10 Books to Read if You Loved Amazon Prime’s ‘Saltburn’

If you’ve been anywhere on the internet the last few weeks, you’ve heard of Saltburn, the risque, slow-burn movie that has been turning heads since its late 2023 release. Featuring outstanding performances by names like Barry Keoghan, Jacob Eloridi, and Rosamund Pike, Saltburn is a black comedy psychological thriller directed and co-produced by Emerald Fennell. From the beautiful sets to the overwhelming and intentional sense of dread as you continue watching and the catharsis of that final dancing scene, Saltburn was a wild ride. If you want a little taste of the unhinged with lots of intrigue, we recommend these books if you loved the movie.
In Monte Carlo, our heroine is swept off her feet by the dashing widower Maxim de Winter and his sudden proposal of marriage. Orphaned and working as a lady’s maid, she can barely believe her luck. It is only when they arrive at Manderley, her husband’s cavernous estate on the Cornish coast, that she realizes how vast a shadow his late wife, Rebecca, will cast over their lives–introducing a lingering evil that threatens to destroy their love from beyond the grave. This universally acclaimed novel has remained consistently in print since its original publication in 1938 and has frequently been adapted–for television, radio, the theater, and film—most notably in 1940 by Alfred Hitchcock, whose Rebecca received the Academy Award for Best Picture, and in the 2020 Netflix film starring Lily James and Armie Hammer.
In Monte Carlo, our heroine is swept off her feet by the dashing widower Maxim de Winter and his sudden proposal of marriage. Orphaned and working as a lady’s maid, she can barely believe her luck. It is only when they arrive at Manderley, her husband’s cavernous estate on the Cornish coast, that she realizes how vast a shadow his late wife, Rebecca, will cast over their lives—introducing a lingering evil that threatens to destroy their love from beyond the grave.
In Monte Carlo, our heroine is swept off her feet by the dashing widower Maxim de Winter and his sudden proposal of marriage. Orphaned and working as a lady’s maid, she can barely believe her luck. It is only when they arrive at Manderley, her husband’s cavernous estate on the Cornish coast, that she realizes how vast a shadow his late wife, Rebecca, will cast over their lives–introducing a lingering evil that threatens to destroy their love from beyond the grave. This universally acclaimed novel has remained consistently in print since its original publication in 1938 and has frequently been adapted–for television, radio, the theater, and film—most notably in 1940 by Alfred Hitchcock, whose Rebecca received the Academy Award for Best Picture, and in the 2020 Netflix film starring Lily James and Armie Hammer.
But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies’ fabled “Smut Salon,” and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door—ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies’ sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus “Workshop” where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision.
In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby–whom Nick had idolized at Oxford–and Catherine, who is highly critical of her family’s assumptions and ambitions.
As the boom years of the eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in the world of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of this glamorous family. His two vividly contrasting love affairs, one with a young black clerk and one with a Lebanese millionaire, dramatize the dangers and rewards of his own private pursuit of beauty, a pursuit as compelling to Nick as the desire for power and riches among his friends. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly comic, this is a major work by one of our finest writers.
A misstep at a dinner party, and the older man she’s been staying with dismisses her with a ride to the train 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 rarefied world that is, at first, closed 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 the next, a cipher leaving destruction in her wake.
Demi has always felt like the odds were stacked against her. At the end of her rope, she seizes a risky opportunity to take over another person’s life and unwittingly becomes the subject of the upstairs couple’s wicked entertainment. But Demi has been struggling forever, and she’s not about to go down without a fight.
In a twist that neither woman sees coming, the game quickly devolves into chaos and rockets toward an explosive conclusion.
Because every good rich person knows—in money and in life, it’s winner takes all. Even if you have to leave a few bodies behind.
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