-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
Books › Lists › Best Books About Female Friendship
The most powerful novels about women’s friendships — loyalty, rivalry, intimacy, and the relationships that shape a life.
Female friendship is one of literature’s most underexplored subjects — and one of its most electric when authors get it right. The books on this list take seriously the bonds between women: the intensity that rivals romance, the rivalries that can be just as consuming, the specific kind of support that only another woman can provide, and the particular grief of losing a female friendship. These novels range from the sweeping multi-volume epic to the tight, campus-set novel, from Neapolitan Naples to small-town Massachusetts.
What they have in common is a refusal of sentimentality. Female friendship, in the best literary accounts, is not a soft thing — it is dynamic, demanding, and formative in ways that shape a life as definitively as any romantic relationship. BookBrowse’s expert editors have reviewed each of these titles in full, with discussion questions designed for book clubs who share the same investment in these relationships.
by Elena Ferrante
The first volume in Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels follows Elena and Lila from childhood through adolescence in postwar Naples — a friendship that is competitive, dependent, and larger than either of them can understand while it is happening. The most discussed novel about female friendship of the 21st century, and one of the best.
by Louisa May Alcott
Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March — four sisters in Civil War-era Massachusetts — figure out who they are against and alongside each other. Alcott’s 1868 novel is not just a children’s classic: it is one of the original and most enduring literary accounts of women choosing their lives.
by Liane Moriarty
Three mothers in a coastal Australian town orbit a murder investigation — which turns out to be about domestic violence and the friendships that form between women who recognize each other’s damage. Moriarty writes popular fiction that takes female friendship more seriously than most literary fiction.
by Sally Rooney
Frances and her ex-girlfriend Bobbi become enmeshed with an older married couple — and the friendship at the novel’s center is as destabilizing as any of the affairs. Rooney’s debut is precise about the ways young women perform intimacy before they know how to sustain it.
by Donna Tartt
A scholarship student joins a small group of classics students at a Vermont college, and their friendship eventually includes murder. Tartt’s novel is not quite about female friendship — most of its characters are male — but the dynamics of intense intellectual friendship, complicity, and betrayal are rendered with exceptional acuity.
by Gail Honeyman
Smart, warm, uplifting, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is the story of an out-of-the-ordinary heroine whose deadpan weirdness and unconscious wit make for an irresistible journey.
by Mary McCarthy
Eight Vassar graduates navigate New York in the 1930s — careers, marriages, politics, sexual freedom. McCarthy’s 1963 novel is satirical and feminist and remarkably frank about sex for its time. It is also one of the most detailed literary accounts of what a cohort of women become over time.
by Elizabeth Strout
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Olive Kitteridge offers profound insights into the human condition – its conflicts, its tragedies and joys, and the endurance it requires.
by Elif Batuman
Selin starts Harvard in the mid-1990s, makes a best friend, and becomes obsessed with a Hungarian email correspondent. Batuman’s semi-autobiographical novel is intensely funny about the formation of intellectual female friendship — the particular quality of a friend who reads everything and notices everything.
by Sarah Waters
A Victorian oyster-girl follows a male impersonator from Whitstable to London and into a life she couldn’t have imagined. Waters’s exuberant debut is a love story, but the female friendships — and the communities of women that sustain Nan through her various misadventures — are what give it its engine.
BookBrowse members get full access to professional reviews, reading guides, and discussion questions for all 10 books above — free.
Join BookBrowse freeAlready a member? Log in →
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
