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Books › Lists › Best Books About Motherhood
The most powerful fiction and memoir about motherhood — its joys, ambivalences, failures, and transformations.
Motherhood is one of the most written-about and least honestly examined experiences in literature — which makes the books that get it right exceptional. The best literary accounts of motherhood refuse the sentimentality that is routinely imposed on it: they show ambivalence and rage and grief and boredom alongside love, and they take seriously the question of what a woman loses and gains when she becomes a mother. The books on this list include some of the defining novels of feminist literature, harrowing accounts of the extremes of maternal love, and quiet, devastating observations of ordinary domestic life.
These are books for mothers and for daughters — and for readers who are neither but want to understand one of the most fundamental human relationships from the inside. BookBrowse’s expert editors have reviewed each of these titles in full, with discussion questions for book clubs that want to go deep.
by Toni Morrison
Beloved is Morrison's undisputed masterpiece. It elegantly captures her trademark touches: elegant prose, fantastical occurrences, striking characters, and racial tension.
by Lionel Shriver
Eva never really wanted to be a mother—and certainly not the mother of the unlovable boy who murdered fellow high-school friends and staff in a horrific rampage. Two years later, it is time for Eva to come to terms with her life and the decisions she made.
by Emma Donoghue
To five-year-old-Jack, Room is the world....
Told in the inventive, funny, and poignant voice of Jack, Room is a celebration of resilience - and a powerful story of a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible.
by Celeste Ng
Winner of the 2017 BookBrowse Fiction Award
From the bestselling author of Everything I Never Told You, a riveting novel that traces the intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson family and the enigmatic mother and daughter who upend their lives.
by Amy Tan
Four Chinese immigrant mothers and their American daughters reach across the gap of language, culture, and silence. Tan’s novel is about the stories mothers don’t tell their daughters and the way that silence — whatever it was meant to protect — often transmits the very wounds it was covering.
by Ann Patchett
The acclaimed, bestselling author - winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize - tells the enthralling story of how an unexpected romantic encounter irrevocably changes two families' lives.
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 Toni Morrison
A powerful tragedy distilled into a jewel of a masterpiece by the Nobel Prize–winning author of Beloved and, almost like a prelude to that story, set two centuries earlier.
by Jonathan Franzen
The Corrections brings an old-fashioned world of civic virtue and sexual inhibitions into violent collision with the era of home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental health care, and globalized greed.
by Jill Alexander Essbaum
A striking debut novel of marriage, fidelity, sex, and morality, featuring a fascinating heroine who struggles to live a life with meaning.
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