18 Novels About Female Friendship

The Reading Room is Dandelion Chandelier’s curated literary salon — monthly, seasonal, and thematic reading lists chosen for beauty, intelligence, emotional resonance, and the mood of the moment.

At a glance: female friendship novels • literary fiction about women’s lives • complicated friendships • chosen family • book club novels

Some friendships are not supporting characters in a woman’s life.

They are the architecture.

This Reading Room special edition gathers 18 of the best novels about female friendship — books about girlhood rivalry, chosen family, class tension, care work, creative ambition, old loyalty, and women who band together when the world gives them no better option.

this is not the usual expected list of novels about female friendship

Elena Ferrante remains the presiding spirit of the modern female-friendship novel: the writer who made rivalry, envy, devotion, class, girlhood, and lifelong entanglement feel like the grandest possible literary subject. But she did not invent the form. Before and around Ferrante, there were other touchstones: Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls trilogy, Mary McCarthy’s The Group, Toni Morrison’s Sula, Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, and the pop-cultural canon of Beaches, Wicked, and Sex and the City — all of which understood, in wildly different registers, that friendship between women can be romance, religion, competition, rescue mission, and weather system.

They are the lineage. This list is the after-party.

The aim here is discovery. These are contemporary and overlooked literary novels in which female friendship is not a decorative subplot but the governing structure: the force that shapes the plot, the moral stakes, and the way the women understand themselves.

The best of them know something polite culture prefers not to say aloud: women’s friendships are rarely simple sanctuaries. They are memory systems, rival courts, emergency funds, witness stands, covens, laboratories, escape routes, and occasionally the original crime scene.

I read friendship novels less for comfort than for evidence: of how women teach one another language, ambition, taste, strategy, mercy, and the occasional useful form of revenge.

For the larger annual map of literary taste, see The Dandelion Chandelier 120, our definitive guide to the year’s most essential books. For new releases, Fresh Ink tracks the current books most worth reading now. And for more shelves organized by mood, month, and private weather, peruse our archive of posts in The Reading Room.

Photography by Pamela Thomas-Graham for Dandelion Chandelier.

discover more of the best novels about female friendship

What follows are 18 novels about female friendship — not the usual suspects, but the ones that understand how women actually know one another.

girlhood, rivalry, and the first wound.

Before women become women, they become each other’s evidence.

1. the book of goose by yiyun li.

Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose is one of the finest contemporary novels about the dangerous imagination of girls. In postwar rural France, Agnès and Fabienne create a literary deception that becomes a private kingdom, a performance, a test of intimacy, and eventually a kind of harm.

Girlhood friendship can be less a sanctuary than a shared hallucination. These girls do not merely know one another; they invent a world together, then discover that invention has teeth.

For readers who still remember the girl who taught them how dangerous admiration could be.

2. cat’s eye by margaret atwood.

Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye is the dark classic on this list, and it has earned its place. Elaine Risley, a painter returning to Toronto for a retrospective, is pulled back into memories of childhood girlhood, cruelty, and the girls who shaped her before she had any defense against them.

Not every female friendship saves us. Some become the original wound, the buried grammar of self-doubt, the thing one spends a lifetime making art around.

For anyone who knows that the most formative girl in your life may not have been kind.

3. the burning girl by claire messud.

Claire Messud’s The Burning Girl is a precise, aching novel about the collapse of an intense girlhood friendship. Julia and Cassie have known each other since childhood, but adolescence brings class difference, family instability, sexual danger, and the slow humiliation of discovering that another person’s life has become inaccessible to you.

Beside Cat’s Eye and Swing Time, it forms a bruised little triptych: novels about the girls who knew us before we knew ourselves, and therefore can never be entirely escaped.

For readers interested in formative female bonds inside families as well as friendships, The Reading Room: Mothers and Daughters, A Field Guide explores the family version of the same question: who gets to shape the woman you become?

women who grow up together, then apart.

The oldest friend is less a person than an archive with opinions.

4. kin by tayari jones.

Tayari Jones’s Kin is one of the newest and strongest additions to this shelf. Set between rural Louisiana and Atlanta, the novel follows Annie and Niecy, two motherless girls whose bond is tested by class, geography, time, and the great American machinery of reinvention.

Friendship becomes kinship not when it is easy, but when the world keeps asking women to survive without enough witnesses. Jones has always been excellent on intimacy under pressure; here, she gives old friendship a Southern history and a moral charge.

For anyone whose oldest friend still remembers the first draft.

5. fiona and jane by jean chen ho.

Jean Chen Ho’s Fiona and Jane restores something essential to the list: the friendship novel as contemporary Asian American life, told through intimacy, estrangement, sexuality, family history, desire, and return. Fiona and Jane move through girlhood, Los Angeles, New York, bad decisions, old loyalties, and the elastic ache of a friendship that keeps changing shape.

This is not a romance with a friendship subplot. It is a friendship novel with the emotional amplitude usually reserved for romance.

For readers who understand that sometimes the great love story is the friend who keeps coming back into frame.

6. the wilderness by angela flournoy.

