Fiction books set in Old Hollywood?

oh you’re speaking my language. The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty is a quieter one, but it follows a young Louise Brooks heading to New York and the woman who goes with her. Gives you that early silent film era feel without being fully inside the studio system.

If you want something a bit more sprawling and full of tangled industry drama, City of Flickering Light by Juliette Fay follows three people trying to make it in the 1920s silent film world. It leans into the desperation and weird friendships that come out of that scene.

Also, not a novel, but Lillian Roxon’s biography of Rock Hudson reads like one. It starts in the golden age and moves forward, but the early sections about the studio machinery and manufactured stardom hit a lot of the same notes as Evelyn Hugo.