Good Reads Best for Womens Book Clubs

Recommendations

The perfect reads for your book club

This listing of modern masterpieces and timeless classics is guaranteed to stimulate a lively give-and-take.

Here'due south to book clubs – those thought-provoking, friendship-forming, cheese-nibbling evenings spent catching up with boyfriend readers.

Whether you're sticking to online or making the leap back into IRL meetings, the tricky part can sometimes be finding the right volume to read. If your group loves to observe the newest affair, then take a look at our rundown of the unmissible summer debuts, just otherwise there is much joy to be found in older books with themes that feel as relevant today as ever.

Here nosotros suggest a rolling update of our favourites – old and new – to cater to all volume social club tastes. Let united states know how you get on!

The Herdby Emily Edwards (2022)

Themes: ideals, vaccinations, child-rearing

The way that friendships evolve when children come up into our lives is a momentous part of many people's lives. And it'southward into these murky waters that author Emily Edwards delves with The Herd, a prescient debut novel that explores the divisive issue of vaccinating children. The Herd follows a rupture in the shut friendship of mothers Elizabeth and Bryony when a white lie leads to tragedy at a children's birthday party. This pertinent novel about vaccination couldn't be more timely - and, in the words of bestselling author Clare Mackintosh, "will accept book clubs across the state in hot debate."

When We Were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo (2022)

Themes: inheritance, death, grief

If your book order is full of people keen to discover new voices, await no further: Ayanna Lloyd Banwo has won comparisons to Arundhati Roy with her gorgeous debut novel, When We Were Birds. At once an unconventional honey story and a meditation on grief, inheritance and what we leave behind when nosotros die, Banwo'southward novel veers deftly into the realm of magical realism while rooting itself firmly in issues that ascertain our lives.

A Taste of Power by Elaine Brown (1992)

Themes: Ceremonious Rights movement, racism, life stories

Not a novel, but a vital memoir that ofttimes reads like one, A Taste of Ability has been called "chilling, well-written, and profoundly entertaining" by The New York Review of Books. Republished xxx years afterwards its original release, Brown's memoir tells the remarkable story of how she became the first female leader of the Black Panthers, subsequently growing upward in poverty in Philadelphia and experiencing a political enkindling as a teenager. This is a volume that will teach yous something new, and leave y'all with plenty to think about.

Pandora by Susan Stokes-Chapman (2022)

Themes: Ancient mythology, Georgian London, romance

If your book order WhatsApp channel was overtaken past Bridgerton hot takes final year, may we suggest Pandora? Susan Stokes-Chapman's brilliantly fallacious debut reels you into a mystery that revels in two historical playgrounds: those of Ancient Greece and Georgian London. Aspiring jewellery creative person Dora Blake is led to the charms of Edward Lawrence, a scholar, when a Greek vase is delivered to her parents' antiquities shop. The two terminate up with more than than they bargained for in attempting to understand it in this atmospheric journeying to the past.

The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller (2021)

Themes: Romance, mid-life, family legacy

Miranda Cowley Heller may be a debut novelist, but she's no stranger to good stories. A one-time books editor, she spent a decade as Head of Drama Series at HBO. No wonder, so, that The Newspaper Palace is a gripping, devastating read. Told betwixt the mid '50s and the passing hours of a contemporary summertime in a New England embankment backwater, The Newspaper Palace hooks you in until the end – when events reach a climax that y'all'll be drastic to discuss.

Read more: The best summertime reads for your book gild

Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead (2021)

Themes: Womanhood, legacy, appetite

Maggie Shipstead'southward third novel was an instant New York Times Bestseller and landed itself in the 2021 Man Booker Prize long list. Not plenty to convince yous? It's a moving and clever read that dovetails the biographies of two remarkable fictional women - both of whom have familiar real equivalents. Marian Graves is an early aviation heroine, attempting to be the start woman to fly around the world longitudinally, beyond both poles. She disappears within attain of her concluding hurdle, but her story lives on in the hands of Hadley Baxter, a modern-day Hollywood ingenue who hopes to resuscitate her career in a Graves biopic. By entwining these ii lives, Shipstead paints a gorgeous story of womanhood across the decades.

