Must-Read Fiction with Strong Female Characters
Discover must-read fiction books featuring strong female characters. Explore empowering stories and inspiring heroines in this curated list of top female-led novels.
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Little Children
by Tom Perrotta
A group of young suburban parents, including a stay-at-home dad, a former feminist, and an over-structured mom, finds its sleepy existence shattered when a convicted child molester moves back into town and two of the parents have an affair.
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Love
by Toni Morrison
The epitome of a group of women's ideals about love, fatherhood, and friendship, wealthy hotel owner Bill Cosey finds his life compromised by his troubled past and his feelings about a spellbinding woman named Celestial.
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Small Wonder
by Barbara Kingsolver
In her new essay collection, the beloved author of High Tide in Tucson brings to us, out of one of history's darker moments, an extended love song to the world we still have. Whether she is contemplating the Grand Canyon, her vegetable garden, motherhood, genetic engineering, or the future of a nation founded on the best of all human impulses, these essays are grounded in the author's belief that our largest problems have grown from the earth's remotest corners as well as our own backyards, and that answers may lie in both those places. Sometimes grave, occasionally hilarious, and ultimately persuasive, Small Wonder is a hopeful examination of the people we seem to be, and what we might yet make of ourselves.
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The Opposite of Fate
by Amy Tan
The author reflects on her family's Chinese American legacy, her experiences as a writer, her survival of natural disasters, and her struggle to manage three family members afflicted with brain disease.
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A Perfect Day
by Richard Paul Evans
A Story of a man who found everything he thought he was missing in the love he already had.
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Nighttime is My Time
by Mary Higgins Clark
The undisputed "Queen of Suspense" delivers a chilling new thriller, set during the 20th high school reunion of a "tragedy-ridden" class, as a murderer sets out on a mission of vengeance against the women who once humiliated him.
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The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency
by Alexander McCall Smith
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Fans around the world adore the bestselling No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series and its proprietor, Precious Ramotswe, Botswana’s premier lady detective. In this charming series, Mma Ramotswe—with help from her loyal associate, Grace Makutsi—navigates her cases and her personal life with wisdom, good humor, and the occasional cup of tea. This first novel in Alexander McCall Smith’s widely acclaimed The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series tells the story of the delightfully cunning and enormously engaging Precious Ramotswe, who is drawn to her profession to “help people with problems in their lives.” Immediately upon setting up shop in a small storefront in Gaborone, she is hired to track down a missing husband, uncover a con man, and follow a wayward daughter. But the case that tugs at her heart, and lands her in danger, is a missing eleven-year-old boy, who may have been snatched by witchdoctors. The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency received two Booker Judges’ Special Recommendations and was voted one of the International Books of the Year and the Millennium by the Times Literary Supplement.
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The Time Traveler's Wife
by Audrey Niffenegger
"The Time Traveler's Wife is the story of Clare, a beautiful art student, and Henry, an adventuresome librarian, who have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-three and Henry was thirty-one. Impossible but true, because Henry is one of the first people diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder: periodically his genetic clock resets and he finds himself misplaced in time, pulled to moments of emotional gravity from his life, past and future. His disappearances are spontaneous, his experiences unpredictable, alternately harrowing and amusing." "The Time Traveler's Wife depicts the effects of time travel on Henry and Clare's marriage and their passionate love for each other, as the story unfolds from both points of view. Clare and Henry attempt to live normal lives, pursuing familiar goals - steady jobs, good friends, children of their own. All of this is threatened by something they can neither prevent nor control, making their story intensely moving and entirely unforgettable."--BOOK JACKET.
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Thursday Next in The Well of Lost Plots
by Jasper Fforde
Exhausted by her stint as Miss Havisham's apprentice at Jurisfiction, Thursday Next is delighted by a respite in the Character Exchange Program in the Well of Lost Plots, a place filled with linguistic chaos, lousy books, and a murderer.
