The Carrie Diaries Books in Order

The Carrie Diaries series imagines what Carrie Bradshaw was like long before New York nightlife and famous newspaper columns. Written as a young adult prequel by Candace Bushnell, it treats Carrie not as an icon but as a small-town teenager who is still figuring herself out.

The first book, The Carrie Diaries, is set in a Connecticut suburb in the early 1980s. Carrie is a high-school senior who feels slightly out of step with the world around her: she loves writing, has a stubborn streak, and is never quite content to follow the script laid out for her. Between classes, swim practice, and hanging out with her friends, she falls for new boy Sebastian Kydd and discovers how messy first love can be when loyalty and desire collide.

Bushnell pays as much attention to Carrie's friendships as to her romances. Carrie, Mouse, Maggie, Lali, Walt, and the rest of their crowd face shifting alliances, betrayals, and big choices about who they want to be after graduation. The book also explores her relationship with her widowed father and sisters, showing how family rules and expectations push against her dreams of leaving town to write.

Summer and the City picks up right where the first book leaves off, with seventeen-year-old Carrie stepping off a bus into Manhattan for her first real taste of city life. She is meant to be in a summer writing program and on her way to a sensible college plan, but the city offers temptations: a loft filled with downtown artists, an older playwright who finds her fascinating, and the thrill of staying out late at parties that feel like scenes from a movie.

Most importantly for longtime fans, this is where she meets Samantha Jones and Miranda Hobbes, sketching the beginnings of the friendships that will anchor her adult life.

Across the two novels, the series tracks how a smart, slightly insecure girl learns to trust her instincts. Fashion and boys are part of the story, but so are quieter milestones: submitting early pieces to the school paper, sitting alone at a typewriter, deciding not to follow the crowd when it would be easier to blend in. The tone is fizzy and fun on the surface, with plenty of parties and snarky asides, yet underneath it is a story about ambition and choosing your own path.

The books were later adapted into a television series, also called The Carrie Diaries, which expanded on Carrie's high-school and early New York years. Together, the novels and show offer a bridge between Bushnell's young adult readers and the world of Sex and the City, showing how a girl from a small Connecticut town becomes the storyteller at the center of Manhattan nightlife.