Brilliant Books By Brilliant Women

1. Beloved by Toni Morrison — A formerly enslaved woman is haunted by the trauma of her past and the ghost of her dead child.

2. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood — In a dystopia where women have lost all rights, a handmaid struggles to reclaim her identity and freedom.

3. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf — A stream-of-consciousness classic that looks at time, trauma, and how people carry their lives inside them.

4. Just Kids by Patti Smith — A beautiful memoir of Patti Smith’s early years in New York and her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. A love letter to art, youth, and becoming.

5. I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman — A girl grows up in an underground prison with no idea why she’s there. When the doors open, she faces a desolate world and a new search for meaning.

6. The Power by Naomi Alderman — Teenage girls develop a strange power that shifts the global balance between men and women. A speculative look at gender, violence, and control.

7. Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi — Based on a real interview, this novel tells the story of a woman on death row in Egypt, revealing how oppression led her to murder. 

8. The Awakening by Kate Chopin — A late 19th-century woman begins to question her role as a wife and mother, seeking freedom in a patriarchal society.

9. The Laugh of the Medusa by Hélène Cixous — A foundational feminist essay encouraging women to write themselves into history.

10. The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector — A poor, unnamed girl living in Rio becomes the subject of a male narrator’s philosophical musings, exposing classism, gendered erasure, and narrative power.

11. The Woman Destroyed by Simone de Beauvoir — Three novellas about women grappling with aging, betrayal, and invisibility in a patriarchal society. 

12. The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood — A group of women wake up imprisoned in the Australian outback and slowly realize they’re being punished for sexual scandals. A brutal, dystopian story about shame and survival.

13. Girls Against God by Jenny Hval — A strange, provocative novel told through the voice of a woman angry at religion, patriarchy, and the culture that shaped her.

14. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath — A brilliant young woman descends into mental illness while trying to find her place in a world that feels suffocatingly narrow.

15. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie — A Nigerian woman moves to the U.S. for school and must navigate race, identity, and love in a foreign land.

16. The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett — Twin sisters choose radically different lives—one passing as white—and their daughters’ paths later collide in unexpected ways.

17. Circe by Madeline Miller — The witch of Homeric myth tells her side of the story.

18. The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller — In one summer, a woman is forced to choose between the life she built and the one she’s always secretly longed for.