Daisy Jones & The Six

My favorite reads pull me in so completely, the story just blooms in my mind, and I forget I’m even reading at all. Daisy Jones & The Six is one of those books you can just get lost in. Just as she conjured the glitz and glam of mid-century Hollywood in The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Taylor Jenkins Reid has recreated the world of '70s-era rock 'n’ roll so vividly that you feel like you’re there.

The book opens with a question no one knows the answer to: Why did Daisy Jones & The Six, a (fictional) group with the charisma of Fleetwood Mac and the artistry of Joni Mitchell, break up at the height of their popularity? Told in a series of interviews (the book is made up entirely of dialogue from the members of the band and their inner circle), Daisy Jones gives you a backstage view of the epic rise, and agonizing fall, of one beloved rock band. Through the lyrics, the petty squabbles, and the long tours, you learn how they found their magic, and why, eventually, they had to let it go.

Daisy Jones reads like a delicious, long-form Rolling Stone exclusive that you can’t make yourself stop reading. I always think the best stories pull us out of ourselves and draw us deeper in at the same time, and this book reconnected me with some long-forgotten part of myself. Even now, it feels like some other me read it in some distant decade—on a lazy, sepia-toned afternoon, a turntable spinning nearby, blissfully following these glamorous, passionate, troubled, extraordinary lives.

Everyone knows Daisy Jones & The Six, but nobody knows the reason behind their split at the absolute height of their popularity ... until now.

Daisy is a girl coming of age in L.A. in the late sixties, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it’s the rock and roll she loves most. By the time she’s twenty, her voice is getting noticed, and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things.

Also getting noticed is The Six, a band led by the brooding Billy Dunne. On the eve of their first tour, his girlfriend Camila finds out she’s pregnant, and with the pressure of impending fatherhood and fame, Billy goes a little wild on the road.

Daisy and Billy cross paths when a producer realizes that the key to supercharged success is to put the two together. What happens next will become the stuff of legend.

The making of that legend is chronicled in this riveting and unforgettable novel, written as an oral history of one of the biggest bands of the seventies.