herself.
Hilderbrand takes her first stab at historical fiction with Summer of ‘69, which is set in a very different Nantucket than the one we’re used to seeing her modern-day characters stroll the beaches of. This Nantucket is one whose visitors and residents are immersed in thoughts of war, civil rights, and space exploration as they navigate life both on and off the island during what Hilderbrand has hailed “the most tumultuous summer of the 20th century.”
Picture this: an invite to revisit the most important friendships from every era of your life...only it's a total disaster. That premise is a peek into The Five-Star Weekend, which sees recently widowed food blogger Hollis Shaw taking a trip down memory lane with one of her friends from her teenage years, one from her 20s, one from her 30s, and another from midlife—all together, in the same weekend. We recommend reading this one fast, before the television adaptation starring Jennifer Garner hits Peacock.
The Perfect Couple is so good that it received the attention of Nicole Kidman, who not only starred in its Netflix adaptation but also served as one of its executive producers. Following a young couple that's set to be married at the groom’s wealthy family estate, the novel quickly turns from a love story to a thriller when an unspeakable crime is committed the night before their wedding. Suddenly, the wedding party has all become suspects, and the bride and groom’s fairytale nuptials have morphed into a dark nightmare.
Aptly named for Hilderbrand’s own literary farewell, Swan Song also mirrors the author’s life of sorts. “One of my recurring characters, Police Chief Ed Kapenash, is retiring—the story details one last case for Ed (a fire and a missing person!) and one last hurrah for me,” she explained in an Oprah Daily essay.
Not surprisingly, it’s one of Hilderbrand’s highest-ranked novels on Goodreads—she designed it to be that way. “I want to be the morning star, brightest at the end of my career, right before I ‘disappear’—or (wink, wink) move to a different part of the sky,” she wrote.
Fair warning? This one’s so touching it even made Hilderbrand cry: “The ending is really, really poignant and bittersweet.”
There are plenty of things that can go wrong with the restoration of the old, rundown Hotel Nantucket without adding a ghost to the mix—but that’s exactly what its new owner, Xavier Darling, has on his hands. The 19-year-old chambermaid who was killed there in a decades-old fire still haunts its halls, and combined with the pressure to succeed, the complex relationships between the hotel staff, and the hotel’s reputation, Xavier may have gotten more than he bargained for.
Hilderbrand went far beyond the shores of Nantucket with this one—she went straight up to the heavens. Protagonist Vivian Howe is a novelist who has just been killed in a hit-and-run accident. Now, she’s spending one final summer watching her loved ones from above, with just three chances to steer her kids in the right direction as their lives unfold. Once her chances are used up, her family will be on their own—and she'll be forced to let go.
The Hilderbabes have spoken: 28 Summers takes the Nantucket cake. Fans on Goodreads and Reddit almost unanimously named this the best book in Hilderbrand’s catalog, and by a landslide, too. The storyline is complex: Link receives a phone number from his dying mother that connects him to a man whose wife is running for president. Now, Link is tasked with figuring out how his mother knows this well-to-do stranger, whose life is far more intricately entwined with his own than he ever could have guessed.
Author Elin Hilderbrand poses in front of her bookshelf.
How to read Elin Hilderbrand’s books in order
You can read Elin Hilderbrand’s books in several different ways.
You can go in the order that she published them, which would be as follows: The Beach Club (2000), Nantucket Nights (2002), Summer People (2003), The Blue Bistro (2005), The Love Season (2006), Barefoot (2007), A Summer Affair (2008), The Castaways (2009), The Island (2010), Silver Girl (2011), Summerland (2012), Beautiful Day (2013), The Matchmaker (2014), Winter Street (2014), The Rumor (2015), Winter Stroll (2015), Here’s to Us (2016), Winter Storms (2016), The Identicals (2017), Winter Solstice (2017), The Perfect Couple (2018), Winter in Paradise (2018), Summer of ‘69 (2019), What Happens in Paradise (2019), 28 Summers (2020), Troubles in Paradise (2020), Golden Girl (2021), The Hotel Nantucket (2022), Endless Summer (2022), The Five-Star Weekend (2023), Swan Song (2024), The Blue Book (2025), and The Academy (2025).
