Women's History Month is an annual celebration that takes place in March, dedicated to honoring and recognizing the significant contributions and achievements of women throughout history. This month serves as a time to reflect on the vital roles that women have played in shaping society, culture, politics, and various fields, often overcoming tremendous obstacles and barriers in the process. The first instance of Women's History Month can be traced back to the early feminist movements in the United States. The first International Women's Day was celebrated on March 8, 1911, and it laid the groundwork for future observances aimed at promoting women's rights. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter proclaimed the week of March 8 as National Women's History Week, encouraging schools and communities to recognize the contributions of women. By 1987, Congress passed a resolution that designated March as Women's History Month, officially expanding the celebration to the entire month.
Throughout Women's History Month, various events and activities are organized to highlight the achievements of women from diverse backgrounds and fields. Educational institutions, community organizations, and cultural institutions often host lectures, workshops, art exhibits, and performances that focus on women's history and issues. These events not only celebrate the past but also inspire future generations to continue the fight for gender equality and women's rights. Women's History Month also serves as an opportunity for individuals to reflect on the women in their own lives who have inspired them, whether it be family members, educators, or public figures. This personal connection to women's history can foster a deeper understanding of the struggles and triumphs that women have faced over the years.
Women's History Month encourages the exploration of intersectionality, recognizing that the experiences of women are not merely one-dimensional. Factors such as race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and sexual orientation all play a significant role in shaping women's experiences and contributions. By acknowledging these diverse perspectives, the celebration becomes more inclusive and representative of the multifaceted nature of women's history. Women's History Month is an important observance that not only commemorates the achievements of women but also serves as a call to action for continued advocacy for gender equality. By educating ourselves and others, we can honor the legacy of those who fought for women's rights and inspire future generations to carry on the work toward a more equitable society for all. Come with me as I dive into the works of some female authors you ought to know.
Disclosure: There are affiliate links throughout this article, meaning I may earn a small commission if you purchase through them.
-Literary Fiction-
Sula by Toni Morrison
Publication Date: June 08, 2004
Description
Sula and Nel are born in the Bottom—a small town at the top of a hill. Sula is wild, and daring; she does what she wants, while Nel is well-mannered, a mamma’s girl with a questioning heart. Growing up they forge a bond stronger than anything, stronger even than the dark secret they have to bear. Strong enough, it seems, to last a lifetime—until, decades later, as the girls become women, Sula’s anarchy leads to a betrayal that may be beyond forgiveness.
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
Masterful, richly textured, bittersweet, and vital, Sula is a modern masterpiece about love and kinship, about living in an America birthed from slavery. Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison gives life to characters who struggle with what society tells them to be, and the love they long for and crave as Black women. Most of all, they ask: When can we let go? What must we hold back? And just how much can be shared in a friendship?
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Sula, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9781400033430>.
-Coming-of-Age-
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
Publication Date: May 8, 2007
Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A PARADE BEST BOOK OF ALL TIME • From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner—a powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity that asks questions about race, class, and gender with characteristic subtlety and grace.
In Morrison’s acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove—an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others—prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
Here, Morrison’s writing is “so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry” (The New York Times).
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, The Bluest Eye, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9780307278449>.
-Fiction-
Dead Poets Society by N. H. Kleinbaum
Publication Date: September 1, 2006
Description
A novelization of the hit movie starring Robin Williams as Professor Keating, an inspiring, uplifting teacher who changes his students' lives.
Todd Anderson and his friends at Welton Academy can hardly believe how different life is since their new English professor, the flamboyant John Keating, has challenged them to "make your lives extraordinary!
Inspired by Keating, the boys resurrect the Dead Poets Society--a secret club where, free from the constraints and expectations of school and parents, they let their passions run wild. As Keating turns the boys on to the great words of Byron, Shelley, and Keats, they discover not only the beauty of language, but the importance of making each moment count.
But the Dead Poets pledges soon realize that their newfound freedom can have tragic consequences. Can the club and the individuality it inspires survive the pressure from authorities determined to destroy their dreams?
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Dead Poets Society, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9781401308773>.
-Domestic Fiction-
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
Publication Date: September 21, 2006
Description
“The Joy Luck Club is one of my favorite books. From the moment I first started reading it, I knew it was going to be incredible. For me, it was one of those once-in-a-lifetime reading experiences that you cherish forever. It inspired me as a writer and still remains hugely inspirational.” —Kevin Kwan, author of Crazy Rich Asians
Amy Tan’s beloved, New York Times bestselling tale of mothers and daughters, now the focus of the documentary Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir
Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's "saying" the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. "To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable." Forty years later the stories and history continue.
With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, The Joy Luck Club, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9780143038092>.
-Literary Fiction-
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
Publication Date: May 4, 1998
Description
Winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, The Age of Innocence is an elegant, masterful portrait of desire and betrayal in old New York—now with a new introduction from acclaimed author Colm Tóibín for the novel’s centennial.
With vivid power, Wharton evokes a time of gaslit streets, formal dances held in the ballrooms of stately brownstones, and society people "who dreaded scandal more than disease." This is Newland Archer's world as he prepares to many the docile May Welland. Then, suddenly, the mysterious, intensely nonconformist Countess Ellen Olenska returns to New York after a long absence, turning Archer's world upside down.
This classic Wharton tale of thwarted love is an exuberantly comic and profoundly moving look at the passions of the human heart, as well as a literary achievement of the highest order.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, The Age of Innocence, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9780684842370>.
-Psychological Fiction-
The Door by Magda Szabó
Publication Date: January 27, 2015
Description
One of The New York Times Book Review's "10 Best Books of 2015"
An NYRB Classics Original
The Door is an unsettling exploration of the relationship between two very different women. Magda is a writer, educated, married to an academic, public-spirited, with an on-again-off-again relationship to Hungary’s Communist authorities. Emerence is a peasant, illiterate, impassive, abrupt, seemingly ageless. She lives alone in a house that no one else may enter, not even her closest relatives. She is Magda’s housekeeper and she has taken control over Magda’s household, becoming indispensable to her. And Emerence, in her way, has come to depend on Magda. They share a kind of love—at least until Magda’s long-sought success as a writer leads to a devastating revelation.
