Women's Fiction

“The main relationship in the book is a triangle. A woman writer has had this very long-term friendship with a problematic older male writer. At the beginning of the book, he commits suicide. He doesn’t leave a note, and the only instruction that he’s left is that he wants our narrator to take care of his Great Dane. Unfortunately, she’s in a tiny Manhattan apartment, and she’s not allowed to have a dog. The dog is in mourning for his master, and so is she. She and this dog are heartbroken. It’s a love triangle, a grief triangle, between the three of them. It becomes about her thinking about her friendship with this man who she knows has, quite unashamedly, slept with lots of his students. It was consensual, but there’s a power differential—he was a professor. He would say, ‘Teaching is erotic. This just happens.’ She confesses she actually slept with him too, but at the very beginning of their relationship. He’s had multiple wives and affairs…It’s a complicated book. It raises a lot of questions. I had lots of debates with my friends who’ve read it, about whether or not she lets the male writer get away with too much. You may see the dog on the cover and ask, ‘Is this a feminist novel?’ But yes, I would argue it is.” Read more...

The Best Feminist Books: 50 Years of Virago Press

Sarah Savitt, Publisher

“It’s about a girl named Nan who goes off to the Pantomime Theatre, which is on the South Coast of England, and sees a girl named Kitty, who is a male impersonator, on the stage and falls in love with her. You’re not sure if it’s a sexual love or a girlish crush but she does go off to London with her and it does turn into a love affair. They begin living together but it becomes complicated because they have to hide. Then Kitty falls in love with a man and Nan is heartbroken and goes off into this strange Edwardian underworld. She sets off as a male-impersonating prostitute for a little bit and goes off with men who think she is a boy, and it’s all very odd. She then gets taken in by an aristocratic woman who wants to keep her as a mistress. Finally, she ends up living with a family who are poor and hardworking and who are saving the underclass from themselves. At this point, all these lovers from her past come back and she has to choose. You feel she is going to go off with Kitty, but is she? What I like is Waters’s sense of being very true. I think she was writing a PhD about London theatre at the turn of the century and then thought, well, I should do something that people want to read. It’s a very complete world; you really feel that you are there and that all these things are happening and you don’t have a moment where you find it hard to suspend your disbelief.” Read more...

The Best Historical Novels

Vanora Bennett, Historical Novelist

“It was criticised as being poverty porn, but I don’t really see that. It does risk being wildly sentimental, but I kind of like that. It’s old school. It has a confident, Dickensian snap and brio, a broad, swinging-for-the-fences ambition, and it worked for me. And the ending is the complete clichéd happy ending. Yet, because it’s such an enormous book, when you get there you feel like you’ve earned the big sentimental pay-off. I really liked it. It had me welling up.” Read more...

The Best Historical Fiction Set in the American South

Xan Brooks, Novelist

“Maggie writes so beautifully, just on a sentence-by-sentence basis. Her metaphors and similes are always fresh, and her characters are so deftly and fully written. I just loved this book.” Read more...

Historical Novels Set in Italy

Tracy Chevalier, Historical Novelist

“Fire Rush is set between London, Bristol, and Jamaica in the late 1970s and early 1980s, is written partly in patois, and brings readers into a world of gangsters, raves, and police brutality. It’s a novel with a strong sense of place, community, and musicality—one that is drawn from the author’s own experiences and took sixteen years to write.” Read more...

The 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction Shortlist

Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor

“Written from the points of view of marine creatures, Pod is a creative, challenging, and quite literally immersive novel. One for open-minded readers with an interest in animal behaviour and writing from unusual perspectives.” Read more...

The 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction Shortlist

Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor

“Morris’s debut novel is set during the Siege of Sarajevo—a four-year ordeal in which the city’s residents were trapped in their homes without heating, power, or clean water, and subjected to daily shelling and sniper fire. It’s been shortlisted for a number of other prizes, including the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize (for ‘evoking the spirit of a place’) and the Author’s Club best first novel award. Will suit fans of humane and literary war novels, such as Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong.“ Read more...

