Barbara Bourland Standalone Novels Reading Order
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| I’ll Eat When I’m Dead | 2017 | Buy |
| Fake Like Me | 2019 | Buy |
| The Force of Such Beauty | 2022 | Buy |
Barbara Bourland writes literary thrillers set in worlds where image is everything. Her debut, I’ll Eat When I’m Dead, is a dark satire about the fashion magazine industry. Fake Like Me, her second novel, follows a painter who retreats to an artists’ colony and finds herself drawn into a mystery surrounding a dead colleague. The Force of Such Beauty tells the story of a former athlete whose marriage to a European prince becomes a gilded cage.
Each of Bourland’s books puts a woman at the center of a glossy, high-status environment and then peels back its surface. Her writing is sharp and often funny, with a clear eye for the absurd rituals that powerful institutions use to keep people in line. The recurring thread in her work is how beauty and ambition can trap the very people they’re supposed to reward.
All three novels are standalones, so there is no required reading order. The table below lists them by publication date.