To celebrate International Women's Day this year, we asked the authors we admire to share their recommendations, and they delivered! From defining novels of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, to international bestsellers of the modern day—expect themes of motherhood, translation, rage, and resistance, amongst this essential reading list.
Tania Branigan
Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong by Louisa Lim
'Expertly reported and beautifully written, Louisa Lim’s Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong is a compelling portrait of one of the world’s great cities and upends conventional ideas about the place, showing what both British and Chinese accounts have missed. It’s essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the extraordinary protests of 2019, and an inspiring, personal exploration of identity and dissent.'
Tania Branigan is the Guardian foreign leader writer; she spent seven years as the Guardian's China correspondent. Her writing has also appeared in the Washington Post and the Australian. Red Memory is her first book.
Natasha Brown
Exposure by Olivia Sudjic
'This tiny book packs a massive punch. Exposure delivers a whirlwind tour of many of today’s great female writers, and examines the discourse that surrounds their work. I've gifted this book so many times, but always keep a copy for myself. Every time I revisit Exposure, I underline something new.'
Natasha Brown is a British novelist. Her debut novel Assembly was shortlisted for several awards including the Folio Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Orwell Prize for Fiction and was chosen as a Foyles Book of the Year.
Nicola Dinan
Bad Habit by Alana S. Portero (translated by Mara Faye Lethem)
'The English translation of Bad Habit by Alana S. Potero, the Spanish bestseller, is out in May this year. It’s a really vivid odyssey of a trans woman coming of age in a working-class suburb of Madrid. Portero’s prose is so commanding - she’s drawn a painful yet unquestionably hopeful novel.'
Nicola Dinan grew up in Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur and now lives in London. Bellies, her debut, was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and shortlisted for the Mo Siewcharran Prize. Her second novel, Disappoint Me, will be released in 2025.
Sinéad Gleeson
Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
'In the 1926 feminist classic Laura “Lolly” Willowes lives as a spinster aunt. After developing a “taste for botany” and tired of depending on male relatives, she begins to feel that “her mind was groping after something that eluded her experience”. Drawn to a country town, where people keep late hours, she is befriended by a cat. Walking the woods, Lolly finally realises that she is in fact a witch. Enamoured of her new independence, she makes a pact with Satan to hold on it. Daringly ahead of its time, it’s a funny, feminist plea to be left alone.'
Sinéad Gleeson’s essay collection Constellations: Reflections from Life won Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards and the Dalkey Literary Award for Emerging Writer. She is the editor of five anthologies including The Art of the Glimpse and the award-winning The Long Gaze Back: An Anthology of Irish Women Writers, and The Glass Shore: Short Stories by Women Writers from the North of Ireland. She is co-editor with Kim Gordon of This Woman’s Work: Essays on Music. Her debut novel, Hagstone, will be published in April 2024 by 4th Estate.
Xiaolu Guo
Translation as Transhumance by Mireille Gansel (translated by Ros Schwartz)
'I recommend Mireille Gansel’s Translation as Transhumance (translated by Ros Schwartz). It is a powerful and poetic book about memory and individual survival spanning cultures and languages. I felt a very intimate connection with Gansel’s idea that translation is about translating the ‘self’.'
Xiaolu Guo is a Chinese British novelist, memoirist and filmmaker. Her novels include A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, and I Am China. Her memoir Once Upon A Time In The East won the National Book Critics Circle Award 2017 and was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize, and her recent novel A Lover’s Discourse was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2020. Her memoir Radical: A Life of My Own was published by Chatto in 2023.
Kiran Millwood Hargrave
Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood by Lucy Jones
'Matrescence by Lucy Jones is many things, as mothers themselves must be. A scientific examination of the biological and physiological changes mothers undergo, a memoir of Jones' own experience of motherhood, a political manifesto for how things should and must change, and most of all a paean to the interconnectedness of all things, from vampire bats to the northern lights. Essential reading for anyone who is or has had a mother.'
Kiran Millwood Hargrave is the Sunday Times bestselling author of ten novels for children and adults, including The Mercies, The Girl of Ink & Stars, Julia and the Shark, and In the Shadow of the Wolf Queen. Her work has won numerous prizes including the Waterstones' Children's Book Prize, the Wainwright Prize, a Betty Trask Award, and the Prix Rive Gauche à Paris. Her stories have been translated into over thirty languages and optioned for stage and screen.
