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Best Books by Women

87 Books by Women You Should Read Before You Die

Without women, some pretty amazing things wouldn't exist. Book-lovers know best that women have changed the world in so many important ways — oftentimes, with their words. We've rounded up more than 80 novels, essays, poem collections, and memoirs written by female writers. Everyone should read these literary works in their lifetimes.

On Beauty by Zadie Smith

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

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Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

The Colour Purple by Alice Walker

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde

Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters

A Tale For the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

Ain't I a Woman by bell hooks

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Song of the Lioness series by Tamora Pierce

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman

Three Strong Women by Marie NDiaye

Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang

Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector

Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

The Giver by Lois Lowry

The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Wild by Cheryl Strayed

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

My Antonia by Willa Cather

Poems New and Collected by Wislawa Szymborska

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro

Interview With the Vampire by Anne Rice

Jubilee by Margaret Walker

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion

I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai

Passing by Nella Larsen

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

Heroines by Kate Zambreno

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

Kindred by Octavia Butler

The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

Obasan by Joy Kogawa

Nightwood by Djuna Barnes

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya

Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

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