What did you love about Euphoria?
The Girls
The Girls follows a girl watching someone magnetic and dangerous, unable to look away even when she should.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation
My Year of Rest and Relaxation watches its narrator destroy herself without stepping in to explain or forgive.
Ask the Dust
Ask the Dust sits with a young man who hates himself too much to believe anyone could want him.
6 books like Euphoria
- The Girls by Emma Cline — Euphoria observes teenage longing with the same forensic care Cline brings to a girl's attraction to…
- My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh — Euphoria shares Moshfegh's willingness to watch a character pursue self-obliteration without flinchi…
- Tampa by Alissa Nutting — Euphoria never turns away from the ugliest parts of desire, and neither does Nutting in this novel n…
- Ask the Dust by John Fante — Euphoria captures the specific desperation of wanting to become someone worthy of desire, which driv…
- We the Animals by Justin Torres — Euphoria watches how family violence and family love coexist in a child's world, which Torres captur…
- Marlena by Julie Buntin — Euphoria understands how one person's self-destruction becomes another's obsession, which Buntin exp…
Picked for the feeling of Euphoria, not its genre. Each one is explained below. One show isn’t much to go on: rate four more and the books are picked for you.
Why these books
Euphoria submerges you in the interior chaos of adolescence, where every feeling arrives at maximum intensity and self-destruction doubles as self-expression. It watches its characters make ruinous choices with clinical attention and unexpected compassion, refusing to moralize but never looking away. The visual style overwhelms, but the emotional architecture underneath is precise: each character carries damage that shapes how they move through desire, shame, and the desperate need to be seen. These books hold that same uncomfortable intimacy, where beauty and pain occupy the same frame.
The Girls
Euphoria observes teenage longing with the same forensic care Cline brings to a girl's attraction to danger and belonging. The prose moves between dreamy observation and sudden violence, capturing how adolescence feels both endless and accelerated. Cline refuses to judge her narrator for the choices that lead her toward catastrophe, instead tracing the exact psychology of wanting to be chosen, to matter, to feel alive in proximity to recklessness. The emotional landscape is unsparing but never cruel.
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My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Euphoria shares Moshfegh's willingness to watch a character pursue self-obliteration without flinching or offering easy redemption. The narrator's pharmaceutical escape plan mirrors the show's characters using substances to make the unbearable tolerable, or to feel anything at all. Moshfegh writes dissociation and numbness as clearly as most writers render joy, capturing the terrible logic that drives someone to destroy what hurts. The dark comedy never softens the darkness. The intimacy with damage feels both voyeuristic and compassionate.
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Tampa
Euphoria never turns away from the ugliest parts of desire, and neither does Nutting in this novel narrated by a predatory high school teacher. The prose is hyperaware of surfaces and bodies, examining how people perform attractiveness and wield sexuality as power or survival. Nutting writes transgression with unsettling clarity, making you inhabit a perspective you'd rather reject. The style is controlled and almost clinical while depicting acts that defy morality, creating the same uncomfortable complicity the show demands from its audience.
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Ask the Dust
Euphoria captures the specific desperation of wanting to become someone worthy of desire, which drives Fante's portrait of a young writer trapped between grandiosity and self-loathing. The emotional swings are extreme, the self-sabotage is constant, and the hunger for transformation borders on delusion. Fante writes loneliness and ambition as a volatile mix, where shame and bravado fuel each other. The voice is raw and undefended, exposing every humiliation and fantasy without the buffer of perspective or maturity.
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We the Animals
Euphoria watches how family violence and family love coexist in a child's world, which Torres captures in lyrical fragments that feel both chaotic and precise. The prose moves through beauty and brutality in the same breath, rendering a household where tenderness and harm arrive without warning. Torres writes the body as the site where emotion registers, where desire forms before it has language, where shame takes root. The structure mirrors memory's rhythm: moments of intensity, then gaps, then sudden clarity.
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Marlena
Euphoria understands how one person's self-destruction becomes another's obsession, which Buntin explores through a narrator still haunted by her teenage best friend's unraveling. The novel moves between past and present, examining how we narrativize the people we couldn't save and how proximity to ruin shapes the rest of your life. Buntin writes addiction and adolescence as intertwined, both defined by terrible choices made in pursuit of feeling. The tone is elegiac but clear-eyed, mourning without romanticizing.
Read it with your book club →Is Euphoria based on a book?
Euphoria isn’t based on a book — it’s an original series created by Sam Levinson, loosely inspired by an Israeli miniseries.
What should I read if I loved Euphoria?
Start with The Girls, My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Tampa. 6 books on this page were picked for the feeling of Euphoria, not its genre, with a reason for each.
Which book is most like Euphoria?
The Girls by Emma Cline. Euphoria observes teenage longing with the same forensic care Cline brings to a girl's attraction to danger and belonging.
These are for everyone who loved Euphoria. Want books picked for you?
Someone who loved Euphoria and Howl's Moving Castle reads different books from someone who loved Euphoria and Knives Out. One show isn’t much to go on. Rate four more — Euphoria already counts — and the books are picked for you.
Rate four more moviesOr read it with your book club and talk about it while you’re still reading.