Whether or not you are a fan of Parks & Recreation, you have likely heard about Galentine’s Day. Despite originating with an overly enthusiastic television character, the holiday has become a widespread excuse to celebrate female friendship. If you are unable to toast your friends in person, it is a great reason to send your bestie a great book about friendship. But if you are like me, you may just love books that highlight female friendships and warm your heart. I have put together a list of seventeen books (most of which are award-winning novels) that center on friendship and are definitely worth reading.
Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson
Synopsis: Running into a long-ago friend sets memory from the 1970s in motion for August, transporting her to a time and a place where friendship was everything—until it wasn’t. For August and her girls, sharing confidences as they ambled through neighborhood streets, Brooklyn was a place where they believed that they were beautiful, talented, brilliant—a part of a future that belonged to them. Another Brooklyn heartbreakingly illuminates the formative time when childhood gives way to adulthood—the promise and peril of growing up—and exquisitely renders a powerful, indelible, and fleeting friendship that united four young lives.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie
Synopsis: Zahra and Maryam have been best friends since childhood in Karachi, even though–or maybe because–they are unlike in nearly every way. Yet they never speak of the differences in their backgrounds or their values, not even after the fateful night when a moment of adolescent impulse upends their plans for the future. Three decades later, Zahra and Maryam have grown into powerful women who have each cut a distinctive path through London. But when two troubling figures from their past resurface, they must finally confront their bedrock differences–and find out whether their friendship can survive.
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close by Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman
Synopsis: Now two friends, Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman, tell the story of their equally messy and life-affirming Big Friendship in this honest and hilarious book that chronicles their first decade in one another’s lives. As the hosts of the hit podcast Call Your Girlfriend, they’ve become known for frank and intimate conversations. In this book, they bring that energy to their own friendship—its joys and its pitfalls. An inspiring and entertaining testament to the power of society’s most underappreciated relationship, Big Friendship will invite you to think about how your own bonds are formed, challenged, and preserved.
Genre: Nonfiction, Memoir
Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades
Synopsis: A blazingly original debut novel told by a chorus of unforgettable voices, Brown Girls illustrates a collective portrait of childhood, adulthood, and beyond, and is a striking exploration of female friendship, a powerful depiction of women of color attempting to forge their place in the world today. For even as the conflicting desires of ambition and loyalty, freedom and commitment, adventure and stability risk dividing them, it is to one another—and to Queens—that the girls ultimately return.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein
Synopsis: A British spy plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France. Its pilot and passenger are best friends. One of the girls has a chance at survival. The other has lost the game before it’s barely begun. When “Verity” is arrested by the Gestapo, she’s sure she doesn’t stand a chance. Her Nazi interrogators give her a simple choice: reveal her mission or face a grisly execution. As she intricately weaves her confession, Verity uncovers her past, how she became friends with the pilot Maddie, and why she left Maddie in the wrecked fuselage of their plane. A universally acclaimed Edgar Award winner, Code Name Verity is a visceral read of danger, resolve, and survival that shows just how far true friends will go to save each other.
Genre: Young Adult, Historical Fiction
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Synopsis: A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance and silence. Through a series of letters spanning twenty years, first from Celie to God, then the sisters to each other despite the unknown, the novel draws readers into its rich and memorable portrayals of Celie, Nettie, Shug Avery and Sofia and their experience.
Genre: Classic, Literary Fiction
Firefly Lane by Kristin Hannah
Synopsis: Spanning more than three decades and playing out across the ever-changing face of the Pacific Northwest, Firefly Lane is the poignant, powerful story of two women and the friendship that becomes the bulkhead of their lives. For thirty years, Tully and Kate buoy each other through life, weathering the storms of friendship—jealousy, anger, hurt, resentment. They think they’ve survived it all until a single act of betrayal tears them apart . . . and puts their courage and friendship to the ultimate test.
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
The Family by Naomi Krupitsky
Synopsis: A captivating debut novel about the tangled fates of two best friends and daughters of the Italian mafia, and a coming-of-age story of twentieth-century Brooklyn itself.
