Books like Scruples
Scruples by Judith Krantz reads as glamorous, sensual. These 12 books share its genome — matched by how they actually read, not just their shelf label.
What Scruples is like to read
A rags-to-riches glamour saga tracking a shy heiress's reinvention as a fashion mogul across Hollywood and high society — plot-driven wish-fulfillment with romantic and dramatic stakes. Best for: readers who love glossy 70s/80s glamour sagas of ambition, transformation, and luxury.
The last tycoon
F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1941
Shares the ambition + vornate thread
The Alchemist, 1612
Ben Jonson · 1612
A whirring farce of con artists fleecing a parade of gulls in a single plague-emptied London house — dense, allusive verse propelling one of the tightest plots in English drama toward a coolly cynical unraveling.
Julius Caesar
William Shakespeare · 1656
A tautly argued political tragedy in blank verse where friendship curdles into assassination and rhetoric becomes a weapon — the famous forum speeches still crackle, and the second
Salomé
Oscar Wilde · 1893
A single-act biblical tragedy of obsession and beheading, its brief span heavy with incantatory language and doomed desire.
The Atlas Six
Olivie Blake · 2020
Six brilliant, deeply unlikable magicians circle each other inside a secret academic society, trading philosophy, seduction, and betrayal more than casting spells.
A Certain Hunger
Chelsea G. Summers · 2020
A confessional first-person memoir from a gourmand serial killer, braiding food, sex, and violence with unrepentant relish.
Memoirs of a Geisha
Arthur Golden · 1997
A lush, confiding first-person memoir-frame that immerses the reader in pre-war Kyoto's geisha world — patient, sensuous, and quietly suspenseful as Sayuri navigates rivalry, artifice, and a forbidden longing.
I, Claudius
Robert Graves · 1934
A wily, self-deprecating memoir-voice guides you through decades of imperial poisonings and palace intrigue, treating Rome's rot as gossip you're being let in on.
Père Goriot
Honoré de Balzac · 1835
Shares the ambition + vornate thread
An Arabian tale
William Beckford · 1786
A hedonistic caliph renounces faith in pursuit of forbidden supernatural power, hurtling toward a doom the text frames as inevitable — Gothic dread wrapped in Orientalist exoticism.
Twisted Lies
Ana Huang · 2022
A dark, obsession-driven romance built around a controlling, morally-gray hero whose fixation on the woman below him drives the tension.
The autobiography of Henry VIII
Margaret George · 1986
An immersive, first-person descent into Henry VIII's mind across decades, alternating his self-justifying journal voice with his jester's wry counterpoint — dense, richly researche
About Scruples — what the genome says
Is Scruples a complete story or a cliffhanger?
It's a complete, standalone-satisfying story.
How spicy is Scruples?
Moderate heat — some open-door scenes.
Who is Scruples for?
readers who love glossy 70s/80s glamour sagas of ambition, transformation, and luxury
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