11 Books About Rich, Awful People

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“Competition was their family love language.”

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There’s just something so fascinating about books about rich people behaving badly. Whether it’s toxic wealthy families, manipulative socialites, old money secrets, or elite friend groups tearing each other apart, these stories blend luxury with chaos in the most addictive way possible. From dark literary fiction to twisty thrillers, books about wealthy people typically explore privilege, power, greed, and the damage caused by excess. If you love novels about the upper class brimming with scandal, betrayal, morally grey characters, and messy relationships, this list is for you. These books about rich, awful people feature dysfunctional families, corrupt elites, and unlikable characters you somehow can’t pull back from. Perfect for fans of stories like Succession and The White Lotus, these novels pull back the curtain on elite society and showcase just how dangerous the world of the ‘haves’ can become. 

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The Secret History – Donna Tartt

Where else could we kick off a list of books about awful rich people than with Donna Tartt’s classic dark academia novel (and one of my favourite stories), The Secret History? Tartt’s story centres around a group of elite, eccentric students studying classics at the elite Hampden College in rural Vermont. Under the influence of their charismatic professor, the students are taught a new way of thinking and living that is worlds apart from the humdrum existence of their peers. 

The group, led by the enigmatic Henry Winter, becomes increasingly detached from society as they are immersed in their classical studies and their own philosophical ideals. Their bond is tragically sealed through a shocking act: the murder of one of their own. As the group spirals into guilt, paranoia, and disintegration, readers explore the cost of beauty and brilliance, as well as the devastating impact of their crime and their fatalistic disillusionment that follows. 

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Pineapple Street – Jenny Jackson

Darley, the eldest daughter in the well-connected old money Stockton family, followed her heart, trading her job and her inheritance for motherhood but giving up far too much in the process; Sasha, a middle-class New England girl, has married into the Brooklyn Heights family, and finds herself cast as the arriviste outsider; and Georgina, the baby of the family, has fallen in love with someone she can’t and must choose what kind of person she wants to be. 

Shot through with the indulgent pleasures of life among New York’s one-percenters, Pineapple Street is an addictive, escapist novel that sparkles with wit. Full of recognisable, loveable – if fallible – characters, it’s about the peculiar unknowability of someone else’s family, the miles between the aves and have-nots, and the insanity of first love – all wrapped up in a deliciously funny, sharply observed debut of family, love, and class.

The Club – Ellery Lloyd

The Home Group is a glamorous collection of celebrity members’ clubs dotted across the globe, where the rich and famous can party hard and crash out in its five-star suites, far from the prying eyes of fans and the media. The most spectacular of all is Island Home – a closely-guarded, ultraluxurious resort – and its three-day launch party is easily the most coveted A-list invite of the decade. 

But, behind the scenes, tensions are at breaking point: the ambitious and expensive project has pushed the Home Group’s CEO and his long-suffering team to their absolute limits. All of them have something to hide – and that’s before the beautiful people with their own ugly secrets even set foot on the island.  As tempers fray and behaviour worsens, some of Island Home’s members will begin to wish they’d never made the guest list. 

The Talented Mr Ripley – Patricia Highsmith

One of the all-time classic books about rich people and the world of opulence and affluence, The Talented Mr Ripley introduces us, readers, to the suave Tom Ripley, a young striver seeking to leave behind his past as an orphan bullied for being a “sissy.” Newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan, Ripley meets a wealthy industrialist who hires him to bring his playboy son, Dickie Greenleaf, back from galivanting in Italy. 

Soon, Ripley’s fascination with Dickie’s debonair lifestyle turns obsessive as he finds himself enraged by Dickie’s ambivalent affections for Marge, a charming American dilettante, and Ripley begins a deadly game. 

Big Little Lies – Liane Moriarty

Madeline is a force to be reckoned with. She’s funny, biting, and passionate; she remembers everything, and forgives no one. Celeste is the sort of beautiful woman who makes the world stop and stare, but she is paying a price for the illusion of perfection. New to town, single mother Jane is so young that another mother mistakes her for a nanny. She comes with a mysterious past and a sadness beyond her years. 

