The Five-Star Weekend

Female relationships under a summer sun — estranged mother and daughter, old wounds, one island setting. Hannah's emotional intensity matches Hilderbrand's warmth.

If you liked The Five-Star Weekend by Elin Hilderbrand and are looking for books with a similar mix of female bonds, a beautiful island setting, and relationships tested by long-held secrets, Kristin Hannah's Summer Island is a natural next read. A famous radio advice host is forced to recuperate on a Pacific Northwest island with the daughter she abandoned years ago, and the two women must finally confront what was lost between them. Like Five-Star Weekend, the novel uses a contained, idyllic setting to pressure-test the stories women tell about love, loyalty, and what they owe each other. Hannah writes with a deeper emotional intensity than Hilderbrand, so this is a good pick if you wanted the female-friendship and summer-setting combination but with higher emotional stakes and a more cathartic payoff.

Female friendship across decades and distance — Kamali traces how loyalty, silence, and class shape two women's bond, echoing Five-Star Weekend's core tensions.

Readers who were drawn to The Five-Star Weekend's exploration of what female friendships survive — and what quietly breaks them — will find a rich companion in Marjan Kamali's The Lion Women of Tehran. Two girls from opposite sides of Tehran form an unlikely bond in childhood, and the novel follows how time, political upheaval, and social expectation pull them apart and draw them back. Where Hilderbrand sets her examination of female loyalty against a sun-lit Nantucket weekend, Kamali unfolds hers across decades and continents, giving the friendship question a grander, more historical scale. If you're searching for books like The Five-Star Weekend that center on the complexity of women's long friendships — the illusions, the sacrifices, the things left unsaid — this novel rewards readers who want those same themes carried to a deeper emotional and historical depth.

A book club of strangers becomes a circle of genuine connection — Page's warm, character-driven style mirrors Hilderbrand's focus on women finding each other at life's turning points.

If you finished The Five-Star Weekend and loved how Elin Hilderbrand uses a single shared event to illuminate what different women need from each other, Libby Page's This Book Made Me Think of You works the same emotional magic through a different premise. A book club forms around women who are each at some kind of crossroads — grief, loneliness, reinvention — and Page slowly reveals how genuine connection grows in unexpected places. The tone is warm and character-centered rather than plot-driven, and the novel shares Hilderbrand's gift for making the interior lives of women feel both specific and universal. It's a strong recommendation for readers searching for books like The Five-Star Weekend that celebrate female community without sentimentalizing the tensions and vulnerabilities that make those bonds real.