Rebecca F Kuang
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
'My pick is Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. I picked it up on a whim when traveling, and loved it much more than I did when I first read it in college. Now I am reading every piece of writing Plath ever produced that I can get my hands on – I’m a bit obsessed with Sylvia at the moment.'
Rebecca F Kuang is the award-winning, #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of the Poppy War trilogy, Babel: An Arcane History, and Foyles Fiction Book of the Year 2023, Yellowface. She has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford; she is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale.
Kate Mosse
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
'Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights is a novel I have re-read in every decade of my life, ever since I fell in love with it in my teens. A brilliant and ambitious novel, it's about obsession, about light and dark, about the power of landscape and the indifference of the natural world to human machinations, about violence and dangerous love, about race and the restrictions on women's lives. It's also a ghost story and offers a shocking insight into Victorian England, and its publication changed what it was possible for women to write. But the final paragraph - when the narrator Lockwood looks at the headstones of Heathcliff, Catherine Earnshaw and Edgar Linton on the moors - is all beauty, all reflection, and brings tears to my eyes every time I read it.'
Kate Mosse is the No 1 multi-million international bestselling author of eleven novels and short story collections, four works of non-fiction and four plays, including Labyrinth, The Ghost Ship and Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries: How Women (Also) Built the World. The Founder Director of the Women's Prize for Fiction and the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction, she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of the Society of Authors and a Trustee of the British Library.
Sheena Patel
Minor Detail by Adania Shibli (translated by Elisabeth Jaquette)
'I read this months ago and it still haunts me. It tells the story of one Palestinian woman’s efforts to find information about another who was killed by occupying Israeli forces in 1949, one year after the Nakba. Such deep ideas of belonging and land are conveyed by the smallest description - an insect bite, air conditioning, the size of a tent, a drive, a map. The writing is intensely poetic, like needle strikes on the body. A total masterclass.'
Sheena Patel is a writer and assistant director for the film and TV industry. She is part of the 4 BROWN GIRLS WHO WRITE collective and her debut novel I'm a Fan won the Discover Book of the Year at the British Book Awards 2023, has been longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Jhalak Prize and finalist in the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction Category for the L.A Times Book Prize. It was Foyles Fiction Book of the Year 2022 and an Observer Best Debut Novel of 2022.
Angela Saini
The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing by Sonia Faleiro
'I'm full of admiration for Sonia Faleiro's approach to reporting, which goes so deep into her subject that all nuance is retained. Investigating the horrific murder of two teenage girls in a village in Uttar Pradesh, India, Faleiro leaves no stone unturned. Everyone is interviewed, each perspective is given time to unfold. The Good Girls is a profoundly feminist book, reminding us that human beings are complex and that patriarchies are multifaceted.'
Angela Saini is a journalist and author based in New York. She teaches science writing at MIT and her work appears regularly in National Geographic, Science and Foreign Policy. Her 2019 book Superior: The Return of Race Science was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, and her latest, The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule, was a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing.
Zadie Smith
Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti
'I think Alphabetical Diaries by Shiela Heti is a future classic. A great concept executed perfectly.'
Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and Swing Time; as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia; three collections of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free and Intimations; a collection of short stories, Grand Union; and the play, The Wife of Willesden, adapted from Chaucer. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People. Zadie Smith was born in north-west London, where she still lives. The Fraud is her first historical novel.
Wiz Wharton
The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers
'Isolation, self-doubt and loneliness are fertile ground for novels, but rarely have they been handled with such authority as in The Member of the Wedding. This slim, ostensible bildungsroman about 12 year-old tomboy Frankie belies a work of profound emotional and political weight, by turns macabrely comic and frequently radical in its examination of belonging, identity and gender. A masterclass in narrative perspective and control, beautifully suffused with its protagonist's implied consciousness, this is a book where what actually happens is secondary to the imagined darkness - so pertinent to early adolescence - of what constantly threatens to happen. A book to savour, cherish and learn from.'
Wiz Wharton was born in London of Chinese-European heritage. She is a prize-winning graduate of the National Film and Television school, where she studied screenwriting under the filmmakers Mike Leigh, Stephen Frears and Kenith Trodd. Her debut novel Ghost Girl, Banana - a dual narrative set in 1960s London and 1990s Hong Kong on the cusp of its handover to China - deals with issues of identity, belonging and familial secrets. The book has been longlisted for the Authors Club Best First Novel Award and is currently being adapted for television. In 2023, she was named by the Scottish Government Expo Fund as one of the 40 writers predicted to set the literary world alight.