Len Rix’s prizewinning translation of The Door at last makes it possible for American readers to appreciate the masterwork of a major modern European writer.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, The Door, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9781590177716>.
-French Literature / Historical Fiction-
The Notebook, the Proof, the Third Lie (Omnibus) by Agota Kristof
Publication Date: June 23, 1997
Description
These three internationally acclaimed novels have confirmed Agota Kristof's reputation as one of the most provocative exponents of new-wave European fiction. With all the stark simplicity of a fractured fairy tale, the trilogy tells the story of twin brothers, Claus and Lucas, locked in an agonizing bond that becomes a gripping allegory of the forces that have divided "brothers" in much of Europe since World War II. Kristof's postmodern saga begins with The Notebook, in which the brothers are children, lost in a country torn apart by conflict, who must learn every trick of evil and cruelty merely to survive. In The Proof, Lucas is challenging to prove his own identity and the existence of his missing brother, a defector to the "other side." The Third Lie, which closes the trilogy, is a biting parable of Eastern and Western Europe today and a deep exploration into the nature of identity, storytelling, and the truths and untruths that lie at the heart of them all. "Stark and haunting." - The San Francisco Chronicle; "A vision of considerable depth and complexity, a powerful portrait of the nobility and perversity of the human heart." - The Christian Science Monitor.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, The Notebook, the Proof, the Third Lie, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9780802135063>.
-Dystopian Science Fiction-
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
Publication Date: April 30, 2019
Description
From a celebrated, award-winning author, modern classic about a young girl fighting for survival in a post-apocalyptic world, perfect for fans of N.K. Jemisin and Margaret Atwood.
Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives inside a gated community with her preacher father, family, and neighbors, sheltered from the surrounding social chaos and anarchy caused by climate change and economic crisis. In a society where any vulnerability is a risk, she suffers from hyperempathy--a debilitating sensitivity to others' emotions.
Precocious and clear-eyed, Lauren must make her voice heard in order to protect her loved ones from the imminent disasters her small community stubbornly ignores. But what begins as a fight for survival soon leads to something much more: the birth of a new faith . . . and a startling vision of human destiny.
Includes a foreword by LeVar Burton and an afterword by N. K. Jemisin
"In the ongoing contest over which dystopian classic is most applicable to our time, Octavia Butler's 'Parable' books may be unmatched."--The New Yorker
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Parable of the Sower, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9781538732182>.
-Political Dystopian Science Fiction-
Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler
Publication Date: August 20, 2019
Description
Originally published in 1998, this shockingly prescient novel's timely message of hope and resistance in the face of fanaticism is more relevant than ever.
In 2032, Lauren Olamina has survived the destruction of her home and family, and realized her vision of a peaceful community in northern California based on her newly founded faith, Earthseed. The fledgling community provides refuge for outcasts facing persecution after the election of an ultra-conservative president who vows to "make America great again." In an increasingly divided and dangerous nation, Lauren's subversive colony--a minority religious faction led by a young black woman--becomes a target for President Jarret's reign of terror and oppression.
Years later, Asha Vere reads the journals of a mother she never knew, Lauren Olamina. As she searches for answers about her own past, she also struggles to reconcile with the legacy of a mother caught between her duty to her chosen family and her calling to lead humankind into a better future.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Parable of the Talents, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9781538732199>.
-Fiction-
Pipers and a Dancer by Stella Benson
Publication Date: April 25, 2023
Description
Ipsie Wilson has always been a striking individual - though she would say for all the wrong reasons. She has never felt quite real - like a looker-on in life, capturing little pieces of people's attention, sometimes exasperating them, sometimes entrancing them, but never adding up to a whole human being - her existence seems very smoke and mirrors. If she sometimes feels lost and bewildered, she can also be quite cussed and determined - the strange contrasts and difficult mixtures in her personality go on and on.
She lost all three of her brothers in the war, which has caused further disorder in her messy life and mind. In the mid-1920s, having wandered for a while from England to San Francisco, she sets off for China to be married to Jacob Heming. He is a very stolid British customs official in Yunnan whom she met in the States; he scares and puzzles her in equal amounts, but at least the idea of him is something to hold onto.
On the boat to China she meets Rodd Innes, an American who just happens to be heading to Yunnan to take over Jacob's position. His easy, cool manner and worldliness forms a stark contrast to her memories of Jacob's rigid stuffiness, and he is clearly taken with her. A contest begins in her responsive yet untidy mind. Then, while Ipsie uncertainly meets Jacob's domineering sister Pauline and old flame Sophie Hinds in Hongkong, Rodd heads to Yueh Lai Chou to take over the reins from Jacob. He is horrified by the boorish man he meets, and determines in her absence that Ipsie cannot marry him.
But then Jacob is captured by brigands in the mountains close by. Ipsie, Pauline and Sophie come rushing to Yueh Lai Chou. What ransom will the brigands demand? What can any of them do to help? When Jacob is returned to them, will Ipsie's growing ambivalence let her care for him, or Rodd, or neither? In the end, fate intervenes with surprising finality.
Pipers and a Dancer, first published in 1924, was Stella Benson's first novel set almost entirely in China. Universally lauded, it was acclaimed by the reviewer for the Spectator as having "more wit, more unruly intelligence than any English novel since the nineties."
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Pipers and a Dancer, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9780645244069>.
-Coming-of-Age /Historical Fiction-
Daddy Was a Number Runner by Louise Meriwether
Publication Date: December 01, 2002
Description
This modern classic is "a tough, tender, bitter novel of a black girl struggling towards womanhood" in 1930s Harlem--with a foreword by James Baldwin (Publishers Weekly).
Depression-era Harlem is home for twelve-year-old Francie Coffin and her family, and it's both a place of refuge and the source of untold dangers for her and her poor, working class family. The beloved "daddy" of the title indeed becomes a number runner when he is unable to find legal work, and while one of Francie's brothers dreams of becoming a chemist, the other is already in a gang. Francie is a dreamer, too, but there are risks in everything from going to the movies to walking down the block, and her pragmatism eventually outweighs her hope; "We was all poor and black and apt to stay that way, and that was that."
