The Carrie Diaries is a young-adult novel, the first in a series of the same name by American author Candace Bushnell. The series is a prequel to Bushnell's 1997 novel Sex and the City, and follows the character of Carrie Bradshaw during her senior year of high school during the early 1980s and part of her life in New York City working as a writer. The Los Angeles Times described it as "[a]n addictive, ingenious origin story."