T here are unapologetically powerful female figures in literature — starting with Enheduana’s pathbreaking hymns to the goddess Inana over four thousand years ago — but what many of the most loved female leads have in common is the strength to endure within the confines of a system that is stacked against them.
Strength comes in many different forms. To reflect that, we have compiled a list of books recommended on Five Books by experts in interviews on a diverse range of topics, all featuring strong female leads. Whether you are drawn to the energy of fictional women warriors or pirates, iconic queens who really existed, mythological retellings from a feminine perspective, or the quiet dignity of many a heroine in classic novels , there is much inspiration to be found in these engaging books.
Many others could be on this list, too: the Miss Marple books with the elderly amateur detective who is always underestimated and always outwits everyone; the award-winning Olive Kitteridge ,Chocolat The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
“It’s about a goddess and witch from the Odyssey. She’s best-remembered as the witch who turned Odysseus’s men into pigs. But what Miller does so cleverly is that she reframes Circe’s story and brings us right back to the very beginning—so by the point that Odysseus enters the frame, her turning the men into pigs feels an entirely understandable reaction, given what we’ve found out about her life predating that moment.” Read more...
Five of the Best Feminist Historical Novels
Flora Carr ,
Novelist
“This is Marlon James’ second novel, and it’s set on a Jamaican sugar plantation. It tells the story of Lilith, who is born into slavery and orphaned at birth by her 13-year-old mother. She’s one of the many slave girls raped by the white masters so she is, unsurprisingly, forced to grow up very fast and begins to push at the edges of what is imaginable for the life of a slave woman. It’s not an easy read, but it is an incredible story. … The novel is not just about Lilith, it’s about six half sisters—or ‘night women’—who are all the product of rape and who form a clandestine sisterhood to formulate the overthrow of their white oppressors.” Read more...
The Best Historical Crime Novels
Anna Mazzola ,
Novelist
“This one is so much fun! Al-Sirafi lived a swashbuckling life as a pirate, but since she became a mother, she has tried to live safely and quietly. She is convincingly drawn out for one last job, first by rewards, then – as things get more dangerous – by threats. So an adventure on the high seas ensues – and it’s a rollickingly good time.” Read more...
The Best Sci-Fi & Fantasy Novels
Sylvia Bishop ,
The bestselling author of Daisy Jones & the Six and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo returns with a book set in 1980 about a physics and astronomy professor, Joan Goodwin, who responds to an advertisement for the first women scientists to join NASA’s Space Shuttle program. Thoughtful and reserved, she finds that training at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, alongside her fellow astronauts and their subsequent mission in 1984, proves life-transforming.
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“I think Flora Carr is a smashing writer, with a particular talent for bringing characters to life and allowing them to really breathe on the page. From the opening lines, in which Mary stops to relieve herself on grass, we know we are being taken with a new intimacy into this woman’s life, whatever we think we already know about it – it’s very atmospheric. It’s also a brilliant idea – a Tudor prison break – so it’s tense, thrilling and compulsive from the start.” Read more...
Historical Novels Based on True Stories
Emily Howes ,
Novelist
“Fingersmith is an astonishing piece of work. Sarah Waters creates a fabulous sense of place, the violence of those Victorian institutions, the impossibility of a women ever getting out again if she was confined. It’s a novel that requires a lot of its reader—who is tricking who, who is the most morally bankrupt. It’s an extraordinary novel. I don’t think any modern writer does the underbelly of the Victorian period better than Sarah Waters.” Read more...
Historical Novels with Strong Female Leads
Kate Mosse ,
Novelist
“The Witch’s Heart is the exact kind of book I’m actively seeking at the moment – books that enrich and broaden women’s stories from both history and mythology. Books that fill in the woman-shaped gaps in our past. Book that give voices to female characters who have been sidelined and silenced in the very tales in which they appear.” Read more...
The Best Mythopoeic Fantasy
Samantha Shannon ,
Novelist
“These books are set in a contemporary world, but one where magic suddenly came back into this world of technology after thousands of years of being dormant. … Compared to our world, it’s more dangerous because you have shapeshifters, vampires controlled by necromancers, mages, witches, and monsters. The monsters range from low-key nuisances to the extremely nasty, people-eating kind.” Read more...
