Literary Fiction by Women Writers Worth Reading & Rereading

Normal People is the story of mutual fascination, friendship, and love. The main characters, Connell and Marianne, grew up in the same town, but that’s where their similarities end. Connell is popular and well-liked. Marianne is a loner. Yet … when the two talk, something life-changing begins. Their dynamic reverses when the two attend Trinity College in Dublin. Still, they circle one another — straying, fighting, and magnetically coming back. But just how far are they willing to go — especially as self-destruction looms? You’ll have to read it to find out

Run, don’t walk, to your local bookstore to pick up Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. Named one of the New York Times’ 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, this book is a love story, but not like one you’ve read before. It follows Sam and Sadie — two college friends, often in love, but never lovers — who become creative partners in the world of video game design. When one collaboration launches them to stardom, the two are tested beyond measure, and risk losing more than a game. There’s betrayal. There’s ambition. There are intricately designed virtual worlds. And there’s a story you won’t forget.

The Vanishing Half is a multigenerational family saga that pierces you. The New York Times #1 bestseller follows the Vignes twin sisters, inseparable as children, who choose to live in two very different worlds. One sister lives with her Black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. The book explores the identities we’re born with and the ones we create, and keeps the pages turning.

If you’re looking for a crossover between a literary classic and a contemporary thriller, look no further than Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. This suspenseful novel is set at a New England college, where a group of clever, eccentric misfits learn to view the world very differently from their fellow students, all thanks to the influence of a charismatic professor. Their search for the transcendent eventually leads them down a dangerous path and makes each of them question their morality — and mortality. (The intrigue!)

Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet is a deeply moving novel about the death of Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son and the years leading up to the production of his great play Hamlet. It’s set in England in 1580, when the Black Death looms over everyday life. But that doesn’t stop a young Latin tutor from falling in love with an eccentric young woman — or the two from building a life and family together as his career takes off on the London stage. Or from their beloved son succumbing to the plague. Hamnet is an intimate portrait of 16th-century English life — and the ways art can emerge from loss.

Set against London’s racial and cultural tapestry, White Teeth follows two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Veterans of World War II, their families — and country — are transforming around them. Archie’s second marriage to a beautiful woman half his age gives him a second lease on life and produces a strong-willed daughter. Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage (he had to wait for her to be born) produces twin sons whose separate paths confound his every effort to direct them. What follows is a funny and sharp story that flirts with disaster.

The God of Small Things is part powerful family saga, part forbidden love story, and part piercing political drama — set in a country drifting dangerously toward unrest. The novel follows Estha and Rahel, seven-year-old twins from an affluent Indian family whose world is shaken by the arrival of their beautiful young cousin, Sophie. Her arrival leads to an illicit liaison, accidental (and intentional) tragedies, and things unsaid finally exposed. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times calls it “as subtle as it is powerful.”

Meet Olive: A retired schoolteacher who is at times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, and at other times in sad denial. Olive deplores the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine (and in the world at large), but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her. As everyone around her grapples with their problems, Olive is brought to a deeper understanding of herself and her life. Pulitzer Prize winner Olive Kitteridge offers a profound look into the human condition, including its conflicts, tragedies, and joys, and the endurance it all requires.

A Tale for the Time Being is a story of our shared humanity and the search for home. It starts in Tokyo, where 16-year-old Nao has decided on a final escape from her aching loneliness and classmates’ bullying. But before she ends it all, she plans to document the life of her great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived for more than a century. Across the Pacific, there’s Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao’s unknown fate, and forward into her own future. Both delightful and harrowing, Ozeki’s novel appeals to many.

Told across two timelines, Great Circle is the powerful story of Marian Graves, a daredevil female aviator determined to chart her own course in life. After surviving a sinking ocean liner as an infant and later dropping out of school, Marian sets off to fulfill her destiny of circumnavigating the globe. In the present day, Hadley Baxter is cast to play Marian in a film centered on Marian’s disappearance. Her immersion into Marian’s character unfolds alongside Marian’s own story, as their stories converge. As People puts it, it’s an “epic trip — through Prohibition and World War II, from Montana to London to present-day Hollywood — and you’ll relish every minute.”

The Great Believers is an award-winning novel about what it’s like to live during times of crisis. Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, sees his career begin to flourish, just as the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, his friend’s little sister. Three decades later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, Fiona is finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life. The two intertwining stories move us through the heartbreak of the ’80s and will keep you turning the page.

One of Oprah’s Best Books of the Year, Homegoing is set in 18th-century Ghana, where two half-sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery. The novel follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: From the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem. As The Root puts it, it’s “a timely, riveting portrayal of the global African Diaspora.”

The House of the Spirits is a rich family saga and riveting story of an unnamed Latin American country’s turbulent history. We follow the Trueba family, whose passions, struggles, and secrets span three generations and a century of violent social change. When a tipping point emerges, it brings a tyrannical patriarch and his beloved granddaughter to opposite sides of the fight. Against a backdrop of revolution and counterrevolution, Allende weaves a spirit-ridden world and fills it with colorful and all-too-human inhabitants. By the end, you’ll know why the San Diego Tribune describes Allende as “one of Latin America’s most inspired writers.”

Still Life is a sweeping portrait of people brought together by love, war, art, flood, and the ghost of E. M. Forster. In this Good Morning America Book Club pick, a young English soldier, Ulysses Temper, meets a kindred spirit in Evelyn Skinner, a middle-aged art historian intent on salvaging paintings from the rubble of war-torn Italy. Their chance encounter in Tuscany in 1944 shapes Ulysses’s life for the next four decades and ultimately brings him back to where it all began. It’s tender. It’s humorous. It’s full of light. And it is, as the author describes it, a celebration of beauty and love in all their forms.

If you want to step into Gilded Age New York society, The Age of Innocence is your ticket in. Set in the 1870s, this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel follows Newland Archer, an eligible young man from New York high society, who is about to announce his engagement. That is, until he meets his would-be fiancée’s cousin. She’s worldly, disregards society’s rules, and Newland is drawn to her. When the two develop a passionate bond, a classic love triangle takes shape. Suddenly, three young people find themselves drawn into a poignant and bitter conflict between love and duty. It’s complex and utterly fulfilling.