Dr Ksenia Chmutina, with the help of friends and colleagues, has compiled a reading list sharing fiction and non-fiction reads about women. Covering themes of motherhood, resilience, romance, feminism, success, class and race to name a few, there’s something for everyone to enjoy and learn from.
The story of how each of the Gracie children have coped and failed to cope with their childhood.
The Magic Toyshop
Angela Carter
A novel that follows the development of Melanie as she becomes aware of herself, her environment, and her own sexuality.
Too Much Happiness
Alice Munro
A fictional retelling of the life of the 19th century Russian mathematician and writer Sofia Kovalevskaya.
Pinjar
Amrita Pritam
Pinjar is widely considered one of the outstanding works of Indian fiction set during the period of the Partition of India.
The Hate You Give
Angie Thomas
Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, this is a powerful and gripping novel about one girl's struggle for justice.
Girl, Woman, Other
Bernardine Evaristo
The lives and struggles of 12 very different characters - mostly women, black and British - who tell the stories of their families, friends and lovers, across the country and through the years.
Empty Houses
Brenda Navarro
The story that unfolds in the aftermath of a child's disappearance.
The Vanishing Half
Brit Bennett
A story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing.
Love in the New Millennium
Can Xue
Comical, topical, romantic, and often surreal stories of life on the ground in modern China.
Queenie
Candice Carty-Williams
A novel about the life and loves of Queenie Jenkins, a vibrant, troubled 25-year-old British Jamaican woman who is not having a very good year.
The World’s Wife
Carol Ann Duffy
A collection of poems that subverts the predominant notion of men and their thoughts as being superior and more valuable.
Americanah
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A young Nigerian woman, Ifemelu, immigrates to the United States to attend university.
Diary of a Provincial Lady
E. M. Delafield
A woman wittily portrays her everyday experiences, family life, and relations with her friends and neighbours in a small English town.
Neapolitan Novels
Elena Ferrante
A four-part series about female friendship.
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World
Elif Shefak
A one-woman story about a sex worker in Istanbul.
City of Girls
Elizabeth Gilbert
The lives of young and older women living in New York in the 1940s.
The Girls
Emma Cline
Powerful interpretation of ambiguous emotional vectors, and the catastrophic directions in which they can lead.
The Vegetarian
Han Kang
A novel about modern day South Korea, but also about shame, desire and our faltering attempts to understand each other.
Paula
Isabel Allende
A memoir and a tribute to by Isabel Allende’s deceased daughter Paula Frías Allende, who fell into a porphyria-induced coma in 1991 and never recovered.
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Jeanette Winterson
A coming-of-age story about a lesbian girl who grows up in an English Pentecostal community.
Girls Against God
Jenny Hval
A genre-warping, time-travelling horror novel slash-feminist manifesto.
Dept. of Speculation
Jenny Offill
A fragmentary novel about modern marriage.
The Farm
Joanne Ramos
A story about women serving as surrogates for wealthy clients.
The Women's Courtyard
Khadija Mastur
The book brings into focus the claustrophobic lives of women whose entire existence was circumscribed by the four walls of their homes, and the outside world remained a dream.
Sonechka
Ludmila Ulitskaya
An excellent introduction to contemporary Russian female writers, this is the life story of a Russian booklover.
The L-Shaped Room
Lynne Reid Banks
The story of a young unmarried and pregnant woman, who moves into a London boarding house, befriending a young man in the building.
The Shadow King
Maaza Mengiste
An exploration of female power, and what it means to be a woman at war.
The Women’s Room
Marilyn French
Set in 1950s America, the story follows the fortunes of Mira Ward, a conventional and submissive young woman in a traditional marriage, and her gradual feminist awakening.
Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson
The story of Ruth and her sister Lucille, who are cared for by their eccentric Aunt Sylvie after their mother commits suicide.
When I Hit You
Meena Kandasamy
The raw material of domestic abuse leads to a meditation on writing and a searing examination of a woman's place in contemporary Indian society.
The Female Persuasion
Meg Wolitzer
A novel about power and influence, ego and loyalty, womanhood and ambition.