The Twelvemonth of the Witchingby Alexis Henderson (2021)

Themes: Gothic, history, womanhood

Alexis Henderson'south electrifying debut won a suitably cult audience upon its release concluding twelvemonth. The Year of the Witching follows Bethel, a immature adult female with prophetic abilities powerful plenty to lure her away from her puritanical upbringing and into a war of a scale she could never have imagined.

A dark and compelling tale, The Twelvemonth of the Witching has won comparisons to The Handmaid's Tale, if Atwood's fundamentalist dystopian state was prepare in the time of the Salem witch trials instead. Escapist and thrilling, it's jump to exist a read that your group have plenty to say nearly.

Read more than: 15 spellbinding books that celebrate witches and witchcraft

The Fire Next Fourth dimension by James Baldwin (1963)

Themes: Ceremonious Rights Motility, racial equality, social justice

Does your book lodge read non-fiction? It can be a great style to get stuck into a book that demands conversation subsequently reading. Pretty much any of James Baldwin'due south work would exist a wise option to read as a group, just Baldwin'due south short but vital duo of "letters" is a adept place to start. The Fire Adjacent Time became a bestseller upon its release in 1963, capturing the mood of a nation on the brink of a civil rights movement and exposing America'due south terrible legacy of racial injustice. Well-nigh 60 years on and Baldwin's book remains pertinent as ever as a ways of reflecting on what has been – and what nonetheless needs to be – washed to gain equality.

Read more: Where to start with James Baldwin

The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell (2021)

Themes: family trauma, parenthood

Nix gets the conversation flowing at a book lodge quite like a adept mystery novel, where the motives and actions of the characters are equally fun to dissect as the twists and turns of the action. At that place is no author more perfect to fill this brief than Lisa Jewell, whose superbly-written psychological thrillers take been gripping readers for decades, and no ameliorate novel than her latest – The Dark She Disappeared. Centred on a common cold case of a missing daughter and her complex relationship with her mother, abandoned mansions, mysterious notes and deep-rooted family hurting also play their part in a book that's unpredictable to the very end and too expert not to talk about.

Read more: Lisa Jewell on the books that have shaped her life

Luckenboothby Jenni Fagan (2021)

Themes: feminism, history, structuralism

The tertiary novel from Jenni Fagan is a marvel. A thorny, gripping tumble through a century, and a towering Edinburgh tenement edifice, that places a dozen outsiders in a tight fist of the events that take happened before them. How much does our by shape u.s.a., how much agency do we have in changing our fates and what power do women have in a world built by men?

Fagan's ambitious novel tackles these swaggering themes with passion and flair, as quirks from real history collide with a heady gothicism. Luckenbooth isa swift-to-read novel that volition go on you in its grip long after you close the covers.

Read more: How I wrote information technology: Jenni Fagan on Luckenbooth

Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson (2020)

Themes: race, masculinity, young dear

At just 160-odd pages, Caleb Azumah Nelson's debut novel is a slip of a thing, merely the heartache it manages to contain within its pages is enormous. This is a book nigh the near misses of beloved, love besides intense for the life it stumbles upon. Set against a richly drawn backdrop of gimmicky Due south London, music, books and institutional racism color the feel of our hero. A vital and beautiful story.

Read more than: 'I met Malorie Blackman and was starstruck': 21 Questions with Caleb Azumah Nelson

Bluish Ticket by Sophie Mackintosh (2020)

Themes: maternity, feminism, costless choice

The determination whether or not to have children feels, in some ways, bigger today than always with the future of the planet and then uncertain. What if that choice was taken out of your easily? In the follow-upward to her Booker-nominated The Water Cure, Sophie Mackintosh envisions a earth in which women are allocated their reproductive fates by the government as soon as they have their showtime menses.

A novelist with already unmistakable style, the luminescence of Blue Ticket lies in its ambiguity. This is less a fully realised dystopia than a smudgy mirror on the earth we inhabit today that will requite you plenty to chew over most how nosotros discuss – and dictate – the role of female bodies in gild. Every bit Mackintosh told us: "women's pain is not something that tin be put aside".