The Best Fantasy Novels With Battle Couples
Valerie Valdes ,
Novelist
“This is one of Alison Weir’s best books. I think she has managed to teach history to more people than Oxford University, because her books are so well written and easy to follow. She is especially good at taking time to explain the world that she writes about, so the reader gets a real feel for what it was like to live in the middle ages. Her books emphasise the colour and pageantry of that era – what everyone wore, what their jewels were like. I love that kind of book. Eleanor lived in the 12th century and was a great heiress. She owned Aquitaine, a large duchy in southwest France. She was originally married to the French king, Louis VII. He was two years older than she was, but hers was the stronger personality and he was no match for her. She ran him around.” Read more...
The best books on Strong Women in Bad Marriages
Nancy Goldstone ,
Historian
Classic Books with Strong Female Leads
Maintaining her self-respect, moral integrity and an independent spirit despite poverty and hardship, Jane Eyre is one of the most admired fictional female characters of all time. So is Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch , with her intellectual growth, moral strength and admirable self control. Several of Jane Austen ’s characters are loved for their wit, composure and skilful navigation of societal expectations. Batsheba Everdine in Far From the Madding Crowd Gone With the Wind The Woman in White
“The novel is based on an actual woman called Moll King who was an accomplice of a well-known organized crime boss in the 18th century called Jonathan Wild. Defoe found out about Moll King when he was visiting a journalist he’d collaborated with in Newgate Prison in the late 1710s. Moll King was irrepressible. She was constantly committing crimes—I think she was sentenced to transportation to America four times and went twice. On both occasions, she came back, which was illegal. She was also constantly making new marriages.” Read more...
The Best 18th-Century Novels
Sophie Gee ,
Literary Scholar
“I only read Jane Eyre for the first time a couple of years ago. I’m in my 50s now, at the stage where I’m thinking that I’d better get to reading all those books I told myself I’d get to ‘someday,’ before it’s too late. Jane Eyre was one of those books. I expected to enjoy it, but not to love it as much as I do. It isn’t really horror, but so what? It’s certainly Gothic. It’s full of darkness, and it does have some moments of real, striking horror. It’s about Jane Eyre, of course, a woman who comes of age into a world in which really the only way of maintaining any kind of independence is becoming a tutor for some rich person’s kid. So this is the path that she takes, and that’s how she meets Mr. Rochester – a rich, imposing man, apparently a widower, with a child he needs looked after.” Read more...
The Best Gothic Horror Books
Nathan Ballingrud ,
Novelist
“Not only is Eliot a great moral thinker—you feel the movement of a philosophically sophisticated ethicist moving behind the scenes of Middlemarch—but it’s also about the use of literature in moving us morally forward…It’s not only my favourite philosophical novel, it’s my favourite novel. I teach it again and again and each time I am flabbergasted by what she’s able to accomplish and what my students get out of it.” Read more...
The Best Philosophical Novels
Rebecca Goldstein ,
Philosopher
“The Tale of Princess Fatima is an action- and adventure-filled heroic tale, and has been a favourite of oral storytellers from Cairo to Marrakesh. The English translation is a slim volume, a selection of episodes from a long epic featuring Princess Fatima (Al-amīra Dhāt al-Himma), her son ‘Abdelwahhab, and many other characters including a stellar cast of dazzling women warriors.” Read more...
Five Timeless Books Rooted in Oral Storytelling
Tuva Kahrs ,
Five Books Editor
“This is an iconic American text. It was written in the years immediately following the American Civil War. Alcott presents a portrait of a northern family of women managing on their own while their husband/father is serving as an army chaplain. This classic work contains a powerful message to young women, namely that they do not have to marry in order to achieve success. Jo is one of the first in a long line of what might be described as ‘plucky’ heroines who follow their own destiny. She doesn’t end up marrying her leading man in this book although she finally does in a later volume.” Read more...
The best books on The History of American Women
Jay Kleinberg ,
Historian
“Henry James is brilliant on power relationships—people say his books are about money and class but they’re not, they’re about power. He understood the ways in which we are all seduced by power. And here we have Isabel who believes she has a desire for freedom but whose stronger desire is, in fact, for power, the power to exert her own freedom over other people. “ Read more...
The Best Psychological Novels
Salley Vickers ,
Novelist
For Younger Readers
Philip Pullman ‘s trilogy featuring the quick-witted young Lyra is a great read or audiobook experience for the whole family. On this list, we have also included a couple of fantasy novels with teenage heroines, and a memoir.