The End We Start From
Megan Hunter
A lyrical vision of the strangeness and beauty of new motherhood, and a tale of endurance in the face of unimaginable change.
Breasts and Eggs
Meiko Kawakami
Stories of three women, all related but vastly different, in how they see themselves and how they define womanhood.
The Power
Naomi Alderman
Women developing the ability to release electrical jolts from their fingers, thus leading them to become the dominant gender.
Postcolonial Love Poem
Natalie Diaz
This collection is suffused with poems about romantic, erotic love. It is an anthem of desire against erasure.
The Eighth Life
Nino Haratischwili
The saga of a Georgian family living on the fringes of the Russian and Soviet empires.
Parable of the Sower
Octavia Butler
A book about a society broken into enclaves, all fighting for their survival.
Second Place
Rachel Cusk
A fable of human destiny and decline, enacted in a closed system of intimate, fractured relationships.
The Mars Room
Rachel Kushner
A story about what it means to be poor and female in America.
Witch
Rebecca Tamás
A thrilling, visceral and totally unexpected collection that is part poetry book, part questionnaire, and part spell book.
The Friend
Sigred Nunez
A moving story of love, friendship, grief, healing, and the magical bond between a woman and her dog.
The Tiger’s Wife
Téa Obhert
An allegory to illustrate the complexities of Balkan history.
The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison
A story of a young African-American girl named Pecola who grew up following the Great Depression.
Lost Children Archive
Valeria Luiselli
The story of children separating from the parent, crossing borders, facing death, being detained.
Property
Valerie Martin
An eerily mesmerising inquiry into slavery's venomous effects on the owner and the owned.
Long Live the Post Horn!
Vigdis Hjorth
This is an existential scream of a novel about loneliness (and the postal service!).
Homegoing
Yaa Gyasi
A novel of breath-taking sweep and emotional power that traces 300 years in Ghana.
Swing Time
Zadie Smith
The story takes place in London, New York and West Africa, and focuses on two girls who can tap dance.
The Purpose of Power: How to Build Movements for the 21st Century
Alicia Garza
The story of how she responded to the persistent message that Black lives are of less value than white lives by galvanising people to create change.
A celebration of freedom work, a movement genealogy, a call to action, and a challenge to those who think of abolition and feminism as separate political projects.
Assata
Assata Shakur
A 1988 autobiographical book written in Cuba where Shakur currently has political asylum.
Sister Outsider
Audre Lorde
A collection of essential essays and speeches exploring race, sexuality, poetry, friendship, the erotic and the need for female solidarity.
Burn it Down! Feminism Manifesto for the Revolution
Breanne Fahs
The most comprehensive collection of feminist manifestos, chronicling our rage and dreams from the nineteenth century to today.
Revolutionary Feminisms
Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah
A unique book, tracing 40 years of anti-racist feminist thought in a moment of rising authoritarianism, climate crisis, and ever more exploitative forms of neoliberal capitalism.
Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
Bell Hooks
Examination of the effect of racism and sexism on Black women, the civil rights movement, and feminist movements from suffrage to the 1970s.
Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower
Brittney Cooper
A book that reminds us why eloquent rage keeps us all honest and accountable, and that women don't have to settle for less.
Invisible Women
Caroline Criado Perez
An impressive range of case studies, stories and new research from across the world that shows how the world is designed for men.
The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism
Catherine Rottenberg
The book shows how leaning in self-determinedly sidelines collective efforts to secure equality.
Anarchafeminism
Chiara Bottici
A call for a decolonial and deimperial position and for a renewed awareness of the somatic communism connecting all different life forms on the planet.
Notes from a Feminist Killjoy: Essays on Everyday Life
Erin Wunker
Erin Wunker holds her own as an eloquent, very necessary voice in the ongoing discourse on gender politics.
A Decolonial Feminism
Francoise Verges
This powerful manifesto argues that feminists should no longer be accomplices of capitalism, racism, colonialism and imperialism.
The Country Under My Skin
Gioconda Belli
A memoir of the Nicaraguan revolution and Belli’s life, working secretly for the resistance until she had to flee the country and live in exile.