You can also read them by topic. Currently, Hilderbrand has four different series available. There’s the Winter Series, which includes Winter Street, Winter Stroll, Winter Storms, and Winter Solstice; the Paradise Series, which consists of Winter in Paradise, What Happens in Paradise, and Trouble in Paradise; and the Academy Series, which is so far limited to the author’s upcoming September 2025 novel of the same name. (Hilderbrand revealed in a 2024 essay for Oprah Daily that a second novel will follow.)
Hilderbrand’s remaining 25 books bear no official series name, but are all classified as “Summer books” on her publisher’s website.
What is Elin Hildebrand's best-selling book?
Hildebrand’s team keeps her individual book sales figures relatively close to its chest, which means her best-selling book of all time is not publicly known.
That said, her website cites Summer of ’69 as her first novel to debut at No. 1 on The New York Times Best Seller list, with USA TODAY reporting 2022’s The Hotel Nantucket as her second No. 1 hit.
According to CBC, she has sold 20 million books overall worldwide.
Why is Elin Hildebrand not writing anymore?
Hilderbrand explained her decision to retire from writing her "summer books" in a 2024 essay for Oprah Daily. “I am retiring for my readers’ sake,” she wrote. “I live in fear of repeating myself, and of the quality of my books slipping. I never want anyone to pick up my latest novel and say, ‘She’s lost it.’…Or even ‘This just wasn’t as good as the last one.’”
She elaborated in a 2024 podcast, saying, "I'm stopping writing these books because, frankly, I am out of ideas. Nantucket is small. I've covered every part of the island, every festival, every time of year...I've gotten to the bottom of the well."
Ultimately, Hilderbrand chose her literary legacy over riches. “I have called my decision to retire the 'purest' decision I have ever made," she wrote. "The standards I keep for my body of work are more important [than money and fame].”
In addition to being creatively challenged, Hilderbrand also said that she wanted to spend more time with her family. “I...find myself with kids in their early 20s and late teens who still (thank goodness) want to hang out with me, and I want nothing more than to be a full-time parent to them in these precious years before they move out and start their own families,” she wrote.
Liev Schreiber and Nicole Kidman in The Perfect Couple season 1.
Which of Elin Hilderbrand’s books are being made into movies?
In addition to The Perfect Couple, which premiered on Netflix in September 2024, Hilderbrand told Boston.com that several of her other novels are in the works with different networks, including The Five-Star Weekend, which is currently in development with Peacock. (Jennifer Garner and Chloë Sevigny are set to star.)
The novelist revealed that Swan Song, the entire Winter series, and 28 Summers had all been optioned as of June 2024, with the latter slated for movie development by MRC Film. “I can be as involved or as uninvolved as I want to be on those,” Hilderbrand shared.
Deadline reported in March 2025 that Swan Song would be the basis for the second season of The Perfect Couple, albeit with a new writer at the helm. According to the outlet, leads Leslee and Bill Richardson will be "spiritual successors” to Kidman and Liev Schreiber’s characters of Greer and Tag Winbury.
In 2021, Winter in Paradise was also announced as in development with ABC and Ellen Pompeo, while Warner Bros. TV optioned the rights for The Hotel Nantucket in 2022. However, little news has been shared about either project since then.
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Marie Claire’s editors and writers are some of the most voracious readers around (present company included). There’s an entire section on MC dedicated to our love of the written word. It's chock-full of book rankings, news on our fave authors (why yes, we have scoured the internet for every possible detail about the upcoming Netflix adaptation of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo), writer Q&As, and reviews on the titles our editors loved best.
In short? We’re not only devouring books at a breakneck pace, we’re dissecting every little detail about them (which is precisely why and how we have our pulse on the literary juggernaut that is #Booktok).
In some cases, we’re even writing them ourselves (shoutout to Marie Claire’s digital director, Jenny Hollander, whose debut novel was published in 2024).