“This is one of my favourite books. Lyra feels like a natural successor to Matilda. She is a character of action. She isn’t sitting in a corner reading. She is out there and she is having a real effect on her story. She isn’t being buffeted by forces and having to rebel against them, she is out there actively seeking an adventure. I read this when I was eleven and starting secondary school. I remember her really sticking with me not least because she lies so much.” Read more...
Fierce Girls in Tween Fiction
Kiran Millwood Hargrave ,
Children's Author
⭐ American Library Association Amazing Audiobook 2025
The Night Ends with Fire is not a Young Adult book, but with an 18-year-old protagonist it will definitely appeal to older teen readers as well as to adults. It’s a gripping fantasy novel inspired both by the Chinese classic Three Kingdoms
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“A wizard known as the Dragon takes a girl once every ten years from the villages in a valley; in return, he protects the valley from the Wood, a forest that occasionally corrupts livestock or lost humans with violent madness, and is constantly trying to encroach on more territory. Our hero Agnieszka is an unlikely choice for the Dragon, so of course she is chosen. In his castle she discovers and begins to develop her magical talents.” Read more...
The Best Fantasy Novels of the Past Decade
Sylvia Bishop ,
Memoirs
Concluding our list of books with strong female leads is a selection of memoirs by women who tell their own stories of survival and extraordinary resilience:
“I absolutely adore this gulag memoir. It’s special. I don’t normally read this sort of literature because it’s so gloomy and actually quite dull, this monotonous suffering and nothing else. Usually, if you do read this kind of book, you certainly don’t want to reread it. But this is completely different. She writes so well: a light, beautiful, elegant kind of writing. Its main message is that what you have at the end of your life is not the result of the circumstances in which you’ve been living but of what is inside you and what you did with that.” Read more...
Books from the KGB Archives
Lyuba Vinogradova ,
Historian
“Khalida is a remarkable woman. She’s living in a society where women’s rights are virtually non-existent. She’s obviously very intelligent and has quite a progressive family. That seems to give her the bravery to be quite bolshy. She says in the book that she’s stubborn. She is very stubborn and when she gets it in her head that women should be playing football, she doesn’t give it up—even though everyone tells her it’s a terrible idea. Her family suffers, because she’s bringing them shame in the view of the society and the authorities around her, but she perseveres. If you want to read a book about battling against the odds, this is the book for you.” Read more...
The Best Sports Books of 2024: The William Hill Award
Alyson Rudd ,
Journalist
“Leymah Gbowee starts out as somebody who takes circumstances as they come, but she becomes a woman who helps end the war in Liberia. She goes from being a battered wife to becoming a woman who leads her country to peace. … Her argument was simple and powerful. She has this great line: “Why are women, who bore the brunt of war, expected to remain quiet while men debated how to make peace?”” Read more...
The best books on Women and War
Gayle Lemmon ,
Journalist
“Safiya Sinclair finds poetry as a pathway out of her abusive, extremely restricted, patriarchal upbringing…Sinclair opens her book with the 1966 visit to Jamaica of Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, whom the Rastafari believed was a living god…Sinclair’s father was just a toddler at the time but he was inspired by Marley’s music to join the Rastafari. Sinclair is particularly adept at bringing a personal lens to these larger historical forces and vice versa. It’s a really fascinating memoir.” Read more...
The Best Memoirs: The 2024 NBCC Autobiography Shortlist
May-lee Chai ,
Short Story Writer
“What’s really remarkable to me about Know My Name is the depth of self-interrogation that Chanel Miller does throughout this book. There is a lot of questioning, because she is forced to do it. She’s forced to do it because of the questions that she is getting by Brock Turner’s defense lawyers, who are trying to cast aspersions on her. They’re trying to reframe her as an illegitimate person. They’re trying to reframe her as a liar. They’re trying to reframe her as part of a larger culture, that says that a woman who has been sexually assaulted was ‘asking for it’ in some way.
She realizes that there are so many attempts to reframe her as a person that it is clear that she has had to work very, very hard emotionally, not just to understand her own feelings and emotions and experiences, but to find a way to articulate them that is clear.” Read more...
The Best of Memoir: the 2020 NBCC Autobiography Shortlist
Mark Athitakis ,
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