A Century of Female Revolution: From Peterloo to Parliament
Glynis Cooper
The book about fight for rights and equality.
Gender and the Politics of History
Joan Wallach Scott
This landmark work from a renowned feminist historian is a trenchant critique of women's history and gender inequality.
The Women's Revolution
Judy Cox
The inspiring story of how Russian women threw off centuries of oppression to strike, organise, liberate themselves and ultimately try to build a new world based on equality and freedom for all.
Black Towns, Black Futures
Karla Slocum
Succinctly written text that explores the Black towns that thrived in Oklahoma during the Jim Crow years.
Tomorrow Sex will be Good Again
Katherine Angel
This book helps open up the discussion about consent.
Demonic Grounds
Katherine McKittrick
A new powerful interpretation of Black women's geographic thought.
Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?
Katrine Marçal
An engaging takedown of the economics that shows us how different, how much better, things could be.
GIRL: Essays on Black Womanhood
Kenya Hunt et al.
A collection of original essays on what it means to be black, a woman, a mother and a global citizen.
Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism
Kristen R. Ghodsee
This book is about the links between female sexual pleasure and politics.
Feminist City: A Field Guide
Leslie Kern
The book combines memoir, feminist theory, pop culture, and geography, exposing the social inequalities built right into our cities, homes, and neighbourhoods.
Betraying Big Brother
Leta Hong Fincher
A story of how the movement against patriarchy could reconfigure China and the world.
China in One Village
Liang Hong
A story that recounts the forces that are undermining rural areas, and the helplessness of the people who live there.
I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death
Maggie O’Farrell
A memoir of the near-death experiences that have punctuated and defined O’Farrell’s life.
Beyond Power
Marilyn French
This examination of the nature and effects of power draws on the wide range of disciplines, to investigate the sources of patriarchy.
Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis
Nancy Fraser
The book charts the history of women’s liberation and calls for a revitalised feminism.
The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems
Nancy Folber
This book explains why the work of caring for others is under-valued and under-rewarded in today's global economy.
The Little Virtues
Natalia Ginzburg
A collection of essays exploring both the mundane details and inescapable catastrophes of personal life.
Seeing Like a Feminist
Nivedita Menon
Feminism is not about a moment of final triumph over patriarchy but about the gradual transformation of the social field.
Black Feminist Thought
Patricia Hill Collins
The book sets out to explore the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals and writers, both within the academy and without.
Against White Feminism
Rafia Zakaria
A radically inclusive, intersectional, and transnational approach to the fight for women’s rights.
Men Explain Things to Me
Rebecca Solnit
A collection of essays on what often goes wrong in conversations between men and women.
Complaint!
Sara Ahmed
An examination of what we can learn about power from those who complain about abuses of power.
The Yellow House
Sarah M. Broom
A memoir about the inexorable pull of home and family in the aftermath of a disaster.
Of Women
Shami Chakrabarti
A powerful, urgent and timely polemic on why women still need equality, and how we get there.
Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World
Sheila Rowbotham
A groundbreaking contribution to debates on women's oppression and consciousness, and the connections between socialism and feminism.
Unbought and Unbossed
Shirley Chisholm
An amazing insight into how Shirley Chisholm grew from a young girl from Brooklyn, to become America's first African American congresswoman.
Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation
Silvia Federici
Published in 2004, the book is among the most important works to explore gender and the family during the primitive accumulation of capital.
The Second Sex
Simone de Beauvoir
This seminal text is a historical account of women's disadvantaged position in society.
They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South
Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
An extensive study of the role of Southern white women in the plantation economy and slave-market system.
A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery and Resistance
Stella Dadzie
The story of the enslaved West Indian women in the struggle for freedom.
Women Who Read Are Dangerous
Stefan Bollman
A compelling selection of paintings, drawings, prints and photographs of women reading through the ages.
The Unwomanly Face of War
Svetlana Alexievich
This oral history of women in World War II chronicles the experiences of the Soviet women who fought on the front lines, on the home front, and in the occupied territories.
Feminist International
Veronica Gago
Leader of Latin America’s powerful new women’s movement rethinks the meaning of feminist politics.