The Best Elin Hilderbrand Books, Ranked—From 'The Perfect Couple' to 'The Five-Star Weekend'

2025’s The Academy, co-written with Hilderbrand’s daughter, Shelby Cunningham, marked the writer’s first foray into non-Nantucket territory since announcing her big pivot. The new material, which follows a group of boarding school students as they navigate the arrival of a new Gossip Girl-style website that’s sharing their darkest secrets, didn’t have quite the same chokehold on the Hilderbabes as her usual fare, with some complaining of a lack of depth and loose ends. Still, it’s a fun back-to-school read if you can take it at face value.

Those who can, do; those who can’t, matchmake: That’s the premise at the heart of this novel about 48-year-old matchmaker Dabney Kimball Beech. She never got over the love she lost 27 years prior when he left her behind to pursue his dreams. Now he’s back, and her old feelings threaten to upend her world—and her marriage. While the storytelling holds up (it’s Hilderbrand, after all), the overarching theme of infidelity will certainly sour it for some.

This one’s like The Parent Trap for adults. It’s about two twins living 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 twin’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.”

As one of Hilderbrand’s earlier novels, The Blue Bistro is the perfect introduction to her Nantucket-based universe. It follows sojourner Adrienne Dealey, who comes to (you guessed it), Nantucket for the summer with no expectations beyond earning some fast cash at a local bistro. What she finds, however, is an instant attraction to her new employer and a burning curiosity about her fascinating coworkers. Can you say “beach read?”

Hilderbrand traded in the familiar shores near the Cape Cod peninsula for the allure of the tropics with Winter in Paradise. Its heroine, Irene Steele, is forced to come to grips with her husband's death when he's killed in a plane crash—but also the second family he's been hiding in the Caribbean. The mix of betrayal, mystery, love and grief proved irresistible for readers, who call this one “fantastic.”

Picture this: an invite to revisit the most important friendships of your life from every era...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 a friend from her teenage years, one from her 20s, one from her 30s, and another from midlife—all together, in the same weekend. Bonus: Once you read the book, you can check out the TV series adaptation starring Jennifer Garner on 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 who are set to be married at the groom’s wealthy family estate, the novel quickly turns from a love story into 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 to crafting books about her beloved Massachusetts island, 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.”

Like The Perfect Couple, Beautiful Day is centered on the hustle and bustle of an upcoming wedding and the tangled lives of the guests gathering for the event. However, both have very different vibes. Where The Perfect Couple is a mystery-thriller, Beautiful Day is a complex amalgamation of emotions guided by a confessional notebook the bride’s late mother left behind for her big day. And for regular Hilderbrand readers, those big feels win out.

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.