First published in 1970, Daddy Was a Number Runner is one of the seminal novels of the black experience in America. The New York Times Book Review proclaimed it "a most important novel."
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Daddy Was a Number Runner, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9781558614420>.
-Erotic / Psychology / Women's Studies-
Women on Top by Nancy Friday
Publication Date: October 30, 2012
Description
In a post-50 Shades of Grey world, a new audience is ready for Nancy Friday’s groundbreaking work on female sexual fantasies. Women on Top explores the changing face of sex and power dynamics through over 150 collected fantasies from real women.
More than ever before, women everywhere are devouring the hottest stories from behind closed doors, tales of sexual encounters designed to create new frissons of excitement with each turn of the page.
But the fantasies in this book aren’t fiction. They are the real erotic imaginings of real women . . . and nothing is more exciting than that.
Nancy Friday, whose collections of women’s sexual fantasies include My Secret Garden and Forbidden Flowers, offers up “a smorgasbord of sensual scenarios” (New Women) in this explicit New York Times bestseller that puts women in control of their sexual destinies. Nearly two hundred women contributed, in their own uncensored words and through interviews with the author, the shocking, daring, amusing, untamed, and pulse-pounding imaginings that turn them on the most. “The fantasies are fascinating,” raves Esquire magazine, no doubt because unlike anything any novel could ever truly capture, they allow open access to what women really desire.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Women on Top, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9781476715605>.
-Literary Fiction / Suspense Thriller-
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
Publication Date: April 07, 2015
Description
A young New Yorker grieving his mother's death is pulled into a gritty underworld of art and wealth in this "extraordinary" and beloved novel that "connects with the heart as well as the mind" (Stephen King, New York Times Book Review), named a New York Times Best Book of the 21st Century.
Theo Decker, a 13-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don't know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by a longing for his mother, he clings to the one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into a wealthy and insular art community.
As an adult, Theo moves silkily between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty labyrinth of an antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love -- and at the center of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle.
The Goldfinch is a mesmerizing, stay-up-all-night and tell-all-your-friends triumph, an old-fashioned story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention. From the streets of New York to the dark corners of the art underworld, this "soaring masterpiece" examines the devastating impact of grief and the ruthless machinations of fate (Ron Charles, Washington Post).
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, The Goldfinch, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9780316055444>.
-Autobiography / Memoir-
Just As I Thought by Grace Paley
Publication Date: June 30, 1999
Description
This rich and multifaceted collection of Grace Paley's vivid record of her life.
As close to an autobiography as anything we are likely to have from this quintessentially American writer, Just As I Thought gives us a chance to see Paley not only as a writer and "troublemaker" but also as a daughter, sister, mother, and grandmother. Through her descriptions of her childhood in the Bronx and her experiences as an antiwar activist to her lectures on writing and her recollections of other writers, these pieces are always alive with Paley's inimitable voice, humor, and wisdom.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Just As I Thought, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9780374525859>.
-Memoir-
Memoirs of a Woman Doctor by Nawal El Saadawi
Publication Date: January 01, 1989
Description
Rebelling against the contraints of family and society, a young Egyptian woman decides to study medicine, becoming the only woman in a class of men. Her encounters with the other students mdash; as well as the male and female corpses in the autopsy room--intensify her dissatisfaction with and search for identity. She realizes men are not gods as her mother had taught her, that science cannot explain everything, and that she cannot be satisfied by living a life purely of the mind.
After a brief and unhappy marriage, she throws herself into her work, becoming a successful physician, but at the same time, she becomes aware of injustice and hypocrisy in society. Fulfillment and love come to her at last in a wholly unexpected way.
". . . Memoirs of a Woman Doctor by Nawal el Saadawi, one of the leading Egyptian feminist writers, reveals the contradictions embedded in women's self-oppressive struggle against patriarchy."--Khadidiatau Gueye, Research in African Literatures (Indiana University Press)
Nawal el Saadawi, born in 1931 in Kafr Tahla, Egypt, is an Egyptian physician, psychiatrist, author and activist. She is the founder and president of the Arab Women's Solidarity Association and co-founder of the Arab Association for Human Rights. In 2004 she won the North-South Prize from the Council of Europe. In 2005 she won the inana International Prize in Belgium. In 2010 she won the Sean MacBride Peace Prize from the International Peace Bureau. She has written and published other novels, memoirs, plays, non-fiction and short stories including Woman at Point Zero, The Hidden Face of Eve and The Fall of the Imam.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9780872862234>.
-Middle Grade Fiction-
The Baby-Sitters Club Retro Set (Books #1-6) by Ann M. Martin
Publication Date: August 28, 2018
Description
Revisit the best friends you'll ever have with this brand-new exclusive retro collection! Featuring books 1-6, Kristy's Great Idea, Claudia and the Phantom Phone Calls, The Truth About Stacey, Mary Anne Saves the Day, Dawn and the Impossible Three, and Kristy's Big Day -- all with their original covers, in a fantastic BSC tin case.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, The Baby-Sitters Club Retro Set (Books #1-6), Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9781338311488>.
-Literary Fiction-
Lives of Girls and Woman by Alice Munro
Publication Date: February 13, 2001
Description
The debut novel from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro, “one of the most eloquent and gifted writers of contemporary fiction” (The New York Times).
“Munro has an unerring talent for uncovering the extraordinary in the ordinary.”—Newsweek
Rural Ontario, 1940s. Del Jordan lives out at the end of the Flats Road on her father’s fox farm, where her most frequent companions are an eccentric bachelor family friend and her rough younger brother. When she begins spending more time in town, she is surrounded by women—her mother, an agnostic, opinionated woman who sells encyclopedias to local farmers; her mother’s boarder, the lusty Fern Dogherty; and her best friend, Naomi, with whom she shares the frustrations and unbridled glee of adolescence.
