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books that every woman should read once
33
items These stories cut deep. They remind you what it means to care too much, to question your worth, to be underestimated, to feel invisible, to break free.
This is a reclamation of your body, your joy, your wildness. Florence Given dares you to strip back the shame, the guilt, the conditioning that has been drilled into you since girlhood. What if your life was never meant to be small, quiet, or easily ...
Women Living Deliciously by Florence Given
Mikki Kendall tears through the polished facade of modern feminism and lays bare its most dangerous failure: forgetting the women who need it most. Through razor-sharp essays rooted in lived experience, she unflinchingly tackles the real frontlines—p...
Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendall
Warm, wise, and disarmingly honest, this is the kind of book that gently holds a mirror up to your relationships—and helps you see what’s really there. Drawing from her years as a psychotherapist, Philippa Perry offers practical, no-judgment insights...
The Book You Want Everyone You Love* To Read *(and maybe a few you don’t) by Philippa Perry
This poetry collection feels like a friend sitting beside you in your darkest, quietest moments—gently reminding you that heartbreak doesn’t mean the end. With soft, soul-deep language, Franny Arrieta leads you through the raw terrain of loss, loneli...
The Art of Falling in Love Again by Franny Arrieta
This book doesn’t just talk about love—it sits you down and walks you through every corner of it. With tenderness and curiosity, Natasha Lunn explores the many ways love shows up in our lives: in romantic longing, deep friendship, loss, loneliness, m...
Conversations on Love by Natasha Lunn
If you’ve ever felt like no one talks enough about how hard (and magical) friendship can be—this book gets you. Packed with honesty, humour, and warmth, Sal and Al write from lived experience as best friends and podcast hosts who’ve seen it all: frie...
Finding Your People by Alexandra Hourigan, Sally McMullen
“I do not know what will happen at the end of this week.”
That single line opens the haunting, final letter of Mata Hari—a woman once hailed as the most dazzling performer in Europe, now awaiting execution for espionage.
In The Spy, Paulo Coelho sli...
The Spy by Paulo Coelho
This isn't a fairy tale—it's a raw, rose-stained reckoning with the self. In her tenth poetry collection, Amanda Lovelace steps out from behind the mythic metaphors and delivers something intimate, unfiltered, and achingly human. Through heartbreak, ...
she followed the moon back to herself by Amanda Lovelace
Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist is a blazing, brutally honest collection of essays that unpacks what it means to live in the contradictions—loving pop culture, craving pink, and still raging against systemic injustice. With humor and razor-sharp insight, s...
Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay
Told with quiet fury and piercing clarity, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 is a haunting portrait of an ordinary woman slowly crushed under the weight of systemic misogyny. From childhood to adulthood, Kim Jiyoung’s life is shaped by expectations, dismissals,...
Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo, Jamie Chang
With quiet rage and intimate tenderness, Breasts and Eggs captures the raw, unfiltered interior lives of three women navigating class, beauty, motherhood, and selfhood in a society that asks them to shrink. Told in two parts—one claustrophobic and im...
Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami, Sam Bett
Ethereal, elegiac, and exquisitely restrained, Cold Enough for Snow is a delicate meditation on language, intimacy, and the quiet gaps between people who love each other. A daughter takes her mother on a trip to Tokyo—a city of rain-slicked streets, ...
Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au
Sharp, intimate, and fearlessly honest, Still Born unravels the tangled web of motherhood, choice, and ambivalence. Laura and Alina—two fiercely independent women in their thirties—have made peace with the idea of a childless life. But when Alina rec...
Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel, Rosalind Harvey
A luminous novel of solitude, resilience, and unraveling. After being left by her husband, a young mother tries to rebuild her life with her two-year-old daughter in a sun-drenched Tokyo apartment. But even in the constant light, she descends into em...
Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima, Geraldine Harcourt
Fierce, defiant, and unflinchingly honest. In this genre-defying work of memoir, poetry, and political essay, Audre Lorde charts her journey through breast cancer—not just as a personal reckoning, but as a radical act of visibility. She confronts the...
The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde
What does it mean to inherit a political legacy you never asked for? In Burger’s Daughter, Nadine Gordimer tells the story of Rosa Burger, a young woman coming of age in apartheid-era South Africa as the daughter of a martyred white communist revolut...
Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter by Newman
How far will love stretch before it snaps—and what happens when it does? Stay With Me follows Yejide, a woman haunted by silence and expectation in 1980s Nigeria. All she and her husband want is a child. But as pressure mounts—from family, from cultu...
Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo
This isn’t just a story—it’s twelve lives braided into a living, breathing chorus. In Girl, Woman, Other, Bernardine Evaristo paints a dazzling mosaic of Black British womanhood through generations, classes, sexualities, and dreams. From radical thea...
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
This book cuts deep—because it tells the truth. White Tears/Brown Scars is a blistering, necessary exploration of how white womanhood has historically weaponized victimhood at the expense of women of color. Ruby Hamad peels back the polite veneers an...
White Tears/Brown Scars by Ruby Hamad
This novel haunts quietly—until it shatters you. The Door is the story of an unusual bond between a writer and her housekeeper, Emerence—an unforgettable woman, both terrifying and tender, who guards her private life with steel-like resolve. What beg...
The Door by Magda Szabó, Len Rix
What happens to the stories we never finish? Alma Cruz, a celebrated writer, inherits a plot of land in the Dominican Republic and transforms it into a literal graveyard for the characters and drafts she abandoned—her failures, her ghosts. But storie...
The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez
Three young women. Three unresolved murders. And a country just waking up from dictatorship, not yet ready to name the epidemic in its midst. Set in 1980s Argentina, Dead Girls is not a thriller and not a police report—it is something more intimate a...
Dead Girls by Selva Almada, Annie McDermott
She’s messy, magnetic, and doesn’t care to be saved. With a poet’s precision and a punk’s defiance, Permafrost follows a fiercely intelligent, suicidal lesbian narrator as she ricochets through cities and lovers in search of something she doesn’t dar...
Permafrost by Eva Baltasar, Julia Sanches
Tambu is only thirteen, but the weight of survival—of her family, her country, her womanhood—already presses down on her. In colonial Rhodesia, where the promise of education is tangled with the price of erasure, she claws her way into a future that ...
Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga
Set against the neon glow of Tokyo’s sleepless Kabukicho district, Gifted is a quietly devastating portrait of a fractured mother–daughter bond. When the narrator—an emotionally detached hostess estranged from her past—is unexpectedly confronted by h...
Gifted by Suzumi Suzuki, Allison Markin Powell
A lyrical, intimate portrait of a girl outgrowing the only world she’s ever known, Annie John captures the quiet devastation of adolescence. Set in lush, colonial Antigua, Annie's once-idyllic life begins to fracture as she turns twelve. Her mother—o...
Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid
Maddie Wright is twenty-five and stuck in a life that isn’t really hers. The “Maame” of her Ghanaian name means “woman,” but she’s been forced to grow up too fast—juggling caregiving, cultural expectations, and the quiet loneliness of always being th...
My Name is Maame by Jessica George
In a quiet, crumbling Tokyo house where cats roam and trains rumble past the window, 21-year-old Chizu begins again. Her mother has moved to China, and now she’s sharing a home with 71-year-old Ginko—a sharp, strange woman whose silence says more tha...
A Perfect Day to be Alone by Nanae Aoyama, Jesse Kirkwood
What starts as a small rebellion spirals into something far more consuming when Ms Shibata—exhausted from being the only woman expected to clean up after everyone—announces she’s pregnant. She isn’t. But suddenly, she’s free: no more coffee runs, no ...
Diary of a Void by Emi Yagi, Lucy North
There’s something intoxicating about the French Riviera in summer—salt in the air, skin sun-warmed, love both fleeting and dangerous. At just seventeen, Cécile is sharp, spoiled, and utterly unmoored, spending the summer in a villa with her indulgent...
Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan
Shaka Isawa lives in a body the world doesn’t know what to do with—curved spine, reliant on machines, confined to a care home. But online, she’s electric: ranting on Twitter, crafting filthy erotica, taking up space in all the ways she’s denied offli...
Hunchback
Jina has tried to forget. Forget the whispers. The silence. The girl who died. But years later, she's forced to return to Anjin University—the place where her world cracked open—to confront the truth she’s been running from.
Who is Jina? A bystander...
Another Person by Kang Hwagil, Clare Richards
Singapore, 2003. In the sticky haze of adolescence, sixteen-year-old Szu clings to her strange, electrifying friendship with Circe. It's a lifeline—an escape from her decaying home and her distant, glamorous mother Amisa, a faded cult horror actress ...
Ponti by Sharlene Teo