Genre: Historical Fiction
The Island of Sea Women by Lisa See
Synopsis: Mi-ja and Young-sook, two girls living on the Korean island of Jeju, are best friends who come from very different backgrounds. When they are old enough, they begin working in the sea with their village’s all-female diving collective, led by Young-sook’s mother. As the girls take up their positions as baby divers, they know they are beginning a life of excitement and responsibility–but also danger. A wonderful ode to a truly singular group of women, The Island of Sea Women is a beautiful story about the endurance of friendship when it’s pushed to its limits, and you…will love it.
Genre: Historical Fiction
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
Synopsis: Beginning in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, the fiery and unforgettable Lila and the bookish narrator, Elena, become women, wives, mothers, and leaders, all the while maintaining a complex and at times conflicted friendship. This first novel follows Lila and Elena from their fateful meeting as ten-year-olds through their school years and adolescence.
Genre: Literary Fiction, Translated Fiction
The One Hundred Years of Lenni & Margot by Marianne Cronin
Synopsis: Seventeen-year-old Lenni Pettersson lives on the Terminal Ward at the Glasgow Princess Royal Hospital. Though the teenager has been told she’s dying, she still has plenty of living to do. Joining the hospital’s arts and crafts class, she meets the magnificent Margot, an 83-year-old, purple-pajama-wearing, fruitcake-eating rebel, who transforms Lenni in ways she never imagined. As their friendship blooms, a world of stories opens for these unlikely companions who, between them, have been alive for one hundred years. Delightfully funny and bittersweet, heartbreaking yet ultimately uplifting, The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot reminds us of the preciousness of life as it considers the legacy we choose to leave, how we influence the lives of others even after we’re gone, and the wonder of a friendship that transcends time.
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
The Rose Code by Kate Quinn
Synopsis: The New York Times bestselling author of The Huntress and The Alice Network returns with another heart-stopping World War II story of three female code breakers – Osla, Mab, and Beth – at Bletchley Park. As the royal wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip whips post-war Britain into a fever, a mysterious traitor has emerged from the shadows of their Bletchley Park past, and now the friends must resurrect their old alliance and crack one last code together. But each petal they remove from the rose code brings danger–and their true enemy–closer…
Genre: Historical Fiction
Sula by Toni Morrison
Synopsis: Two girls who grow up to become women. Nel and Sula’s devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal–or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic, Sula is a work that overflows with life.
Genre: Classics, Literary Fiction
Text Me When You Get Home: The Evolution & Triumph of Modern Female Friendship by Kayleen Schaefer
Synopsis: In Text Me When You Get Home, journalist Kayleen Schaefer interviews more than one hundred women about their BFFs, soulmates, girl gangs, and queens while tracing this cultural shift through the lens of pop culture. Schaefer also includes her own history of grappling with a world that told her to rely on men before she realized that her true source of support came from a strong tribe of women. Her personal narrative and celebration of her own relationships weaves throughout the evolution of female friendship on-screen, a serious look at how women have come to value one another and our relationships.
Genre: Nonfiction, Pop Culture, Memoir
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
Synopsis: Reclusive author Vida Winter, famous for her collection of twelve enchanting stories, has spent the past six decades penning a series of alternate lives for herself. Now old and ailing, she is ready to reveal the truth about her extraordinary existence and the violent and tragic past she has kept secret for so long. Calling on Margaret Lea, a young biographer troubled by her own painful history, Vida disinters the life she meant to bury for good. Margaret is mesmerized by the author’s tale of gothic strangeness–featuring the beautiful and willful Isabelle, the feral twins Adeline and Emmeline, a ghost, a governess, a topiary garden and a devastating fire. Together, Margaret and Vida confront the ghosts that have haunted them while becoming, finally, transformed by the truth themselves.
Genre: Gothic Fiction
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
Synopsis: Propelled by the same superb instinct for storytelling that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once an incredible chronicle of thirty years of Afghan history and a deeply moving story of family, friendship, faith, and the salvation to be found in love.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Wahala by Nikki May
Synopsis: An incisive and exhilarating debut novel following three Anglo-Nigerian best friends and the lethally glamorous fourth woman who infiltrates their group—the most unforgettable girls since Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha.
Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Cultural Heritage
Read Between the Spines 