These three women are all at different crossroads, but they will all wind up in the same shocking place. Big Little Lies is a brilliant book about the rich and affluent, delving into ex-husbands and second wives, mothers and daughters, schoolyard scandals, and the little lies that can turn lethal. 

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Crazy Rich Asians – Kevin Kwan

When Rachel Chu agrees to spend the summer in Singapore with her boyfriend, Nicholas Young, she envisions a humble family home, long drives to explore the island, and quality time with the man she might one day marry. What she doesn’t know is that Nick’s family home happens to look like a palace, that she’ll ride in more private planes than cars, and that with one of Asia’s most eligible bachelors on her arm, Rachel might as well have a target on her back. 

Initiated into the world of dynastic splendour beyond her imagination, Rachel meets Astrid, the It Girl of Singapore society; Eddie, whose family practically lives in the pages of the Hong Kong socialite magazines; and Eleanor, Nick’s formidable mother, a woman who has very strong feelings about who her son should – and should not – marry. Addictive and brimming with jaw-dropping opulence, Crazy Rich Asians is a novel about what it means to be in love, young, and gloriously, crazily rich. 

The Midnight Feast – Lucy Foley

It’s the opening night of The Manor, and no expense, small or large, has been spared. The infinity pool sparkles; crystal pouches for guests’ healing have been placed in the Seaside Cottages and Woodland Hutches; the “Manor Mule” cocktail is being poured with a heavy hand. Everyone is wearing linen. 

But under the burning midsummer sun, darkness stirs. Old friends and enemies circulate among the guests. Just outside the Manor’s immaculately kept grounds, an ancient forest bristles with secrets. And the Sunday morning of opening weekend, the local police are called. Something’s not right with the guests. There’s been a fire. A body has been discovered. 

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The Last Mrs Parrish – Liv Constantine

Amber Patterson is fed up. She’s tired of being a nobody. She deserves more – a life of money and power like the one blond-haired, blue-eyed goddess Daphne Parrish takes for granted. To everyone in the exclusive town of Bishops Harbor, Daphne – a socialite and philanthropist – and her real estate mogul husband, Jackson, are a couple straight out of a fairy tale. 

Amber’s envy could eat her alive if she didn’t have a plan. Amber and Daphne’s compassion and caring to insinuate themselves into their family’s lives. Before long, Amber is Daphne’s closest confidante, travelling to Europe with the Parrishes and growing closer to Jackson. But a skeleton from her past may undermine everything that Amber has worked towards, and if it is discovered, her well-laid plan may soon fall to pieces. 

My Year Of Rest And Relaxation – Ottessa Moshfegh

Our narrator should be happy, shouldn’t she? She’s young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?

Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, this book about wealth and privilege shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. 

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The Guest – Emma Cline

Summer is coming to a close on the East End of Long Island, and Alex is no longer welcome. A misstep at a dinner party, and the older man she’s been staying with dismisses her with a ride to the station and a ticket back to the city. 

With few resources and a waterlogged phone, but gifted with an ability to navigate the desires of others, Alex stays on Long Island and drifts like a ghost through the hedged lanes, gated driveways, and sun-blasted dunes of a rarified world that is, at first, closed off to her. Propelled by desperation and a mutable sense of morality, she spends the week leading up to Labor Day moving from one place to another, a cypher leaving destruction in her wake. 

Yellowface – R.F. Kuang

Authors Juniper Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But Athena is a literary darling, while June is a nobody. So when June witnesses Athena’s death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse, stealing Athena’s just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese labourers during the First World War. So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? 

This piece of history deserves to be told, whoever the teller. That is what June believes, and The New York Times bestseller list agrees. But June cannot escape Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens her stolen success. As she races to protect her secret, she discovers precisely how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves. 

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