Books by Women That Every Man Should Read

This is one of the 743 lists we use to generate our main The Greatest Books list.

About this list

Chosen by Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Richard Curtis and more. The description on the website says:

Studies show men avoid female authors. Ahead of the Women’s prize for fiction, chair of judges Mary Ann Sieghart finds out why – and we ask male authors to redress the balance

This list was originally published in 2022 and was added to this site over 2 years ago.

View: List Grid Table

Rank	Book	Authors	Year	Country	Language
30	Middlemarch	George Eliot	1871	British	English
17008	We Had To Remove This Post	Hanna Bervoets	2021	Dutch	Dutch
32	Mrs. Dalloway	Virginia Woolf	1925	British	English
1350	Olive Kitteridge	Elizabeth Strout	2008	American	English
358	The God of Small Things	Arundhati Roy	1997	Indian	English
2498	Homegoing	Yaa Gyasi	2016	Ghanaian	English
848	Regeneration	Pat Barker	1991	British	English
9053	Autumn	Ali Smith	2016	British	English
17008	Winter	Ali Smith	2017	British	English
17008	Spring	Ali Smith	2019	British	English
14901	Summer	Ali Smith	2020	British	English
17008	The Terrible	Yrsa Daley-Ward	2018	British	English
59	Rebecca	Daphne du Maurier	1938	British	English
2159	My Cousin Rachel	Daphne du Maurier	1951	British	English
16	To Kill a Mockingbird	Harper Lee	1960	American	English
1232	Cheri	Colette	1920	French	French
3124	Oryx and Crake	Margaret Atwood	2003	Canadian	English
740	The Goldfinch	Donna Tartt	2013	American	English
17008	The Last Widow	Karin Slaughter	2019	American	English
453	The Sea, The Sea	Iris Murdoch	1978	British	English
1739	The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4	Sue Townsend	1982	British	English
17008	My Phantoms	Gwendoline Riley	2021	British	English
17008	Singin’ Swingin’ And Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas	Maya Angelou	1976	American	English