Read more: Sophie Mackintosh interview: 'Women's hurting is something that can't exist put aside'

Childhood, Youth, Dependency past Tove Ditlevsen (2021)

Themes: addiction, memoir, creativity

Terminal twelvemonth saw the long-overdue publication of the trilogy of memoirs by Tove Ditlevsen, a well-known, controversial effigy in Kingdom of denmark who has taken a century to be recognised in the UK. The Copenhagen Trilogy, as the series is known, is compelling and tragic and delivered in Ditlevsen's trademark dry wit. She depicts a life of ascending to the literary circles of Copenhagen from a childhood survived in the urban center's poorest neighbourhoods, with plenty of sick-advised life decisions fabricated along the manner.

Ditlevsen may exist being heralded as an autofiction master, but she has ever won over women readers. If you loved Elena Ferrante's Neopolitan Novels, y'all will devour The Copenhagen Trilogy.

Read more: Tove Ditlevsen: Why information technology's time to find Denmark's well-nigh famous literary outsider

The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2019)

Themes: race, politics, power

Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of America's foremost critical thinkers on culture, politics and social issues. He is also, somewhat unfairly, a brilliant prose writer with souvenir for storytelling that made his debut novel, The Water Dancer, a favourite of Oprah Winfrey and other literary tastemakers in the US.

A blend of historical fiction and magic realism, it tells the story of Hiram Walker, a man built-in into slavery on a Virginia plantation who besides has a mysterious, superhuman power to send himself and others beyond incommunicable distances. In a twelvemonth when race relations in the The states has dominated news around the earth, this brilliant and compelling novel feels even more pertinent.

Read more: The debut novels that should be on your radar

Victory by James Lasdun (2019)

Themes: wedlock, friendship, sexual politics

If your book social club is full of busy people, this duo of novellas might be only the ticket. The first, 'Feathered Glory', is a painfully astute delineation of a seemingly traquil marriage that's disrupted when the husband randomly encounters an old flame.

But it'south the 2nd, 'Afternoon of a Faun', that was widely discussed upon publication for being one of the first pieces of literary fiction to grapple with male culpability in the post #MeToo era. In information technology, the protagonist'due south friend, a minor glory, is defendant of a historical rape and the story follows his struggle to discover out the truth and reckon with his conflicting senses of loyalty and morality. Brilliantly truthful and never didactic, few books of the modern era have made the case for the value of fiction like this one.

The Secret to Superhuman Force by Alison Bechdel (2021)

Themes: creativity, exercise, crumbling

The pioneering cartoonist never meant to write anything too serious with her latest graphic memoir. But then eight years went by and she realised that a lifelong fascination with exercise had helped her through some of the toughest moments of Bechdel's life. Roofing grief, mortality, inventiveness and the difficulty of giving ourselves a break, The Surreptitious to Superhuman Strength offers Bechdel's trademark wit and humanity with familiarity.

Read more: 'Yous have to let things die': how Alison Bechdel's exercise memoir became a matter of life and decease

We Are All Birds of Republic of uganda by Hafsa Zayyan (2021)

Themes: family tradition, history, religion

Zayyan's debut won the inaugural Merky Books New Author'south Prize even before she finished the manuscript. The resulting book is a dazzler, an ambitious and exploratory novel that spans mid-century Republic of uganda and modernistic-day U.k..

Sameer is a millennial caught betwixt a high-flying career every bit a lawyer, and an inexplicable want to navigate his family history. Hassan is living a comfortable, if grief-stricken, life in Republic of uganda when Idi Amin's expulsion of the land's Asian minority in 1972 changes his family'southward destiny forever.

There'southward plenty to larn about and discuss from Nosotros Are All Birds of Uganda - as well equally the opportunity to discover a startling new literary vox in Zayyan.

