Have you noticed the bumper crop of The Girl… books over the last years?
Back in 1999, when Tracy Chevalier published the Girl With a Pearl Earring it was an original title. The trend started a decade later with Stieg Larsson’s Millenium Trilogy: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest.
After that The Girl… titles started to appear more often and across genres:
- The Girl Who Never Made Mistakes, a children’s book by Mark Pett and Gary Rubinstein
- The Girl Who Wrote in Silk, a historical novel by Kelli Estes
- The Girl with All the Gifts, a post-apocalyptic thriller by M. R. Carey
- The Good Girl, a psychological thriller by Mary Kubica
- The Girl He Never Noticed, a new-adult romance by sweetdreamer33 and Neilani Alejandrino
- The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo, a collection of satirical essays by Amy Schumer
It is, however, in thrillers that The Girl… truly triumphed, with bestsellers like The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, and Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll. The girl in question might be disturbed, she might have a lot of baggage and issues, but she’s a force to be reckoned with.
2016 confirms the trend. The following are all classified as thrillers of some sort:
- The Girl in the Spider’s Web by David Lagercrantz
- The Perfect Girl by Gilly Macmillan
- All the Missing Girls by Megan Miranda
- My Girl by Jack Jordan
- Girl in the Dark by Marion Pauw
- Razor Girl by Carl Hiaasen
- and a more mature The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware
It’s good to see that authors are looking for some variations of The Girl… theme as the market becomes a little saturated. Try not to confuse the psychological thriller The Girl Before by Rena Olsen with the suspense thriller The Girl Before by JP Delaney, scheduled for publication in 2017.