Shopaholic

About the Shopaholic series

Becky Bloomwood is a financial journalist who cannot manage her own money — a walking contradiction Sophie Kinsella turns into the defining joke and the beating heart of the Shopaholic series. Becky's compulsive spending, her genius for self-justifying rationalization, and the mounting pile of unopened bank statements she hides from everyone she loves make the opening novel, The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic (2000, published in the US as Confessions of a Shopaholic), one of the books that helped define the chick-lit boom of the early 2000s. What kept readers coming back across nine more books was that Kinsella never let Becky's spending stay merely funny: it costs her jobs, relationships, and eventually forces the kind of reckoning most addiction-adjacent comedies avoid.

The series follows Becky through marriage to banker Luke Brandon, motherhood, a stint living in the US, and a slow, genuinely earned journey toward financial (if never fully emotional) self-control, while Kinsella's supporting cast — best friend Suze, PR nightmare Bonnie, long-suffering parents — gives the books an ensemble warmth beneath the shopping-bag chaos. A 2009 film adaptation starring Isla Fisher (drawing on the first two novels) introduced Becky to audiences who hadn't read the books. Kinsella closed out the series with Christmas Shopaholic in 2019; she died in December 2025, and no further installments are expected.

How to read this series

Read in publication order, starting with The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic (2000, US title Confessions of a Shopaholic) — this is a continuous story following Becky Bloomwood's life, not a set of standalone entries, and later books assume you know her marriage, career and family history from earlier ones. The digital novella Shopaholic on Honeymoon (2014) slots in at position 3.5, between Shopaholic Ties the Knot and Shopaholic & Sister, and can safely be skipped if you only want the main-numbered novels — it wasn't included in every print collection of the series and adds a fun but non-essential interlude rather than plot you'll need later. Christmas Shopaholic (2019) is the most recent and, following Sophie Kinsella's 2025 death, the final entry in the series.