The specific pleasure ofSuccessionwas not the money — or not only the money. It was watching people with extraordinary resources behave with extraordinary pettiness, the way wealth could compress rather than expand the emotional range of the people who held it. The Roys didn't become better people because they were rich. They became more themselves, which was the tragedy.
The books on this list are for people who miss that particular feeling: the sick pull of wanting someone to win who you know you shouldn't root for, the dark comedy of watching entire families organized around the question of who gets to inherit the kingdom, and the occasional moment of almost unbearable human clarity that makes all the scheming worth following.
A note on range: some of these are fiction, some nonfiction, some literary and some compulsively readable. All of them have the thing.
The most direct fictional comp on this list. Four adult siblings in New York — the entitled, the anxious, the reasonable one who isn't as reasonable as she thinks — are waiting on their inheritance from a trust fund their late father established. Their older brother has made a chaotic decision that may have already depleted it. Everything that follows is about money and about who these people actually are when the money is in question, which turns out to be a great deal. Warm-blooded whereSuccessionwas ice-cold, but the same anatomy of what inheritance does to a family. Reviewers kept comparing it to Franzen, which is apt.
The 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner, and the best literary novel about American wealth in recent memory. Told in four nested narratives — a 1920s novel about a Wall Street titan and his wife, a memoir by the titan himself, a manuscript by his wife, and a secretary's diary — it keeps dismantling what you thought you knew about power and who controls the story of it. Diaz writes about money the waySuccessionfilmed it: as a gravitational field that warps everything around it, including truth. Structurally audacious, humanly devastating.
A dysfunctional Midwestern family's one last Christmas together: a patriarch losing his mind to Parkinson's, a mother who can't stop trying to fix things, and three adult children each in different stages of catastrophe.The Correctionsis a National Book Award winner and one of the defining American novels of the 21st century. The Lambert family doesn't have Roy-level money, but they have Roy-level inability to communicate, and Franzen's portrait of generational rot and parental love gone wrong hits the same nerve. Funnier than you'd expect and more devastating.
Manhattan, 2016. Toby Fleishman — a hepatologist, shorter than he'd like, recently separated — is navigating online dating and shared custody when his ex-wife vanishes. What begins as a comedy of Manhattan manners slowly reveals itself as something sharper: a novel about ambition, gender, and who gets to define what happened in a marriage. Brodesser-Akner writes New York's upper-professional class with the same forensic intimacy thatSuccessionbrought to its world. Witty, acerbic, and then unexpectedly moving. The FX series is also excellent, if you want more.
Six teenagers at an arts summer camp in 1974 become inseparable. Over the next four decades, their fortunes diverge wildly — one becomes extraordinarily successful, others struggle, and all of them are shaped by the envy and devotion that live inside long friendships. Wolitzer is one of the best novelists working today about the psychic toll of watching people near you succeed, andThe Interestingsis her biggest canvas. The wealth here is artistic as much as financial, but the corrosive dynamics — the ones where closeness and resentment become indistinguishable — are pureSuccessionDNA.
BeforeThe Big Short, Lewis wrote this: his memoir of three years as a Salomon Brothers bond salesman in the late 1980s, when Wall Street was essentially printing money for people willing to do the right kind of damage. Funny, appalling, and genuinely illuminating about how financial culture works and what it does to people who get inside it,Liar's Pokerreads like it was written yesterday. The character who is really on trial — the culture of greed that made all of this possible — is exactly whatSuccessionwas circling.
The Theranos story, reported by the Wall Street Journal journalist who broke it. Elizabeth Holmes built a $9 billion blood-testing company on a lie, surrounded herself with powerful men who didn't ask the right questions, and created a culture of secrecy and intimidation that lasted for years. Carreyrou writes it like a thriller because it is one, and it has everySuccessionelement: a charismatic founder with an untouchable aura, a board of powerful men rendered suddenly irrelevant, and the specific corruption of institutional power. The scene where George Shultz refuses to believe his own grandson is a Roy family moment.
Originally a stage play, adapted and published as a novel: the 163-year history of the Lehman Brothers bank, from two German Jewish immigrants opening a cotton shop in Alabama in 1844 to the firm's collapse in 2008 that helped trigger the global financial crisis. Massini writes it as a kind of epic poem in prose — surprising and propulsive, not dry — and it has the multigenerational family-becoming-institution-becoming-catastrophe arc thatSuccessiongestured toward. For people who want the dynasty piece of the show more than the comedy.
Journalist Misha Glenny spent years mapping global organized crime networks and the legitimate financial structures that enable them — from Russian oligarchs to Israeli diamond merchants to Bulgarian arms traffickers. The result is one of the most readable and disturbing works of investigative nonfiction in recent memory, and it answers a questionSuccessionkept raising in the background: what does this kind of wealth actually connect to? What's underneath? Not a beach read, but compulsive. The TV series is also worth your time.
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