The 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction Shortlist

Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor

“Trespasses, set in 1970s Northern Ireland, is Kennedy’s first novel and it has found considerable acclaim—garnering endorsements from the likes of Sarah Moss, Max Porter, and Nick Hornby. It follows a young, female teacher who falls for a married man as The Troubles tear their community apart. He’s a barrister, he tells her, but this is a place where it doesn’t matter what you do—it’s all about ‘what you are.’ They must keep their relationship a secret from everyone they know, for their own safety as much as for marital continuity. The New York Times called it ‘brilliant, beautiful, heartbreaking.’ Kennedy, who started writing fiction in her forties, previously published a well-regarded collection of formally inventive short stories, The End of the World is a Cul de Sac.“ Read more...

The 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction Shortlist

Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor

“Alva is one of the protagonists. She’s a moody, rebellious teenager who is starting to pull away from her mother, a white American woman. Alva has a dual identity—she has a Chinese father who she doesn’t know, and an American mother. Through Lu Fang, the Chinese businessman who Alva’s mother marries, we get a sweep of Chinese history, from the Cultural Revolution onwards. So it’s a book that tackles big themes and a lot of history, but always through a propulsive narrative that keeps you turning the pages.” Read more...

Recent Fiction Highlights: The 2024 Women’s Prize Shortlist

Monica Ali, Novelist

“It’s a gut-punch of a book, which provokes so many emotions in the reader: sorrow, rage, tenderness, laughter—it’s often funny, you know. The whole range. It balances the light and the dark. And it’s suffused with love…The ending is almost metaphysical, it’s philosophical. You stand back and think about the big picture of life and this eternal cycle that we’re in, generation after generation. It’s uplifting, actually.” Read more...

Recent Fiction Highlights: The 2024 Women’s Prize Shortlist

Monica Ali, Novelist

“It’s a very accomplished piece of storytelling. It weaves history, politics, and family with a profound meditation on the purpose of art. It’s very nuanced, multi-layered, gorgeously written. And it’s original—because it plays with form. Parts of the book are written as a script, fo example. And it asks deep questions about the purpose of art: whether it can be a form of resistance; whether a play written centuries ago can resonate with the lives of people in the West Bank in the present day. It’s very subtle, its outlook. Very humane. It’s generous, compassionate. It’s a book you won’t necessarily romp through. But you sink into it, and then you really reap the rewards. There’s a lot of food for thought.” Read more...

Recent Fiction Highlights: The 2024 Women’s Prize Shortlist

Monica Ali, Novelist

“It’s a historical novel that begins on a sheep farm in New South Wales in the 1880s. It goes right through until the 1950s. In Dolly we have a character who constantly fights against the constraints placed on her as a woman in a man’s world. And she pays a really high price for her nonconformity. She builds a business, loses everything, is forced to start over. But she never loses her fighting spirit. Grenville’s prose is just immaculate: simultaneously plain and poetic. She conjures up those very harsh and beautiful landscapes so perfectly. It’s a book that transports you to another time and place, and all of us judges fell in love with Dolly—we were there for the pain and the beauty of all Dolly’s struggles.” Read more...

Recent Fiction Highlights: The 2024 Women’s Prize Shortlist

Monica Ali, Novelist

“It’s an intergenerational saga set in Ireland, exploring the really messy, fraught relationship between Carmel and her daughter Nell. They’ve moved from being a very close single-mother, only-daughter unit to having quite a fractured relationship. It also encompasses the long shadow thrown over their family by Carmel’s father, Phil, who is now deceased but was a famous poet. Through Phil, Anne Enright raises a lot of questions about art. For instance: is it possible to separate the art and the artist? If the person who has produced the art has done terrible things in their life, does that affect how you view that art?” Read more...

Recent Fiction Highlights: The 2024 Women’s Prize Shortlist

Monica Ali, Novelist

“Once you’ve read this book, you’re never going to forget it. It’s absolutely searing, deeply moving. And it’s an utterly compelling piece of storytelling. There have been quite a few novels recently that have looked at the Sri Lankan civil war. This novel is unique in the way that it centres women’s experience of the war. She uses that lens of women’s experience to examine the impact on families, on the war of values that can tear families apart as much as the violence. And she’s unflinching in her commitment to complexity and nuanced and clear-eyed moral scrutiny of all sides of the conflict…It’s a novel that rewards multiple readings as well, because it’s packed with historical detail. It ranges in scale from the intimate to the epic.” Read more...

Recent Fiction Highlights: The 2024 Women’s Prize Shortlist

Monica Ali, Novelist