What to read next
The Briar Club is set in a Washington, D.C. boarding house during the McCarthy era, where a mysterious new tenant draws the women living there into a weekly supper club — and a friendship that ends with a body on the floor. Readers looking for books like The Briar Club want Kate Quinn's blend of female friendship, rotating points of view and Cold War paranoia, with a mystery threaded through a very human story about women claiming their own power.
If you want more Kate Quinn
Kate Quinn
Why Matchbook recommends it: A Soviet sniper's real-life wartime tour of the United States — the same page-turning mix of history, friendship and danger, and a link to one of the Briar Club's own secrets.
If you loved Cold War women with secrets
Lara Prescott
Why Matchbook recommends it: CIA typists in 1950s Washington secretly help smuggle Doctor Zhivago into the USSR — women underestimated in exactly the way the Briar Club's residents are.
If you loved a building full of women and a mystery
Fiona Davis
Why Matchbook recommends it: The Barbizon Hotel for Women in 1950s New York, a scandal buried in its past and the tenants who lived through it.
If you loved the McCarthy-era paranoia
Thomas Mallon
Why Matchbook recommends it: A young man in 1950s Washington is drawn into a secret relationship as the Lavender Scare sweeps through government — the same fear that shadows Quinn's boarding house.
If you loved a woman hiding who she really is
Marie Benedict & Victoria Christopher Murray
Why Matchbook recommends it: Belle da Costa Greene conceals her Black heritage while becoming J.P. Morgan's librarian — secrecy, ambition and a woman defying her era.
If you loved friendship built around cooking
Jennifer Ryan
Why Matchbook recommends it: Four women compete in a wartime cooking contest and become unlikely allies — the supper-club warmth of The Briar Club in a different setting.
If you loved forbidden 1950s love
Patricia Highsmith
Why Matchbook recommends it: Two women fall in love in 1950s New York and pay the price society demands — the quiet danger behind one of the Briar Club's most moving threads.
The romance? The characters? The setting? The twists? Tell Matchbook what worked for you — and what didn't — and we'll find your next read.