Through these unwitting mentors and in her own encounters with sex, birth, and death, Del explores the dark and bright sides of womanhood. All along she remains a wise, witty observer and recorder of truths in small-town life. The result is a powerful, moving, and humorous demonstration of Alice Munro’s unparalleled awareness of the lives of girls and women.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Lives of Girls and Women, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9780375707490>.
-Coming-of-Age -
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
Publication Date: April 03, 1991
Description
A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICK
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A coming-of-age classic about a young girl growing up in Chicago • Acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world—from the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature.
“Cisneros draws on her rich [Latino] heritage...and seduces with precise, spare prose, creat[ing] unforgettable characters we want to lift off the page. She is not only a gifted writer, but an absolutely essential one.” —The New York Times Book Review
The House on Mango Street is one of the most cherished novels of the last fifty years. Readers from all walks of life have fallen for the voice of Esperanza Cordero, growing up in Chicago and inventing for herself who and what she will become. “In English my name means hope,” she says. “In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting."
Told in a series of vignettes—sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes joyous—Cisneros’s masterpiece is a classic story of childhood and self-discovery and one of the greatest neighborhood novels of all time. Like Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street or Toni Morrison’s Sula, it makes a world through people and their voices, and it does so in language that is poetic and direct. This gorgeous coming-of-age novel is a celebration of the power of telling one’s story and of being proud of where you're from.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, The House on Mango Street, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9780679734772>.
-Poetry-
Map by Wisława Szymborska
Publication Date: April 12, 2016
Description
“Both plain-spoken and luminous . . . Szymborska’s is the best of the Western mind—free, restless, questioning.” — New York Times Book Review
A New York Times Editors’ Choice
One of Europe’s greatest poets is also its wisest, wittiest, and most accessible. Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska draws us in with her unexpected, unassuming humor. “If you want the world in a nutshell,” a Polish critic remarked, “try Szymborska.” But the world held in these lapidary poems is larger than the one we thought we knew.
Edited by her longtime, award-winning translator, Clare Cavanagh, Map traces Szymborska’s work until her death in 2012. Of the approximately two hundred fifty poems included here, nearly forty are newly translated; thirteen represent the entirety of the poet’s last Polish collection, Enough, never before published in English. Map offers Szymborska’s devoted readers a welcome return to her “ironic elegance” (TheNew Yorker).
“Vast, intimate, and charged with the warmth of a life fully imagined to the end. There’s no better place for those unfamiliar with her work to begin.” — Vogue
“Her poems offer a restorative wit as playful as it is steely and as humble as it is wise . . . Her wry acceptance of life’s folly remains her strongest weapon against tyranny and bad taste.” — Los Angeles Times Book Review
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Map, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9780544705159>.
-Domestic / psychological Fiction-
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Publication Date: December 16, 2008
Description
BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An affluent Indian family is forever changed by one fateful day in 1969, from the author of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
“[The God of Small Things] offers such magic, mystery, and sadness that, literally, this reader turned the last page and decided to reread it. Immediately. It’s that haunting.”—USA Today
Compared favorably to the works of Faulkner and Dickens, Arundhati Roy’s modern classic is equal parts powerful family saga, forbidden love story, and piercing political drama. The seven-year-old twins Estha and Rahel see their world shaken irrevocably by the arrival of their beautiful young cousin, Sophie. It is an event that will lead to an illicit liaison and tragedies accidental and intentional, exposing “big things [that] lurk unsaid” in a country drifting dangerously toward unrest.
Lush, lyrical, and unnerving, The God of Small Things is an award-winning landmark that started for its author an esteemed career of fiction and political commentary that continues unabated.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, The God of Small Things, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9780812979657>.
-Historical Fiction-
Held by Anne Michaels
Publication Date: January 30, 2024
Description
WINNER OF THE GILLER PRIZE • SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • ANEW YORK TIMES BEST HISTORICAL NOVEL OF THE YEAR •
A breathtaking and ineffable new novel from the author of the international bestsellers Fugitive Pieces and The Winter Vault—a novel of love and loyalty across generations, at once sweeping and intimate
1917. On a battlefield near the River Escaut, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory as the snow falls—a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night.
1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near a different river. He is alive but still not whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and tries to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures: ghosts with messages he cannot understand.
So begins a narrative that spans four generations of connections and consequences that ignite and reignite as the century unfolds. In radiant moments of desire, comprehension, longing, and transcendence, the sparks fly upward, working their transformations decades later.
Held is affecting and intensely beautiful, full of mystery, wisdom, and compassion, a novel by a writer at the height of her powers.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Held, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9780593536865>.
-Psychological / Historical Fiction-
Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
Publication Date: May 26, 1998
Description
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
Winner of the Lannan Literary Fiction Award
Winner of the Guardian Fiction Award
In 1940 a boy bursts from the mud of a war-torn Polish city, where he has buried himself to hide from the soldiers who murdered his family. His name is Jakob Beer. He is only seven years old. And although by all rights he should have shared the fate of the other Jews in his village, he has not only survived but been rescued by a Greek geologist, who does not recognize the boy as human until he begins to cry. With this electrifying image, Anne Michaels ushers us into her rapturously acclaimed novel of loss, memory, history, and redemption.
As Michaels follows Jakob across two continents, she lets us witness his transformation from a half-wild casualty of the Holocaust to an artist who extracts meaning from its abyss. Filled with mysterious symmetries and rendered in heart-stopping prose, Fugitive Pieces is a triumphant work, a book that should not so much be read as it should be surrendered to.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Fugitive Pieces, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9780679776598>.
-Autobiography / Memoir-
The Men in My Life by Patricia Bosworth
Publication Date: January 30, 2018
Description
Acclaimed biographer Patricia Bosworth recalls her emotional coming of age in 1950s New York in this profound and powerful memoir, a story of family, marriage, tragedy, Broadway, and art, featuring a rich cast of well-known literary and theatrical figures from the period.
From Bosworth—acclaimed biographer of Montgomery Clift, Diane Arbus, Marlon Brando, and Jane Fonda—comes a series of vivid confessions about her remarkable journey into womanhood. This deeply-felt memoir is the story of a woman who defied repressive 1950s conventions while being shaped by the notable men in her life.
