Candace Bushnell Books in Order

If you want the classic New York singles vibe: Sex and the City → Four Blondes → Trading Up → Lipstick Jungle.
If you like ensemble social satire: One Fifth Avenue → Killing Monica.
If you're curious about Carrie Bradshaw's beginnings: The Carrie Diaries → Summer and the City.
If you want a sharp contemporary YA story: Rules for Being a Girl.
If you’re interested in midlife dating and reinvention: Is There Still Sex in the City?.

Candace Bushnell was born in Glastonbury, Connecticut, in 1958 and grew up in a small New England town that felt a long way from Manhattan. She would eventually turn that distance into material, writing about women who long for the big city and everything it promises.

Her parents, Calvin Bushnell and Camille Salonia, encouraged curiosity in different ways. Her father worked as an engineer and helped develop fuel-cell technology used on NASA's Apollo missions, while her mother brought a streak of Italian energy and humor into the house. As a teen, Bushnell was already studying people, parties, and power, even if she did not yet have the language for it.

By her late teens she had left Connecticut for college, spending time at Rice University and New York University before deciding that the classroom was less interesting than the city outside.

At nineteen she moved to New York for good. Early on she sold a children's story to a major publisher, but the book never appeared, and for years she pieced together a living as a freelance journalist. Those years of struggling, club-hopping at places like Studio 54, and watching how status and money worked in Manhattan would quietly become the research for her later fiction.

In 1993 Bushnell joined the New York Observer and soon launched the Sex and the City column, drawing on the dating lives of herself and her friends. The pieces were sharp, funny snapshots of single life among New York strivers. Collected in the book Sex and the City, they became the basis for the HBO series that ran from 1998 to 2004, followed by two feature films and later revivals built around the character of Carrie Bradshaw.

After the success of Sex and the City, Bushnell turned to standalone novels that explored similar territory from new angles. Four Blondes and Trading Up follow models, social climbers, and European royalty as they chase status and security. Lipstick Jungle focuses on three powerful friends in media, film, and fashion, and was itself adapted into a television series. With One Fifth Avenue, she shifted the camera to an entire Greenwich Village apartment building, tracing how old money, hedge-fund wealth, and creative ambition collide in one very coveted address.

Bushnell has also been interested in origin stories. In the young adult novels The Carrie Diaries and Summer and the City, she imagines Carrie Bradshaw's high-school years in Connecticut and her first wildly formative summer in New York. These books led to a television prequel series and introduced a new generation of readers to Carrie before the Manolos and cosmos.

More recently, Bushnell has written about what happens after happily-ever-after. Killing Monica plays with the frustrations of being tied to a famous fictional heroine, while Is There Still Sex in the City? follows a circle of women navigating dating, friendship, and independence in midlife. Co-writing Rules for Being a Girl with Katie Cotugno, she turned her eye to contemporary high school politics, telling the story of a student who refuses to stay quiet after a teacher crosses the line.

Along the way she has judged a reality television series, hosted a satellite radio talk show about sex and success, created a web series about women in the office, and even taken her stories to the stage in a one-woman show.

Today Bushnell divides her time between New York City and coastal New York, and she still draws energy from the streets, restaurants, and parks she has been writing about for decades. Her work keeps circling the same questions in new ways: how women build lives for themselves, what friendship looks like at different ages, and what it really means to find a home in a restless city.