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2nd Chance
by James Patterson
The Women's Murder Club returns for another thrilling crime investigation. Will their skills be enough to take down a brutal madman? A brutal madman sprays bullets into a crowd of children leaving a San Francisco church. Miraculously-or was it intentionally?-only one person dies. Then an elderly black woman is hung. Police homicide inspector Lindsay Boxer senses a connection and together with medical examiner Claire, assistant D. A. Jill, and Chronicle reporter Cindy, finds a link that sends a chill through the entire nation. This killer's motives are unspeakable. In this "inventive" installment of the Women's Murder Club, James Patterson proves once again why he is the #1 master of the murder mystery (Sunday Times).
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Lost in a Good Book
by Jasper Fforde
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of The Constant Rabbit comes “Harry Potter just for adults . . . [an] immensely enjoyable, almost compulsive experience” (The New York Times Book Review)—the second novel in the renowned Thursday Next series. “[Lost in a Good Book] is satire, fantasy, literary criticism, thriller, whodunit, game, puzzle, joke, postmodern prank, and tilt-a-whirl.”—The Washington Post If resourceful, fearless literary detective Thursday Next thought she could avoid the spotlight after her heroic escapades in the pages of Jane Eyre, she was sorely mistaken. Her adventures as a renowned Special Operative in literary detection have left Thursday Next yearning for a rest. But when the love of her life is eradicated by the corrupt multinational Goliath Corporation, Thursday must bite the bullet and moonlight as a Prose Resource Operative in the secret world of Jurisfiction, the police force inside the books. There she is apprenticed to Miss Havisham, the famous man-hater from Dickens’s Great Expectations, who teaches her to book-jump like a pro. If Thursday retrieves a supposedly vanquished enemy from the pages of Poe’s “The Raven,” she thinks Goliath might return her lost love, Landen. But her latest mission is endlessly complicated. Not only are there side trips into the works of Kafka and Austen, and even Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Flopsy Bunnies, Thursday finds herself the target of a series of potentially lethal coincidences, the authenticator of a newly discovered play by the Bard himself, and the only one who can prevent an unidentifiable pink sludge from engulfing all life on Earth. Don’t miss any of Jasper Fforde’s delightfully entertaining Thursday Next novels: THE EYRE AFFAIR • LOST IN A GOOD BOOK • THE WELL OF LOST PLOTS • SOMETHING ROTTEN • FIRST AMONG SEQUELS • ONE OF OUR THURSDAYS IS MISSING • THE WOMAN WHO DIED A LOT
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Murder, She Wrote: Dying to Retire
by Jessica Fletcher
Jessica Fletcher is in a Florida retirement community for the funeral of a dear old friend whose heart gave out-only to discover that the woman's death from natural causes may have been artificially induced. With the help of a feisty group of young-in-spirit retirees, Jessica must track down the clues and find out who prescribed the fatal treatment...
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Blacklist
by Sara Paretsky
Investigating the death of a man found in an empty estate building for a long-time client starts V.I. on the trail of four generations of deadly secrets.
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The Beekeeper's Apprentice ; Or, on the Segregation of the Queen
by Laurie R. King
A chance meeting with an elderly beekeeper turns into a pivotal, personal transformation when fifteen-year-old Mary Russell discovers that the beekeeper is the reclusive Sherlock Holmes, who soon takes on the role of mentor and teacher.
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Hancock Park
by Katherine V. Forrest
New from the Lambda Award winner and bestselling author of Sleeping Blues - another Kate Delafield mystery. It wasn't a typical call for detectives Kate Delafield and Joe Cameron. For one thing, the upscale neighbourhood of Hancock Park was more likely to be a stop on a bus tour of the stars' than a homicide scene. For another, everyone seemed too willing to point the detectives in the direction of Victoria Talbot's ex-husband. Now while the ex is on trial for his life, Kate must piece together a puzzle of secrets and lies before she can uncover the startling truth...'