Benable — create shareable lists of things you recommend!
E.g., products you love, local businesses, travel recs - you can add anything to a Benable list!
books that every woman should read once
33
items These are the kinds of books that don’t just stay on the page. They press on old questions. They sit beside you long after you’ve closed them. They remind you what it’s like to care too much, to be underestimated, to feel invisible, to leave, to retu...
This is the book you open when you realise how much of yourself you’ve been negotiating away. Not loudly. Just in small, daily edits. Florence writes about bodies, desire, and shame the way someone speaks when they’ve finally stopped apologising. It ...
Women Living Deliciously by Florence Given
This book doesn’t argue. It remembers. Kendall writes from the places feminism often ignores, hunger, fear, exhaustion, survival and refuses to let them stay invisible. Each essay feels grounded in lived consequence, not theory. It’s the kind of read...
Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendall
This feels like sitting across from someone who listens carefully before speaking. Perry doesn’t tell you how to fix your relationships. She pays attention to how they actually feel, the small misunderstandings, the patterns you repeat without realis...
The Book You Want Everyone You Love* To Read *(and maybe a few you don’t) by Philippa Perry
These poems feel written for the hours when you’re awake but not quite functioning. They don’t rush you toward hope. They sit beside heartbreak and let it breathe. Arrieta writes about loss, tenderness, and reopening yourself slowly, without pretendi...
The Art of Falling in Love Again by Franny Arrieta
This book moves gently through the many shapes love takes, romantic, platonic, familial, absent. Through conversations with writers and thinkers, Lunn lets love stay complicated and unresolved. There are no conclusions here, just company. It’s for an...
Conversations on Love by Natasha Lunn
Friendship doesn’t usually get treated with this much seriousness. This book talks about closeness, drift, jealousy, and breakups with the care they deserve. It understands how friendships shape who we become and how painful it is when they change. I...
Finding Your People by Alexandra Hourigan, Sally McMullen
Told as the final voice of Mata Hari, this novel feels like a reckoning written too late. Coelho gives space to a woman reduced to myth, seductive, dangerous, disposable and lets her speak plainly about freedom, desire, and punishment. It’s quiet and...
The Spy by Paulo Coelho
This collection feels like fragments gathered after a long disorientation. Lovelace writes about heartbreak, coping, and returning to yourself without romanticising the process. The poems are short, heavy, and intimate, like thoughts you don’t say ou...
she followed the moon back to herself by Amanda Lovelace
Gay writes from inside contradiction. Loving things she critiques. Wanting justice while being imperfect. These essays move through pop culture, politics, trauma, and identity with sharp honesty and self-awareness. It’s not about being a “good” femin...
Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay
This book reads quietly, until you realise how much weight it’s carrying. Kim Jiyoung’s life is ordinary in the way many women’s lives are: shaped by expectation, dismissal, and sacrifice. The restraint of the writing mirrors the restraint imposed on...
Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo, Jamie Chang
Kawakami writes about bodies, money, loneliness, and motherhood with startling intimacy. The novel lingers on conversations that feel uncomfortable because they’re honest. It’s about wanting a life that doesn’t fit the templates available and what it...
Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami, Sam Bett
This book moves like a quiet walk you don’t rush. A mother and daughter travel together, circling around what they can’t quite say. Memory, language, and distance blur gently. It’s sparse, atmospheric, and deeply interior, a novel that trusts silence...
Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au
Here, motherhood is neither idealised nor dismissed. Nettel explores ambivalence, friendship, and care without forcing clarity. The emotions are muted but persistent, like something tapping beneath the surface. It honours complexity instead of resolv...
Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel, Rosalind Harvey
A woman, newly alone, raises her child in a bright apartment that doesn’t protect her from unraveling. Told over a year, this novel captures how isolation can coexist with routine, how light doesn’t always save you. It’s intimate and quietly devastat...
Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima, Geraldine Harcourt
Lorde refuses disappearance. Writing through illness, she insists on visibility, of pain, anger, fear, and Black womanhood. This is not a recovery story. It’s a record of choosing truth over comfort, even when the body is under siege.
The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde
This novel asks what happens when your identity is inherited before it’s chosen. Rosa Burger grows up inside politics, resistance, and expectation, trying to understand where she ends and her legacy begins. It’s thoughtful, heavy, and unresolved, lik...
Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter by Newman
Love, marriage, and longing unfold under immense pressure in this novel. Yejide’s desire for a child becomes entangled with silence and betrayal, revealing how private pain is shaped by public expectation. It’s tender and suffocating in equal measure...
Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo
This book moves in many voices, none of them small. Across generations, identities, and lives, Evaristo traces connection, sometimes joyful, sometimes fractured. It’s expansive without losing intimacy, celebratory without denying difficulty.
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
Hamad writes with clarity that doesn’t soften itself. She examines how white womanhood has been positioned as innocent, and how that innocence has caused harm. The book is direct, historical, and necessary, especially where discomfort begins.
White Tears/Brown Scars by Ruby Hamad
A relationship unfolds slowly, almost cautiously, between two women bound by work and need. Power, pride, and affection blur. When betrayal comes, it feels inevitable and unbearable. This novel stays with you long after it ends.
The Door by Magda Szabó, Len Rix
A writer builds a resting place for the stories she couldn’t finish and discovers they aren’t done with her. This novel is about memory, history, and the voices that refuse burial. It’s reflective, layered, and quietly haunted.
The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez
Three murdered girls, barely remembered. Almada refuses spectacle, choosing instead to reconstruct lives erased by violence and neglect. The book reads like mourning turned into record, restrained, furious, and necessary.
Dead Girls by Selva Almada, Annie McDermott
This narrator doesn’t ask to be understood. She moves through desire, isolation, and defiance with sharp humour and refusal. The novel is brief, intense, and uninterested in redemption. It survives on its own terms.
Permafrost by Eva Baltasar, Julia Sanches
Tambu grows up as her country fractures. Education offers escape and erasure at once. This novel captures girlhood shaped by ambition, obligation, and colonial pressure, lucid, unsentimental, and quietly enraged.
Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga
A fractured mother–daughter relationship unfolds against Tokyo’s nightlife. Grief and distance shape every interaction. The prose is restrained, almost careful, allowing emotion to surface slowly.
Gifted by Suzumi Suzuki, Allison Markin Powell
Growing up means losing the intimacy you didn’t know was temporary. Annie’s separation from her mother is gradual and painful, marked by rebellion and silence. The writing is lyrical, sharp, and intimate.
Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid
This is for anyone who became responsible too early. Maddie navigates grief, cultural expectation, and the exhaustion of always coping. The voice is warm and awkward and deeply recognisable.
My Name is Maame by Jessica George
Two women share a house, not quite companionship, not quite solitude. Life moves slowly. Loneliness isn’t solved, it’s lived with. This novel finds meaning in small continuations.
A Perfect Day to be Alone by Nanae Aoyama, Jesse Kirkwood
A small lie opens space where none existed. This book explores labour, gender, and imagination through quiet absurdity. It’s restrained, unsettling, and strangely tender.
Diary of a Void by Emi Yagi, Lucy North
Youth, boredom, desire, and cruelty unfold under the sun. What begins lightly ends with something broken. The detachment is part of the tragedy.
Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan
This novel refuses pity. A disabled woman claims desire, rage, and authorship over her own story. It’s confrontational, intimate, and unapologetically uncomfortable.
Hunchback
Returning to the site of a buried trauma forces a woman to reckon with silence and complicity. The novel is tense, controlled, and morally unsettling.
Another Person by Kang Hwagil, Clare Richards
Girlhood, ghosts, and memory blur together in humid Singapore. Friendship and inheritance haunt long after adolescence ends. The novel feels feverish and unresolved, like the past itself.
Ponti by Sharlene Teo