Read more than: How I wrote it: Hafsa Zayyan on We Are All Birds of Uganda

Girl, Adult female, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (2019)

Themes: dearest, sex, generational divides, queer identity

To avoid the volume social club curse – people not doing the reading and trying to blag it on the twenty-four hours – try the most enjoyable book of 2019. Non but will anybody finishGirl, Woman, Other, they'll probably exercise so early. On paper, the Booker-winnersounds similar it could be a bit of a slog; a huge cast of characters spanning multiple generations, dealing with complex themes like gender identity and intergenerational conflict. Nevertheless from the first page to the last it is a palpable joy, such is the wit and verve of Evaristo's prose, her ability to do heavy emotional earthworks with the deftness of touches. As the narrative breezes through the lives of twelve women – ranging from an elderly matriarch struggling through a family dinner to a young student finding her feet at university – each is brilliantly and believably evoked. Then much to enjoy; so much to talk about afterwards.

Read more than: Bernadine Evaristo on the books that shaped her life

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

Themes: PTSD, womanhood, aging and mental health

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Quite a lot of people, it seems. Depending on the book guild, to raise Mrs Dalloway equally next month's option might well be accused of beingness anything from trite to pretentious, such is the reputation of Modernist literature's leading lady. Cast abroad those presumptions, though, and Woolf's searing portrayal of aging domesticity - and London in a post-pandemic word – in the wake of the First Globe War has the potential to conjure all manner of conversations on matters that still resonate today. There's as well the opportunity to bed in with Woolf'due south famed stream-of-consciousness writing style, which radically changed the literary grade we read today, and like only the best books holds new pregnant for every age.

Read more: Why Mrs Dalloway is the perfect novel for our times

If I Had Your Face up past Frances Cha (2020)

Themes: womanhood, plastic surgery, trauma

Plastic surgery, trauma and fine art collide in a claustrophobic housing cake in Seoul, Korea, in Frances Cha'south intoxicating novel. Post-obit four young women as they navigate the difficulties of finding independence – both in spirit and finances – and escaping their pasts, If I Had Your Confront is a fascinating novel with plenty to talk nigh.

Read more than:If I Had Your Face paints a circuitous new moving-picture show of Korean womanhood

Territory of Calorie-free by Yuki Tsushima (1979)

Yuki Tsushima'southward sparse and stunning novel was originally published equally a series of short stories in the late Seventies, merely you'd exist forgiven for thinking she was a woman writing from the 21st century. Tsushima's narrator is a recently separated woman with a three-year-former daughter, with whom she lives in a compact, light-filled apartment in Tokyo. She is non, on paper, a "expert" female parent - she leaves her child solitary, she gets drunkard. And yet it's impossible not to feel intrigued past Tsushima's graphic symbol. Delicately exploring the ideas of motherhood, feminism and autonomy, Territory of Low-cal is equally pertinent a read at present as it was xl years ago.

Read more: The xx must-read classics in translation

Ordinary People by Diana Evans (2018)

Themes: modern marriage, black identity, domesticity

Non to exist confused with Sally Rooney's Normal People, this realistic novel paints a portrait of a wedlock that, thirteen years in, is running dry. Evans' has previously spoken of her ambition 'to see the everyday in middle-form black lives normalised and humanised' and in Melissa and Michael'south ('1000&Thou') Crystal Palace home, things seem gratingly familiar - until they don't, and the otherworldly starts to unfold.

For those who accept a soft spot for the traditional novel, Evans has earned comparisons to Dickens and Tolstoy, such is her ability to create a consummate and familiar world. Which ways that, even if yous don't want to talk well-nigh relationships, spousal relationship or long-term honey, there is the recent history of Banter Obama's inauguration and the death of Michael Jackson to reconsider as a group.

A Calendar month in the Country – J. Fifty. Carr (1980)

Themes: memory, loss, rural life, the lost golden age of England

Not for nothing did the much-lauded literary podcast Backlisted brand this 1980 Booker-nominee the subject of its first-ever episode. You'd be hard pressed to find a more perfect novella, nor one so strangely overlooked. Information technology'south tells the deceptively simple story of a unmarried, rejuvenating summer spent uncovering a mural in a village church by Tom Birkin, a restoration expert and war veteran escaping London in the wake of a failed wedlock.A Month in the Land richly and gently evokes rural English life – both its scenery and bandage of eccentric characters – but without ever getting misty-eyed or glib. As a prompt for exploring the topic of nostalgia and national graphic symbol in the year we leave the Eu, this is just the ticket.