Born into privilege in San Francisco as the children of famous attorney Bartley Crum and novelist Gertrude, Patricia and her brother Bart Jr. lead charmed lives until their father’s career is ruined when he defends the Hollywood Ten. The family moves to New York, suffering greater tragedy when Bart Jr. kills himself. However, his loving spirit continues to influence Patricia as she fights to succeed as an actress and writer.
Married and divorced from an abusive husband before she’s twenty, she joins the famed Actors Studio. She takes classes with Lee Strasberg alongside Marilyn Monroe, Paul Newman, and others; she works on Broadway opposite Paul Muni, Helen Hayes, and Elaine Stritch; Gore Vidal and Elia Kazan become her mentors. Her anecdotes of theatre’s Golden Age have never been told before. At the zenith of her career, about to film The Nun’s Story with Audrey Hepburn, Patricia faces a decision that changes her forever.
The Men in My Life is about survival, achieving your goals, and learning to love. It’s also the story of America’s most culturally pivotal era, told through the lens of one insider’s extraordinary life.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, The Men in My Life, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9780062287915>.
-Domestic Psychological Fiction-
Unless by Carol Shields
Publication Date: January 03, 2006
Description
“Nothing short of astonishing.” — New Yorker
“A thing of beauty—lucidly written, artfully ordered, riddled with riddles and undergirded with dark layers of philosophical meditations.” — Los Angeles Times
The final book from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carol Shields, Unless, is a harrowing but ultimately consoling story of one family's anguish and healing, proving Shields's mastery of extraordinary fiction about ordinary life.
For all of her life, 44 year old Reta Winters has enjoyed the useful monotony of happiness: a loving family, good friends, growing success as a writer of light 'summertime' fiction. But this placid existence is cracked wide open when her beloved eldest daughter, Norah, drops out to sit on a gritty street corner, silent but for the sign around her neck that reads 'GOODNESS.' Reta's search for what drove her daughter to such a desperate statement turns into an unflinching and surprisingly funny meditation on where we find meaning and hope.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Unless, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9780060874407>.
-Short Story Anthology-
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
Publication Date: October 22, 2019
Description
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • PEN/HEMINGWAY AWARD WINNER.
With a new foreword by Domenico Starnone, this stunning debut collection flawlessly charts the emotional journeys of characters seeking love beyond the barriers of nations and generations.
With accomplished precision and gentle eloquence, Jhumpa Lahiri traces the crosscurrents set in motion when immigrants, expatriates, and their children arrive, quite literally, at a cultural divide.
A blackout forces a young Indian American couple to make confessions that unravel their tattered domestic peace. An Indian American girl recognizes her cultural identity during a Halloween celebration while the Pakastani civil war rages on television in the background. A latchkey kid with a single working mother finds affinity with a woman from Calcutta. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession.
Imbued with the sensual details of Indian culture, these stories speak with passion and wisdom to everyone who has ever felt like a foreigner. Like the interpreter of the title story, Lahiri translates between the strict traditions of her ancestors and a baffling new world.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Interpreter of Maladies, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9780358213260>.
-Domestic Romance Fiction-
On Beauty by Zadie Smith
Publication Date: August 29, 2006
Description
One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
Winner of the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction, another bestselling masterwork from the celebrated author of Swing Time and White Teeth
"In this sharp, engaging satire, beauty's only skin-deep, but funny cuts to the bone." —Kirkus Reviews
Having hit bestseller lists from the New York Times to the San Francisco Chronicle, this wise, hilarious novel reminds us why Zadie Smith has rocketed to literary stardom. On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the culture wars—on both sides of the Atlantic—serve to skewer everything from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision between the personal and the political. Full of dead-on wit and relentlessly funny, this tour de force confirms Zadie Smith's reputation as a major literary talent.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, On Beauty, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9780143037743>.
-Historical Fiction-
The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd
Publication Date: May 05, 2015
Description
From the celebrated author of The Secret Life of Bees comes a novel about two unforgettable American women.
Hetty “Handful” Grimke, an urban slave in early nineteenth century Charleston, yearns for life beyond the suffocating walls that enclose her within the wealthy Grimke household. The Grimke’s daughter, Sarah, has known from an early age she is meant to do something large in the world, but she is hemmed in by the limits imposed on women.
Kidd’s sweeping novel is set in motion on Sarah’s eleventh birthday, when she is given ownership of ten year old Handful, who is to be her handmaid. We follow their remarkable journeys over the next thirty five years, as both strive for a life of their own, dramatically shaping each other’s destinies and forming a complex relationship marked by guilt, defiance, estrangement and the uneasy ways of love.
Inspired by the historical figure of Sarah Grimke, Kidd goes beyond the record to flesh out the rich interior lives of all of her characters, both real and invented, including Handful’s cunning mother, Charlotte, who courts danger in her search for something better.
This exquisitely written novel is a triumph of storytelling that looks with unswerving eyes at a devastating wound in American history, through women whose struggles for liberation, empowerment, and expression will leave no reader unmoved.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, The Invention of Wings, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9780143121701>.
-Historical / Coming-of-Age-
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
Publication Date: January 28, 2003
Description
The multi-million bestselling novel about a young girl's journey towards healing and the transforming power of love, from the award-winning author of The Invention of Wings and The Book of Longings
Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted Black "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the deepest racists in town, Lily decides to spring them both free. They escape to Tiburon, South Carolina—a town that holds the secret to her mother's past. Taken in by an eccentric trio of Black beekeeping sisters, Lily is introduced to their mesmerizing world of bees and honey, and the Black Madonna. This is a remarkable novel about divine female power, a story that women will share and pass on to their daughters for years to come.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, The Secret Life of Bees, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9780142001745>.
