85 novels by women that you should 100% read
Read more books by women.
Here are 85 titles I really enjoyed with no other qualifications than 1) I think they are good 2) you might like them, 3) they are written by women, and 4) no author is recommended more than once.
They are in alphabetical order by author. Here we go:
- Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
2. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
3. Brick Lane by Monica Ali
4. The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
5. How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents by Julia Alvarez
6. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
7. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
8. Persuasion by Jane Austen
9. Funhome by Allison Bechdel
10. Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
11. Oronooko by Aphra Behn
12. The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen
13. the works of Anne Bradstreet
14. Ruby by Cynthia Bond
15. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
16. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
17. The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
18. Kindred by Octavia E Butler
19. My Antonia by Willa Cather
20. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
21. Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
22. The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisero
23. The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins
24. The Collected Work of Emily Dickinson
25. Play it As it Lays by Joan Didion
26. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
27. Middlemarch by George Elliot
28. Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
29. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
30. the entire Neopolitan series by Elena Ferrante
31. The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank
32. Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff
33. The conservationist by Nadine Gordimer
34. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
35. The Book of Unknown Americans by Christina Henriquez
36. Barbara the Slut by Lauren Holmes
37. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
38. The Haunting of the Hill by Shirley Jackson
39. The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
40. Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid
41. The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
42. The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner
43. Passing by Nella Larson
44. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
45. Small Island by Andrea Levy
46. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle
47. Left Hand Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin
48. A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Elena McBride
49. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
50. The Giant’s House by Elizabeth McCracken
51. The Night Guest by Fiona McFarland
52. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
53. All the Living by C.E. Morgan
54. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
55. The Middleman by Bharati Mukherjee
56. Dear Life by Alice Munro
57. The Collected Short Stories of Flannery O’Connor
58. The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht
59. Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta
60. There Once was a Woman Who Tried to Kill her Neighbors Baby by Ludmilla Petrushvskaya
61. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
63. The Mysteries of Udolpho by Anne Radcliff
63. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
64. Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
65. The Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling
66. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
67. Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
68. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
69. Frankenstein by Mary Alice Shelley
70. The Tale of Genji by Muraski Shikibu
71. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
72. White Teeth by Zadie Smith
73. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
74. A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit
75. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
76. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
77. A Secret History by Donna Tartt
78. Love Me Back by Merritt Trace
79. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
80. Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
81. The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty
82. The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West
83. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
84. The Interestings by Meg Woltzer
85. To the Lighthouse by Virgina Woolf
This is not a comprehensive list. If a title you love is not here, I probably just haven’t read it so PLEASE send it to me.