Angela Flournoy’s The Wilderness is a major contemporary anchor for this list: five Black women, two decades of friendship, and the long passage from young adulthood into middle age. The title is exactly right. Adult friendship is wilderness: gorgeous, disorienting, overgrown, occasionally full of animals.

A friendship that lasts twenty years is not a mood; it is an institution with bad lighting and excellent records. Careers, marriages, children, money, geography, disappointment, and fatigue all make rival claims, and still the women remain in orbit.

For readers who know that longevity is not the same as ease.

friendship across class, power, and projection.

Someone always has the better apartment, the better politics, or the better alibi.

7. such a fun age by kiley reid.

Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age is not a cozy friendship novel, which is precisely why it matters. Emira, a young Black babysitter, and Alix, her white employer, become entangled in a relationship that looks intimate, helpful, and progressive until race, labor, money, and self-image reveal the power imbalance underneath.

Female intimacy is never innocent when one woman is being paid to care for another woman’s child. Everyone wants to be seen as good; almost no one wants to examine the invoice.

For readers who like their social novels with excellent manners and a knife under the napkin.

8. swing time by zadie smith.

Zadie Smith’s Swing Time begins with two girls who love dance, though only one has real talent. From there, the novel becomes a lifelong study of race, class, performance, envy, shame, celebrity, proximity to power, and the terrible intimacy of comparison.

Childhood friendship can become a measuring instrument. One girl becomes the person you remember; the other becomes the person you failed to become.

For anyone who has ever confused admiration with evidence.

9. best of friends by kamila shamsie.

Kamila Shamsie’s Best of Friends moves from Karachi girlhood to London adulthood, where an old friendship meets public power, private memory, politics, class, and moral compromise. Zahra and Maryam know too much about each other for comfort, and not quite enough for safety.

Familiarity can be love; it can also be evidence. Shamsie is especially sharp on the danger of having known someone forever.

For readers who suspect old loyalty has a statute of limitations.

The question of work, status, labor, and identity also runs through The Reading Room: So… What Do You Do?, a useful companion shelf for these novels about babysitters, artists, employers, ambition, money, and the absurd theater of professional life.

friendship as witness, care, and moral labor.

The unpaid work of not looking away.

10. what are you going through by sigrid nunez.

Sigrid Nunez’s What Are You Going Through pares friendship down to its hardest question: what does it mean to accompany another person all the way to the edge? A woman agrees to help a dying friend through the final stage of illness, and the novel becomes an austere, lucid meditation on companionship, mortality, and the strange grace of staying.

There is no decorative uplift. Just presence, intelligence, dread, and devotion without confetti.

For anyone who understands that care is not a feeling. It is a calendar, a chair, a ride, a room.

11. fellowship point by alice elliott dark.

Alice Elliott Dark’s Fellowship Point gives the list something crucial: old women, old friendship, and the kind of moral long view that only time can produce. Agnes and Polly have been friends for decades, bound by family, land, class, secrets, writing, inheritance, and the question of what one generation owes the next.

So many friendship novels stop at youth, as if intimacy expires at forty. The longest friendships are less like love affairs than estates: beautiful, complicated, and badly in need of legal counsel.

For readers who prefer their friendship novels with acreage, history, and unresolved documents.

12. we do not part by han kang.

Han Kang’s We Do Not Part is severe, luminous, and not remotely decorative. It tells the story of a friendship between two women while reckoning with a buried chapter of Korean history, making friendship the passageway into memory, violence, grief, and witness.

This is not friendship as escape from the world. It is friendship as the means by which the world, and its horror, becomes impossible to avoid.

For readers who know that witness is a form of love with very little glamour.

Readers drawn to literature about care, obligation, and the emotional architecture of family may also want The Reading Room: A Father, A Daughter, a Story, where inheritance, tenderness, distance, and moral attention get their own shelf.

art, ambition, and women making lives.

Talent is intimate; so is resentment.

13. the animators by kayla rae whitaker.

Kayla Rae Whitaker’s The Animators is one of the great novels about female creative partnership. Mel Vaught and Sharon Kisses meet in college and build a life in animation together, turning friendship into workplace, art practice, mythology, rivalry, trauma, and debt.

Creative collaboration is one of friendship’s most dangerous forms. To make work with another woman is to share taste, memory, labor, credit, and the occasional nervous breakdown.

For anyone who has ever made something with a friend and then wondered who, exactly, owned the wound.

14. clutch by emily nemens.

Emily Nemens’s Clutch brings us into the sharp adult terrain of midlife friendship. Five women who have known each other since college gather in Palm Springs, carrying careers, marriages, children, ambition, addiction, fertility, money, memory, and the various humiliations of still being known by people who remember your original plan.

Adulthood does not end old friendship; it invoices it. Nemens understands that women’s lives are built not only from choices, but from the friends who keep the receipts.

For anyone whose oldest group chat now contains school schedules, professional crises, medical news, and the occasional psychic emergency.

covens, crews, and women who band together.

A group chat, if the group chat had teeth.

15. the bandit queens by parini shroff.