-Domestic Coming-of-Age-
The Patron Saint of Liars by Ann Patchett
Publication Date: July 11, 2023
Description
A New York Times Notable Book
Acclaimed author Ann Patchett's debut novel, hailed as "beautifully written . . . a first novel that second- and third-time novelists would envy for its grace, insight, and compassion” (Boston Herald)
St. Elizabeth’s, a home for unwed mothers in Habit, Kentucky, usually harbors its residents for only a little while. Not so Rose Clinton, a beautiful, mysterious woman who comes to the home pregnant but not unwed, and stays. She plans to give up her child, thinking she cannot be the mother it needs. But when Cecilia is born, Rose makes a place for herself and her daughter amid St. Elizabeth’s extended family of nuns and an ever-changing collection of pregnant teenage girls. Rose’s past won’t be kept away, though, even by St. Elizabeth’s; she cannot remain untouched by what she has left behind, even as she cannot change who she has become in the leaving.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, The Patron Saint of Liars, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9780547520209>.
-Historical Fiction-
The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich
Publication Date: March 23, 2021
Description
WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
WASHINGTON POST, NPR, CBS SUNDAY MORNING, KIRKUS, CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY, AND GOOD HOUSEKEEPING BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C., this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.
Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at the jewel bearing plant, the first factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a Chippewa Council member who is trying to understand the consequences of a new “emancipation” bill on its way to the floor of the United States Congress. It is 1953 and he and the other council members know the bill isn’t about freedom; Congress is fed up with Indians. The bill is a “termination” that threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land and their very identity. How can the government abandon treaties made in good faith with Native Americans “for as long as the grasses shall grow, and the rivers run”?
Since graduating high school, Pixie Paranteau has insisted that everyone call her Patrice. Unlike most of the girls on the reservation, Patrice, the class valedictorian, has no desire to wear herself down with a husband and kids. She makes jewel bearings at the plant, a job that barely pays her enough to support her mother and brother. Patrice’s shameful alcoholic father returns home sporadically to terrorize his wife and children and bully her for money. But Patrice needs every penny to follow her beloved older sister, Vera, who moved to the big city of Minneapolis. Vera may have disappeared; she hasn’t been in touch in months, and is rumored to have had a baby. Determined to find Vera and her child, Patrice makes a fateful trip to Minnesota that introduces her to unexpected forms of exploitation and violence, and endangers her life.
Thomas and Patrice live in this impoverished reservation community along with young Chippewa boxer Wood Mountain and his mother Juggie Blue, her niece and Patrice’s best friend Valentine, and Stack Barnes, the white high school math teacher and boxing coach who is hopelessly in love with Patrice.
In the Night Watchman, Louise Erdrich creates a fictional world populated with memorable characters who are forced to grapple with the worst and best impulses of human nature. Illuminating the loves and lives, the desires and ambitions of these characters with compassion, wit, and intelligence, The Night Watchman is a majestic work of fiction from this revered cultural treasure.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, The Night Watchman, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9780062671196>.
-Biographical Fiction-
What Does It Feel Like? by Sophie Kinsella
Publication Date: October 08, 2024
Description
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK From #1 bestselling author Sophie Kinsella, an unforgettable story—by turns heartbreaking and life-affirming—of a renowned novelist facing a devastating diagnosis and learning to live and love anew.
“The bravest book you’ll read all year.”—Jodi Picoult
“Only Sophie Kinsella can make you laugh like this while she’s got you crying.”—Taylor Jenkins Reid
A PARADE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
“What Does It Feel Like? is fiction, but it is my most autobiographical work to date. Eve’s story is my story.”—Sophie Kinsella
Eve is a successful novelist who wakes up one day in a hospital bed with no memory of how she got there. Her husband, never far from her side, explains that she has had an operation to remove the large, malignant tumor growing in her brain.
As Eve learns to walk, talk, and write again—and as she wrestles with her diagnosis, and how and when to explain it to her beloved children—she begins to recall what’s most important to her: long walks with her husband’s hand clasped firmly around her own, family game nights, and always buying that dress when she sees it.
Recounted in brief anecdotes, each one is an attempt to answer the type of impossible questions recognizable to anyone navigating the labyrinth of grief. This short, extraordinary novel is a celebration of life, shot through with warmth and humor—it will both break your heart and put it back together again.
“Why did I write such a personal book? I have always processed my life through writing. Hiding behind my fictional characters, I have always turned my own life into a narrative. It is my version of therapy, maybe. Writing is my happy place, and writing this book, although tough going at times, was immensely satisfying and therapeutic for me.”—Sophie Kinsella
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, What Does It Feel Like?, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9780593977569>.
-Historical Fiction-
Krik? Krak! by Edwidge Danticat
Publication Date: December 15, 2015
Description
Discover the 20th Anniversary edition of Edwidge Danticat’s unforgettable National Book Award Finalist story collection—complete with a new story.
Arriving one year after the Haitian-American's first novel (Breath, Eyes, Memory) alerted critics to her compelling voice, these 10 stories, some of which have appeared in small literary journals, confirm Danticat's reputation as a remarkably gifted writer.
Examining the lives of ordinary Haitians, particularly those struggling to survive under the brutal Duvalier regime, Danticat illuminates the distance between people's desires and the stifling reality of their lives. A profound mix of Catholicism and voodoo spirituality informs the tales, bestowing a mythic importance on people described in the opening story, "Children of the Sea," as those "in this world whose names don't matter to anyone but themselves." The ceaseless grip of dictatorship often leads men to emotionally abandon their families, like the husband in "A Wall of Fire Rising," who dreams of escaping in a neighbor's hot-air balloon. The women exhibit more resilience, largely because of their insistence on finding meaning and solidarity through storytelling; but Danticat portrays these bonds with an honesty that shows that sisterhood, too, has its power plays. In the book's final piece, "Epilogue: Women Like Us," she writes: "Are there women who both cook and write? Kitchen poets, they call them. They slip phrases into their stew and wrap meaning around their pork before frying it. They make narrative dumplings and stuff their daughter's mouths so they say nothing more."
These stories inform and enrich one another, as the female characters reveal a common ancestry and ties to the fictional Ville Rose. In addition to the power of Danticat's themes, the book is enhanced by an element of suspense—we're never certain, for example, if a rickety boat packed with refugees introduced in the first tale will reach the Florida coast. Spare, elegant and moving, these stories cohere into a superb collection.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Krik? Krak!, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9781616957001>.
