Your TBR pile should include all of these important books by women writers from around the world.
1. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Color Purple won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
2. Baddawi by Leila Abdelrazaq
via pinterest.com
Baddawi is a coming-of-age story about a young boy named Ahmad struggling to find his place in the world.
3. So Long a Letter by Mariama Ba
via pinterest.com
So Long a Letter is a semi-autobiographical epistolary novel originally written in French by the Senegalese writer Mariama Bâ. Its theme is the condition of women in Western African society.
4. The Butterfly Prison by Tamara Pearson
via open-bks.com
The Butterfly Prison is a tapestry of vignettes that tells the hushed-up, little stories that unfold within a world characterized by diminishment and shame, the stories of the disenfranchised, the stories of Paz and Mella.
5. Fledgling by Octavia Butler
via pinterest.com
The novel tells the story of Shori, who appears to be a 10- or 11-year-old African-American girl, but is actually a 53-year-old member of a race called “Ina”, or vampires.
6. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
It is a story about the childhood experiences of fraternal twins whose lives are destroyed by the “Love Laws” that lay down “who should be loved, and how. And how much.”
7. Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy
via pinterest.com
Woman on the Edge of Time is considered a classic of utopian “speculative” science fiction as well as a feminist classic.
8. Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Half of a Yellow Sun tells the story of the Biafran War through the perspective of the characters Olanna, Ugwu, and Richard.
9. Things We Left Unsaid by Zoya Pirzad
via pinterest.com
Things We Left Unsaid is a multi-award winning novel set in southern Iran. It follows an Iranian-Armenian housewife’s struggles to find fulfilment within her family’s expectations.
10. Maya’s Notebook by Isabel Allende
via pinterest.com
The novel depicts Maya Vidal, a young adult from Berkeley, California who travels to Chiloé, a region in Chile.
11. Sirena Selena: A Novel by Mayra Santos-Febres
via pinterest.com
Discovered by Martha Divine in the backstreets of San Juan, picking over garbage, drugged out of his mind and singing boleros that transfix the listener, a fifteen year old hustler is transformed into Sirena Selena, a diva whose uncanny beauty and irresistible voice will be their ticket to fame and fortune.
12. Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat
via pinterest.com
The novel deals with questions of racial, linguistic and gender identity in interconnected ways.
13. The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich
via pinterest.com
The unsolved murder of a farm family still haunts the white small town of Pluto, North Dakota, generations after the vengeance exacted and the distortions of fact transformed the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation.
14. The Country Under My Skin by Gioconda Belli
via pinterest.com
An electrifying memoir from the acclaimed Nicaraguan writer and central figure in the Sandinista Revolution.
15. The Secret River by Kate Grenville
via pinterest.com
The Secret River is a historical novel about an early 19th-century Englishman transported to Australia for theft.
16. God Help the Child by Toni Morrison
Spare and unsparing, God Help the Child weaves a tale about the way the sufferings of childhood can shape, and misshape, the life of the adult.
17. Wash by Margaret Wrinkle
An unforgettable journey across continents and through time, from the burgeoning American South to West Africa and deep into the ancestral stories that reside in the soul.
18. Passing by Nella Larsen
via pinterest.com
Set primarily in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in the 1920s, the story centers on the reunion of two childhood friends of mixed-race African-American ancestry—Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield—and their increasing fascination with each other’s lives.
19. Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
via pinterest.com
Nightwood is one of the earliest prominent novels to portray explicit homosexuality.
20. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the 1969 autobiography about the early years of African-American writer and poet Maya Angelou.
Receive top book recommendations directly in your inbox.
Leave a Comment
Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked with *