Pino by Francine Toon (2020)

Themes: spiritualism, isolation, motherhood

Francine Toon'due south chilling debut constitute its place on plenty of breathless preview lists before its release in January, merely at that place are improve reasons that mere hype to bring a new release to a book club. Pine works deceptively difficult. Toon'due south elegantly minimalist prose immerses the reader in a remote and tight-knit Highlands customs, steeped in silence and superstition. Nosotros find it through the lens of 11-year-old Lauren and her struggling, borderline-alcoholic single male parent, around whom increasingly unsettling things beginning to happen. Masterfully, Toon never fully clarifies who is tidying their gloomy footling business firm, nor what leaves the scent of 'something rotten, like meat left in the sun' - which ways there's all the more to be discussed as a group.

Read more: 'We are the granddaughters of the witches yous couldn't burn': Francine Toon on the Sarah Everard vigil

The Thing About December – Donal Ryan (2014)

Themes: coming-of-historic period, grief, the Irish crash

Novels with thousand political points to make are all well and expert – and indeed, this 2014 novel has plenty to say virtually the economic flagrancy of pre-recession Ireland – just what really makes for a proficient volume club word is the way characters make you feel. For one who will play with your center like a rag doll, meet Donal Ryan's protagonist Johnsey Cunliffe, function of fine literary tradition of big-hearted but not-too-bright giants pitted against a cruel world. Newly orphaned, the young Johnsey struggles with the upkeep his family subcontract in Ireland while local vultures circle his manor. Grieving, lonely and sick-equipped, his life takes a turn for the better when he befriends a nurse and a fellow local oddball.

The Thing About December is wonderfully deplorable and devastatingly funny, executed with a lyrical beauty that is oftentimes stunning, with clear shades of Flowers For Algernon, Of Mice and Men and Woods Gump among others.

Read more: "This is my near personal novel still": Donal Ryan on Strange Flowers

Acts of Agony by Megan Nolan (2021)

Themes: youth, relationships, dependency

Megan Nolan'southward highly anticipated debut novel reads every bit the author intended: as if you're sucked into the intense relationship she describes within its pages. A relentless and compulsive book, Acts of Desperation follows the falling in and out of love of the anonymous narrator with a chilly and coercive artist, who makes a reluctant boyfriend. In the process, Nolan interrogates what it is to desire to love more than than another person wants y'all, and the lengths people will go to achieve the romance society has promised them.

Read more: Megan Nolan: the books that shaped my life

Disgrace by J. Yard. Coetzee (1999)

Themes: abuse of ability, consent, race

This Nobel Prize-winning novel follows David Lurie, a middle-aged professor in Greatcoat Town who has an matter with a immature educatee. When it ends and she makes a complaint to the academy, he is publicly shamed but refuses to apologise. Sound familiar? Coetzee's slender masterpiece (Disgrace is only 220 pages long) was lauded for its examination of post-apartheid in South Africa in 1999, but is finding fresh relevance in the post-#MeToo era thanks to its protagonist, a powerful, pompous homo who is appalled when his ain daughter is attacked while existence unable – or unwilling – to meet his own behaviour in a similar low-cal. Coetzee is at the acme of his powers hither, sifting through giant and complex themes with prose as taunt as a drum.

Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder (2021)

Themes: Motherhood, creativity, magic-realism

If you've ever been alone in the house with a small child, thinking wistfully about your life before children, Nightbitch will be an illuminating read. Rachel Yoder's incendiary debut has won praise from Carmen Maria Machado and Jenny Offil for her unflinching and funny portrayal of how an artist turns gradually into a dog after giving up her job to heighten her son. Sound wild? It is. In that location's plenty to chew on here.