-Epic Historical Fiction-
Woman of Light by Kali Fajardo-Anstine
Publication Date: April 18, 2023
Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A “dazzling, cinematic, intimate, lyrical” (Roxane Gay) epic of betrayal, love, and fate that spans five generations of an Indigenous Chicano family in the American West, from the author of the National Book Award finalist Sabrina & Corina
“Sometimes you just step into a book and let it wash over you, like you’re swimming under a big, sparkling night sky.”—Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere and Everything I Never Told You
A PHENOMENAL BOOK CLUB PICK AND AN AUDACIOUS BOOK CLUB PICK • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Book Riot
There is one every generation, a seer who keeps the stories.
Luz “Little Light” Lopez, a tea leaf reader and laundress, is left to fend for herself after her older brother, Diego, a snake charmer and factory worker, is run out of town by a violent white mob. As Luz navigates 1930s Denver, she begins to have visions that transport her to her Indigenous homeland in the nearby Lost Territory. Luz recollects her ancestors’ origins, how her family flourished, and how they were threatened. She bears witness to the sinister forces that have devastated her people and their homelands for generations. In the end, it is up to Luz to save her family stories from disappearing into oblivion.
Written in Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s singular voice, the wildly entertaining and complex lives of the Lopez family fill the pages of this multigenerational western saga. Woman of Light is a transfixing novel about survival, family secrets, and love—filled with an unforgettable cast of characters, all of whom are just as special, memorable, and complicated as our beloved heroine, Luz.
LONGLISTED FOR THE JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE • LONGLISTED FOR THE CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE FOR FICTION
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Woman of Light, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9780525511335>.
-Urban Fiction-
The Complete Fiction (Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories) by Nella Larsen
Publication Date: April 18, 2023
Description
A Contemporary Classics hardcover omnibus of the complete fiction of one of the most gifted writers of the Harlem Renaissance, including her most famous novel, Passing.
Throughout her short but brilliant literary career, Nella Larsen wrote piercing dramas about the Black middle class that featured sensitive, spirited heroines struggling to find a place where they belonged. Passing, Larsen’s best-known work, is a disturbing story about the unraveling lives of two childhood friends, one of whom turns her back on her past and marries a white racist. Just as disquieting is the portrait in Quicksand of biracial Helga Crane, who is unable to escape her loneliness no matter where and with whom she lives. Race and marriage offer few securities here or in the other stories in this compulsively readable collection, rich in psychological complexity and imbued with a vibrant sense of place.
Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9780593536544>.
-Epistolary Domestic Fiction-
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë
Publication Date: October 26, 2021
Description
Chiltern creates the most beautiful editions of the World's finest literature.
Your favorite classic titles in a way you have never seen them before; the tactile layers, fine details and beautiful colors of these remarkable covers make Chiltern classics feel extra special and look striking on any shelf.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte, tells the story of young Helen Graham's disastrous marriage to the dashing drunkard Arthur Huntingdon--said to be modeled on the author's brother Branwell--and her flight from him to the seclusion of Wildfell Hall. Pursued by Gilbert Markham, who is in love with her, Graham refuses him and, by way of explanation, gives him her journal. There he reads of her wretched married life. Eventually, after Huntingdon's death, they marry.
Anne Bronte's second but last novel,The Tenant of Wildfell Hallwas first published in 1848 under the pseudonym of Acton Bell, and was an immediate success. It is now considered to be the one of the first feminist novels.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9781912714933>.
-Romance-
Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell
Publication Date: February 15, 2009
Description
Wives and Daughters, Elizabeth Gaskell's last novel, is regarded by many as her masterpiece. Molly Gibson is the daughter of the doctor in the small provincial town of Hollingford. Her widowed father marries a second time to give Molly the woman's presence he feels she lacks, but until the arrival of Cynthia, her dazzling step-sister, Molly finds her situation hard to accept. Intertwined with the story of the Gibsons is that of Squire Hamley and his two sons; as Molly grows up and falls in love she learns to judge people for what they are, not what they seem. Through Molly's observations the hierarchies, social values, and social changes of early nineteenth-century English life are made vivid in a novel that is timeless in its representation of human relationships. This edition, the first to be based in the original Cornhill Magazine serialization of 1864-6, draws on a full collation of the manuscript to present the most accurate text so far available.
About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Wives and Daughters, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9780199538263>.
-Romance-
Indiana by Armandine Aurore Lucille Dupin (AKA George Sand)
Publication Date: February 16, 2021
Description
Indiana, a young woman stuck in a loveless marriage, is seduced by a charming neighbor who is not as polished and pure as he appears.
She embarks on a journey to find real love, leading to an unexpected discovery about the object of her affection.
Indiana is a young woman from French Louisiana who's married to the much older Colonel Delmare. Their union is strict and often oppressive, leaving her unfulfilled. Indiana shares their home with her cousin Ralph and her loyal maid, Noun. One evening they encounter a handsome young man, Raymon de Ramière, who becomes interested in Indiana. Yet, prior to their meeting, Raymon had already seduced Noun who is pregnant with his child. This complicated dynamic forces Indiana to decide what she really wants: passion or stability?
Indiana is a bold commentary on the institution of marriage in France. It examines the implied gender roles and responsibilities pushed upon women. Sand champions the need for passion and true love, regardless of social convention.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Indiana, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9781513279527>.
-Contemporary Fantasy / Horror Fiction-
White is For Witching by Helen Oyeyemi
Publication Date: February 04, 2014
Description
Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award
One of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists
From the acclaimed author of What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, Gingerbread, andPeaces
There’s something strange about the Silver family house in the closed-off town of Dover, England. Grand and cavernous with hidden passages and buried secrets, it’s been home to four generations of Silver women—Anna, Jennifer, Lily, and now Miranda, who has lived in the house with her twin brother, Eliot, ever since their father converted it to a bed-and-breakfast. The Silver women have always had a strong connection, a pull over one another that reaches across time and space, and when Lily, Miranda’s mother, passes away suddenly while on a trip abroad, Miranda begins suffering strange ailments. An eating disorder starves her. She begins hearing voices. When she brings a friend home, Dover’s hostility toward outsiders physically manifests within the four walls of the Silver house, and the lives of everyone inside are irrevocably changed. At once an unforgettable mystery and a meditation on race, nationality, and family legacies, White is for Witching is a boldly original, terrifying, and elegant novel by a prodigious talent.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, White is For Witching, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9781594633072>.