Parini Shroff’s The Bandit Queens is wickedly pleasurable: women in an Indian village, a dangerous reputation, bad husbands, dark comedy, and collective agency with sharp elbows. Geeta’s life becomes entangled with the women around her, and what follows is part revenge fantasy, part social satire, part conspiracy of survival.

The best crews rarely arrive with matching tote bags and a mission statement. Sometimes they arrive with a plan that would be inadmissible in court.

For readers who like their female solidarity with excellent comic timing and poor legal advice.

16. we ride upon sticks by quan barry.

Quan Barry’s We Ride Upon Sticks is glorious chaos: a 1989 girls’ field hockey team in Danvers, Massachusetts, dark powers, team mythology, adolescent ambition, and collective female force. The girls want to win. Naturally, history, witchcraft, Emilio Estevez, and late-’80s hair all become involved.

Every female friendship list needs one book that runs onto the field waving a stick and refusing to apologize. Team spirit, but make it possibly occult.

For anyone who believes adolescent girls are among the most underestimated supernatural forces in American life.

17. supper club by lara Williams.

Lara Williams’s Supper Club is about hunger, appetite, shame, rage, bodies, pleasure, and women gathering after dark to take up space. Roberta’s friendship with Stevie helps spark a secret society of hungry young women who feast, transgress, and refuse the training that tells women to want less.

Appetite is political, especially when women stop apologizing for it. This is less dinner party than rebellion. The napkins are not the point.

For readers who prefer their feminist awakening with carbs, darkness, and plausible property damage.

18. brown girls by daphne palasi andreades.

Daphne Palasi Andreades’s Brown Girls is a chorus novel: girls from Queens growing up through immigrant family life, ambition, loyalty, desire, escape, return, and the pull of home. Its first-person plural voice gives the book its power. The “we” is not a gimmick; it is the subject.

Friendship can be borough, memory, accent, witness, and weather. Queens has entered the chat, correctly dressed.

For readers who want a novel that understands girlhood not as one story, but as a chorus coming up the stairs.

where to begin.

If you want the most Ferrante-adjacent book, start with The Book of Goose.

If you want a contemporary novel about Black women’s long adult friendship, start with The Wilderness.

If you want class, race, and power at the center of the story, start with Such a Fun Age or Swing Time.

If you want a devastating novel about care, start with What Are You Going Through.

If you want older women and the long view, start with Fellowship Point.

If you want artistic collaboration, ambition, and resentment with a pulse, start with The Animators or Clutch.

If you want wit, appetite, and women behaving beautifully badly, start with Supper Club, The Bandit Queens, or We Ride Upon Sticks.

If you want the darkest girlhood novel, start with Cat’s Eye.

For more seasonal literary edits, browse The Reading Room, where books are chosen by mood, month, and the private weather they understand best.

the lasting pleasure of female friendship novels.

The best female-friendship novels are not asking whether women support one another.

That question is too small.

The best female-friendship novels ask what women know about one another, what they do with that knowledge, and what happens when love, envy, memory, class, care, art, and survival all sit down at the same table.

Sometimes the friend saves you. Sometimes she writes you down. Sometimes she remembers exactly who you were before you became so convincing.

Either way, she is not a subplot.

faqs:

what are the best novels about female friendship?

Some of the best novels about female friendship include The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li, Kin by Tayari Jones, The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy, Fiona and Jane by Jean Chen Ho, Swing Time by Zadie Smith, The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker, Fellowship Point by Alice Elliott Dark, and Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades.

what are good book club novels about female friendship?

Strong book club novels about female friendship include Such a Fun Age, Fellowship Point, Best of Friends, The Bandit Queens, The Wilderness, and Clutch. Each offers enough plot, tension, character conflict, and social complexity to sustain a serious discussion.

what novels explore complicated female friendship?

For complicated female friendship, read Cat’s Eye, The Burning Girl, Swing Time, Best of Friends, The Book of Goose, and The Animators. These novels understand friendship as a force shaped by envy, memory, ambition, class, power, rivalry, and time.

what are the best contemporary novels about women’s friendships?

Some of the best contemporary novels about women’s friendships include Kin, Clutch, The Wilderness, Fiona and Jane, Such a Fun Age, Brown Girls, Supper Club, and The Bandit Queens. They show how female friendship changes under pressure from race, class, work, motherhood, art, money, and geography.

what should I read after Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet?

After Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, try The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li for another intense portrait of girlhood intimacy; Swing Time by Zadie Smith for friendship shaped by race, talent, and class; Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie for political and personal betrayal; or The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy for a contemporary portrait of long adult friendship. These are strong books like Elena Ferrante for readers who want rivalry, intimacy, class tension, and lifelong female bonds.

what are novels about female friendship and class?

Novels about female friendship and class include Such a Fun Age, Swing Time, Best of Friends, and Kin. These books show how affection is altered by money, labor, race, privilege, mobility, and proximity to power.

what are lighter novels about women who band together?

For lighter but still intelligent novels about women who band together, try We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry, The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff, and Supper Club by Lara Williams. None is purely light, thank goodness, but all have wit, velocity, and a delicious sense of collective female mischief.