Read more: Get to know our 2021 debut authors

What It Feels Like For A Girl by Paris Lees (2021)

Themes: adolescence, Noughties guild civilisation, LGBTQ identity

Paris Lees made her name as a journalistic breath of fresh air, discussing sex, dating and politics every bit a trans woman. But her first book, What It Feels Similar For A Girl, marks Lees out every bit a serious literary talent. Funny and heartbreaking, this memoir reads like a novel equally we follow 13-year-old Byron Lees through a youth of misadventure – sex work, drugs and imprisonment – in a quest for freedom from their small-minded Nottinghamshire hometown.

Read more: Interview: Paris Lees is dancing on her own

The Lonely Londoners by Samuel Selvon (1956)

Themes: immigration, identity, the Windrush generation

Immigration dominated British politics earler this year, with the government announcing a new 'indicate-based' entry system and the Windrush Generation deportations being carried out against an ongoing outcry. What ameliorate time to revisit one the finest works of fiction nearly the latter, Samuel Selvon'south classic novella The Lonely Londoners. It follows several West Indians who arrive in the capital following the 1948 British Nationality Act, which granted citizenship to those living in Commonwealth countries. A freewheeling and somewhat raucous affair, the book centres on Trinidadian Moses Aloette, a veteran who takes new arrivals to London under his wing and shows them how to survive. Full of sex, scams and adventure, it'southward as well a quietly touching insight into immigrant life and the sorrow of existence far from habitation.

Read more: Books that define the Windrush experience

Summer by Ali Smith

Themes: aging, the migrant crisis, current affairs

The 4th book in Ali Smith's Seasonal was released in September, completing one of the most revolutionary publishing experients of the decade. If y'all've not read Fall, Winter or Jump, no thing - Smith'southward books, like the seasons they represent, work in a bike. If you have, you'll know that there is enough to savor - and talk over - here: the migrant crisis, the passing of time, parenting and lost dear. This is a beautiful and profund volume for our times.

Read more: Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet: an oral history

Nosotros Have Ever Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (1962)

Themes: isolation, domesticity, horror

Always controversial, long loved past other writers, over the past decade Shirley Jackson has enjoyed something of a (posthumous) revival among modern readers. Her sparse prose is brilliantly engaging, her images and ideas are chilling, her characters are unforgettable. At a fourth dimension of information overload, there is something irresistibly simple about the dark worlds Jackson creates. Where meliorate to start with unsettling story of sisters, We Have E'er Lived in the Castle?

Read more: Eerie, anxious, foreboding: no wonder we tin't get plenty of Shirley Jackson

Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi

Themes: motherhood, India, inheritance

What do we comport from those who came before usa? How do our relationships with our mothers inform those who nosotros mother? Avni Doshi explores these questions and more in this evocative, unsettling novel, which was one of four debuts shortlisted for the Booker Prize this year. This is a book that is bound to provoke strong feelings and fascinating discussions - and one of the nearly searing pieces of writing to emerge from 2020.

Read more: Avni Doshi interview: 'Ambiguity is intrinsic to motherhood'

Fates and Furies past Lauren Groff (2015)

Themes: union, retention, gender

One of the nigh interesting themes to sally in literary fiction in recent years has been the playing with perspectives, and narrative expectations, around gender. Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry (2018) started as a portrait of a famous male writer so played a succulent sleight-of-hand to put its female protagonist centre stage. Fleishman Is In Trouble, past Taffy Brodesser-Akner (2019), did something similar by keeping the titular grapheme's wife both unsympathetic and firmly at arm'south length until a virtuoso last third. The precursor to both of these hits was Lauren Groff'south wonderful 2015 novelFates and Furies, which charts a union in ii parts: the story of talented just wayward playwright Lance, followed past his beautiful but elusive wife Mathilde. Fans of TV showThe Affair (before it became rubbish) volition dear the differing perspectives on the same relationship. Fans of practiced writing will dearest Groff'south mastery of everything, from dialogue and scenery to suspense and delivering an emotional wallop.

How's your volume club going? Let us know at editor@penguinrandomhouse.co.great britain.

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Source: https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2020/feb/the-ultimate-book-club-reads-for-2020.html

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