-Contemporary Fantasy / Literary Fiction-
Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi
Publication Date: March 03, 2015
Description
As seen on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, where it was described as “gloriously unsettling… evoking Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, Angela Carter, Edgar Allan Poe, Gabriel García Márquez, Chris Abani and even Emily Dickinson,” and already one of the year’s most widely acclaimed novels:
“Helen Oyeyemi has fully transformed from a literary prodigy into a powerful, distinctive storyteller…Transfixing and surprising.”—Entertainment Weekly (Grade: A)
“I don’t care what the magic mirror says; Oyeyemi is the cleverest in the land…daring and unnerving… Under Oyeyemi’s spell, the fairy-tale conceit makes a brilliant setting in which to explore the alchemy of racism, the weird ways in which identity can be transmuted in an instant — from beauty to beast or vice versa.” – Ron Charles, The Washington Post
From the prizewinning author of What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, Gingerbread, and Peaces comes a brilliant recasting of the Snow White fairy tale as a story of family secrets, race, beauty, and vanity.
In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts looking, she believes, for beauty—the opposite of the life she’s left behind in New York. She marries Arturo Whitman, a local widower, and becomes stepmother to his winsome daughter, Snow.
A wicked stepmother is a creature Boy never imagined she’d become, but elements of the familiar tale of aesthetic obsession begin to play themselves out when the birth of Boy’s daughter, Bird, who is dark-skinned, exposes the Whitmans as light-skinned African-Americans passing for white. And even as Boy, Snow, and Bird are divided, their estrangement is complicated by an insistent curiosity about one another. In seeking an understanding that is separate from the image each presents to the world, Boy, Snow, and Bird confront the tyranny of the mirror to ask how much power surfaces really hold.
Dazzlingly inventive and powerfully moving, Boy, Snow, Bird is an astonishing and enchanting novel. With breathtaking feats of imagination, Helen Oyeyemi confirms her place as one of the most original and dynamic literary voices of our time.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Boy, Snow, Bird, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9781594633409>.
-Memoir-
I Heard Her Call My Name by Lucy Sante
Publication Date: February 13, 2024
Description
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Slate
“Reading this book is a joy . . . much to say about the trans journey and will undoubtedly become a standard for those in need of guidance. ” —The Washington Post
“Sante’s bold devotion to complexity and clarity makes this an exemplary memoir. It is a clarion call to live one’s most authentic life.” —The Boston Globe
“Not to be missed, I Heard Her Call My Name is a powerful example of self-reflection and a vibrant exploration of the modern dynamics of gender and identity.” —Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2024
An iconic writer’s lapidary memoir of a life spent pursuing a dream of artistic truth while evading the truth of her own gender identity, until, finally, she turned to face who she really was
For a long time, Lucy Sante felt unsure of her place. Born in Belgium, the only child of conservative working-class Catholic parents who transplanted their little family to the United States, she felt at home only when she moved to New York City in the early 1970s and found her people among a band of fellow bohemians. Some would die young, from drugs and AIDS, and some would become jarringly famous. Sante flirted with both fates on her way to building an estimable career as a writer. But she still felt like her life was a performance. She was presenting a facade, even to herself.
Sante’s memoir braids together two threads of personal narrative: the arc of her life, and her recent step-by-step transition to a place of inner and outer alignment. Sante brings a loving irony to her account of her unsteady first steps; there was much she found she still needed to learn about being a woman after some sixty years cloaked in a man’s identity, in a man’s world. A marvel of grace and empathy, I Heard Her Call My Name parses with great sensitivity many issues that touch our lives deeply, of gender identity and far beyond.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, I Heard Her Call My Name, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9780593493762>.
-Science Fiction-
Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia De La Cerda
Publication Date: September 10, 2024
Description
A debut collection of gritty, streetwise, and wickedly funny stories about Mexican women who fight, skirt, cheat, cry, kill, and lie their way to survival.
"Life's a bitch. That's why you gotta rattle her cage, even if she's foaming at the mouth." In the linked stories of Reservoir Bitches, thirteen Mexican women prod the bitch that is Life and become her. From the all-powerful daughter of a cartel boss to the victim of transfemicide, from a houseful of spinster seamstresses to a socialite who supports her politician husband by faking Indigenous roots, these women spit on their own reduction and invent new ways to endure, telling their own stories in bold, unapologetic voices. At once a work of black humor and social critique, Reservoir Bitches is a raucous debut from one of Mexico's most thrilling new writers.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Reservoir Bitches, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 23 February 2025, <https://bookshop.org/a/109400/9781558613119>.
Now that you've had the opportunity to browse through some extraordinary women authors and explore their books that you should consider reading, what are your thoughts? I, for one, am absolutely excited to indulge myself in a few of these delectable literary choices. The diversity of voices, perspectives, and experiences that women authors bring to the table is full of richness and offers a unique lens through which women view the world. There’s something really special about diving into narratives crafted by talented women, as they often weave intricate tales that resonate on multiple levels, addressing themes of identity, resilience, and empowerment. The contributions of women writers have significantly shaped the literary landscape, making it all the more essential to explore their works.
Each book represents not just a story, but a culmination of experiences, cultural backgrounds, and personal journeys that can broaden our understanding of the different aspects of being a woman but also life in general. The possibility of discovering a new favorite author or finding a book that speaks to your soul is unparalleled. Each title we add to our collection is an invitation to embark on a new adventure, to learn something new, and to connect with the thoughts and emotions of others. So, let’s celebrate the wealth of stories waiting to be uncovered and treat ourselves to the literary treasures that women authors have to offer! One can never truly have too many books, am I right?!? Happy reading friends!
To see all of the books included in this list and to purchase these books click the link below.
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