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Celebrate Women’s History Month with These Must-Read Books
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items March is Women’s History Month in the US - a time to honor the incredible contributions of women throughout history. Let’s dive into these powerful stories and celebrate the voices of women from all walks of life.
Sections
4
Biographies & Memoirs
History
Nonfiction
Fiction
Biographies & Memoirs
One of the most important stories of World War II, already optioned by Steven Spielberg for a major motion picture: a spectacular, searing history that brings to light the extraordinary accomplishments of brave Jewish women who became resistance figh...
The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos
In darkness God's truth shines most clear.
Corrie ten Boom was the first licensed female watchmaker in the Netherlands who became a heroine of the Resistance, a survivor of Hitler's concentration camps, and one of the most remarkable ministers of ho...
The Hiding Place
When the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley in Pakistan, one girl spoke out. Malala Yousafzai refused to be silenced and fought for her right to an education.
On Tuesday, October 9, 2012, when she was fifteen, she almost paid the ultimate price....
I Am Malala
NOBEL PRIZE WINNER • A remarkable memoir of courage, faith, and the power of persistence about one woman's extraodinary journey from her childhood in rural Kenya to the world stage.
“[Maathai’s] story provides uplifting proof of the power of perse...
Unbowed: A Memoir
The New York Times bestselling book from Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg—“a comprehensive look inside her brilliantly analytical, entertainingly wry mind, revealing the fascinating life of one of our generation's most influential voices in ...
My Own Words
In this transcendent memoir, grounded in tribal myth and ancestry, music and poetry, Joy Harjo details her journey to becoming a poet. Born in Oklahoma, the end place of the Trail of Tears, Harjo grew up learning to dodge an abusive stepfather by fin...
Crazy Brave
The True Story of Coretta Scott King Told Fully for the First Time
Coretta: My Life, My Love, My Legacy
Angela Davis has been a political activist at the cutting edge of the Black Liberation, feminist, queer, and prison abolitionist movements for more than 50 years. First published and edited by Toni Morrison in 1974, An Autobiography is a powerful and...
Angela Davis: An Autobiography
Racial identity, pop culture, and delusions of perfection collide in an eye-opening and refreshingly frank memoir by fashion and beauty insider Danielle Prescod.
Danielle Prescod grew up Black in an elite and overwhelmingly white community, her ident...
Token Black Girl: A Memoir
Universally acclaimed, rapturously reviewed, and an instant New York Times bestseller, Chanel Miller's breathtaking memoir "gives readers the privilege of knowing her not just as Emily Doe, but as Chanel Miller the writer, the artist, the survivor, t...
Know My Name
Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Her life story is told in the documentary film And Still I Rise, as seen on PBS’s American Masters.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
"She fought a lonely and almost single-handed fight, with the single-mindedness of a crusader, long before men or women of any race entered the arena; and the measure of success she achieved goes far beyond the credit she has been given in the histor...
Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells
Merle Oberon made history when she was announced as a nominee for the Best Actress Oscar in 1936. Hers was a face that "launched a thousand ships," a so-called exotic beauty who the camera loved and fans adored. Her nomination for The Dark Angel mark...
Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood's First South Asian Star
History
The award-winning Revisioning American History series continues with this “groundbreaking new history of Black women in the United States” (Ibram X. Kendi)—the perfect companion to An Indigenous People’s History of the United States and An African Am...
A Black Women's History of the United States
The Radium Girls is a masterful blend of historical account and heartfelt tribute. Moore's vivid prose brings these forgotten heroines back to life, ensuring that their sacrifices and triumphs are forever etched in our collective memory. As you turn ...
The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women
What makes for the ideal woman? How should she look, love, and be? In this vibrant, high-spirited history, medievalist Eleanor Janega turns to the Middle Ages, the era that bridged the ancient world and modern society, to unfurl its suppositions abou...
The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women's Roles in Society
THE #1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 CUNDIL HISTORY PRIZE
A "Next Big Idea Book Club" Must Read
A groundbreaking reappraisal of medieval femininity, revealing why women have been written out of history and why it matters
Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It
This riveting paperback explores the lives of six remarkable female pharaohs, from Hatshepsut to Cleopatra, and shines a piercing light on perceptions of powerful women today.
Female rulers are a rare phenomenon--but thousands of years ago in ancien...
When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt
"An elegant and expansive history" (New York Times) of African American women's pursuit of political power--and how it transformed America
In Vanguard, acclaimed historian Martha S. Jones offers a new history of African American women's political li...
Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All
Now an eight-part docuseries on Apple TV+
Hillary Rodham Clinton and her daughter, Chelsea, share the stories of the gutsy women who have inspired them—women with the courage to stand up to the status quo, ask hard questions, and get the job done.
...
The Book of Gutsy Women: Our Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience
The dramatic, untold stories of the diverse array of women who helped transform the American West.
This is the story of the women who participated in the greatest mass migration in American history, transforming their country in the process. This is...
Brave Hearted: The Women of the American West
An imaginative and riveting tour de force that tells the “powerful” (The New York Times Book Review) story of women-led slave revolts and chronicles scholar Rebecca Hall’s efforts to uncover the truth about these female warriors who, until now, have ...
Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts
Discover the true story of a self-taught surgeon and trailblazing figure in medical history--Madame Restell, a revolutionary surgeon who fought for women's rights and healthcare in Gilded Age New York.
Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York's Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist
Nonfiction
Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine: The f...
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
The landmark, prize-winning, international bestselling examination of how a gender gap in data perpetuates bias and disadvantages women.
#1 International Bestseller * Winner of the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award * Winner...
Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A potent and electrifying critique of today’s feminist movement announcing a fresh new voice in black feminism
Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot
Winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Biography
“A rich narrative of the Crafts, an enslaved couple who escaped from Georgia in 1848, with light-skinned Ellen disguised as a disabled white gentleman and William as her manservant, exploiting assumptio...
Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom
The powerful story of the women who founded and ran the legendary Chicago reproductive rights organization Abortion Counseling Service, otherwise known as Jane, written by one of its members. A compelling testament to a woman's most essential freedom...
The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service
A classic work of feminist scholarship, a must-read for all those interested in the nature of black womanhood. Examining the impact of sexism on black women during slavery, the devaluation of black womanhood, black male sexism, racism among feminists...
Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism by Bell Hooks; Hooks...
From one of our most important scholars and civil rights activist icon, a powerful study of the women’s liberation movement and the tangled knot of oppression facing Black women.
“Angela Davis is herself a woman of undeniable courage. She should be ...
Women, Race & Class
For true crime lovers!
In Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso, historian Kali Nicole Gross uses detectives' notes, trial and prison records, local newspapers, and other archival documents to reconstruct this ghastly whodunit crime in all its...
Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso: A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America
Fiction
In this stunning bestseller that inspired the Amazon Prime series, praised as "our era's Handmaid's Tale," a fierce new power has emerged--and only women have it (Washington Post).
The Power
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
New York Times Readers Pick: 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
From The New York Times-bestselling author of The Mothers, a stunning new novel about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live ...
The Vanishing Half: A GMA Book Club Pick (A Novel)
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
“Hard to put down, harder to forget.” — Stephen King
White lies. Dark humor. Deadly consequences… Bestselling sensation Juniper Song is not who she says she is, she didn’t write the book she claims she wrote, and ...
Yellowface
The Instant New York Times Bestseller!
A novel about the extraordinary partnership between First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune—an unlikely friendship that changed the world, from the New York Times bestselling...
The First Ladies
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A spellbinding novel that transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. With a new afterword by the author.
This "brutally powerful, mesmerizing story” (Peopl...
Beloved
A New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year and National Book Award finalist, Pachinko is an extraordinary epic of four generations of a poor Korean immigrant family as they fight to control their destiny in 20th-century Japan (San Francisco Chronicle)...
Pachinko
This acclaimed post-apocalyptic novel of hope and terror from an award-winning author "pairs well with 1984 or The Handmaid's Tale" and includes a foreword by LeVar Burton and an afterword by N. K. Jemisin (John Green, New York Times).
Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Adaptation
*Selected as One of the Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times * WINNER of the NATIONAL BOOK AWARD and A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
A finalist for the Kirkus Prize, Andrew Carnegie Medal, Aspen Words Literary Prize, an...
Sing, Unburied, Sing: A Novel
Selected by The Atlantic as one of THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVELS. ("You have to read them.")
The visionary time-travel classic whose Black female hero is pulled through time to face the horrors of American slavery and explores the impacts of racism, sex...
Kindred
An electric debut novel about the daughter of Afghan refugees and her year of self-discovery—“a stunning coming-of-age story” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) and a portrait of the artist as a young woman set in a Berlin that can’t escape its hist...
Good Girl: A Novel
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • GOOD MORNING AMERICA BUZZ PICK • A young Indian woman finds the false rumors that she killed her husband surprisingly useful—until other women in the village start asking for her help getting rid of their own husbands—in this ra...
The Bandit Queens
In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism.
Her Body and Other Parties: Stories
In 1970s Dublin, all forms of contraception are strictly forbidden, but an intrepid group of women will risk everything to change that in this sweeping, timely novel inspired by a remarkable and little-known true story.
The Women on Platform Two: A Novel
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the co-author of Mad Honey comes an “inspiring” (Elle) novel about two women, centuries apart—one of whom is the real author of Shakespeare’s plays—who are both forced to hide behind another name.
“You’ll fall in ...
By Any Other Name: A Novel
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A stunning page-turner with richly layered characters and a gripping moral dilemma that will lead readers to question everything they know about privilege, power, and race
Look for Jodi Picoult’s new novel, By Any Othe...
Small Great Things: A Novel
An imaginative retelling of the triumphs and sorrows of one of the most controversial and misunderstood women in Mexico’s history and mythology, perfect for fans of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Gods of Jade and Shadow and Zoraida Córdova’s The Inheritance ...
Malinalli: A Novel
As a presidency unravels and the fight for women's rights intensifies, a teen girl's future will be determined by her willingness to seek the truth, in this stunning work of historical fiction perfect for fans of Monica Hesse and Malinda Lo.
Illustr...
Truth, Lies, and the Questions in Between