Women's Fiction

A love triangle unearths dangerous, deadly secrets from the past in this thrilling tale perfect for fans of The Paper Palace and Where the Crawdads Sing.

It’s the 1960s in North Carolina, and Lorraine Delford has it all—an upstanding family, a perfect boyfriend, and an idyllic home complete with a white picket fence....

It's a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She's immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall.

From the celebrated author of The Nightingale and The Four Winds comes Kristin Hannah's The Women—at once an intimate portrait of coming of age in a dangerous time and an epic tale of a nation divided....

Maine, 1789: When the Kennebec River freezes, entombing a man in the ice, Martha Ballard is summoned to examine the body and determine cause of death. As a midwife and healer, she is privy to much of what goes on behind closed doors in Hallowell.

From the beloved author of Big Little Lies, Apples Never Fall, and The Husband’s Secret comes a moving novel of love, marriage, family, and trying to find certainty in a fragile world.

From the author of Reese’s Book Club Pick and New York Times bestseller Wrong Place Wrong Time comes an addictive thriller about a new mother’s world upended when her husband commits a terrifying crime.

After Lucy is found wandering the streets, covered in her best friend Savvy’s blood, everyone thinks she is a murderer.

The #1 New York Times bestselling author, whose books so many love, brings us a fresh, contemporary story of a woman and her unruly blended family.

The New York Times bestselling author of The Diamond Eye and The Rose Code returns with a haunting and powerful story of female friendships and secrets in a Washington, DC, boardinghouse during the McCarthy era.

A young woman and her lover are marooned on an island in this “lushly painted” (People) historical epic of love, faith, and defiance from the bestselling author of Sam.

A publishing event ten years in the making—From the bestselling and award-winning author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists comes a searing, exquisite new novel about four women and their loves, longings, and desires.

From the number-one bestselling author of The Nightingale and The Great Alone comes a powerful American epic about love and heroism and hope, set during the Great Depression....

A new Anne Tyler novel destined to be an instant classic: a socially awkward mother of the bride navigates the days before and after her daughter's wedding.

In 1950s Tehran, seven-year-old Ellie lives in grand comfort until the untimely death of her father, forcing Ellie and her mother to move to a tiny home downtown. Lonely and bearing the brunt of her mother’s endless grievances, Ellie dreams of a friend to alleviate her isolation.

Lily hasn’t always had it easy, but that’s never stopped her from working hard for the life she wants. She’s come a long way from the small town where she grew up—she graduated from college, moved to Boston, and started her own business....

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo meets First Lie Wins in this electric, voice-driven debut novel about an elusive bestselling author who decides to finally confess her true identity after years of hiding from her past.

An epic love story set in the sparkling, savage sphere of elite figure skating, The Favorites stars a woman determined to carve her own path on and off the ice.

A gripping vision of our society radically overturned by a theocratic revolution, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale has become one of the most powerful and most widely read novels of our time....

Meredith and Nina Whitson are as different as sisters can be. One stayed at home to raise her children and manage the family apple orchard; the other followed a dream and traveled the world to become a famous photojournalist....

Lily and her ex-husband, Ryle, have just settled into a civil coparenting rhythm when she suddenly bumps into her first love, Atlas, again. After nearly two years separated, she is elated that for once, time is on their side, and she immediately says yes when Atlas asks her on a date.

After serving five years in prison for a tragic mistake, Kenna Rowan returns to the town where it all went wrong, hoping to reunite with her four-year-old daughter. But the bridges Kenna burned are proving impossible to rebuild....

Heartwood takes you on a gripping journey as a search and rescue team race against time when an experienced hiker mysteriously disappears on the Appalachian Trail in Maine.

Brett Bohlinger has forgotten all about the list of life goals she’d written as a naïve teenager. In fact, at 34, Brett seems to have it all.....

Olivia McAfee knows what it feels like to start over. Her picture-perfect life—living in Boston, married to a brilliant cardiothoracic surgeon, raising their beautiful son, Asher—was upended when her husband revealed a darker side....

Beth and her gentle, kind husband Frank are happily married, but their relationship relies on the past staying buried. But when Beth’s brother-in-law shoots a dog going after their sheep, Beth doesn’t realize that the gunshot will alter the course of their lives. For the dog belonged to none other than Gabriel Wolfe, the man Beth loved as a teenager—the man who broke her heart years ago. Gabriel has returned to the village with his young son Leo, a boy who reminds Beth very much of her own son, who died in a tragic accident.

In the heart of the Maine woods, an experienced Appalachian Trail hiker goes missing. She is forty-two-year-old Valerie Gillis, who has vanished 200 miles from her final destination. Alone in the wilderness, Valerie pours her thoughts into fractured, poetic letters to her mother as she battles the elements and struggles to keep hoping. At the heart of the investigation is Beverly, the determined Maine State Game Warden tasked with finding Valerie, who leads the search on the ground.

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until—betrayed and brokenhearted—she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America—but faces an unthinkable hardship.

Emma Rini is in a rut so deep she could shelve books there. While her sister awaits her first baby, and her parents kick off retirement with vow renewals and travel, Emma stays put among the stacks of the family bookshop. In fact, she can’t remember the last time she took a vacation. Or had a romance that hovered above disappointing. When her parents assume she’ll take over the shop for them without a break, she realizes she needs to get away—back to the nineteenth century.

Lenny’s a bit of a mess at the moment. Ever since cancer stole away her best friend, she has been completely lost. She’s avoiding her concerned parents, the apartment she shared with her best friend, and the ever-laminated “live again” list of things she’s promised to do to survive her grief. But maybe if she acts like she has it all together, no one will notice she’s falling apart. The only gigs she can handle right now are temporary babysitting jobs, and she just landed a great one, helping overworked, single mom Reese and her precocious daughter, Ainsley.

When our story begins, Julia Child is an eager but inexperienced codebreaker longing to prove herself in the male-dominated world of intelligence, and Josephine Baker is, well, Josephine Baker—a world-famous entertainer who is now leading a double life as a spy for the French Resistance. When a golden opportunity arises to infiltrate a high-stakes Nazi gala in Vichy France, Julia must put aside her by-the-book mentality to assist her unorthodox new partner.

2019: Lucy awakens from a dream to find her hands around her ex-lover’s throat. Horrified, she flees to her older sister’s house on the Australian coast, hoping she can help explain the strangely vivid nightmare that preceded the attack—but Jess is nowhere to be found. As Lucy awaits her return, the rumors surrounding Jess’s strange small town start to emerge. Numerous men have gone missing at sea, spread over decades. A tiny baby was found hidden in a cave. And sailors tell of hearing women’s voices on the waves.

For years, Kara Ballard Torrington has kept her distance from the town in Maine where she was raised and the boisterous, often-troubled Ballard family. She’s made a whole new life for herself on Gansett Island that is upended by a phone call in which she learns that two of her brothers have been accused of murder. When her parents ask her husband, celebrated attorney Dan Torrington, to come help them, Kara is forced to confront the drama she left behind in Maine as well as a whole new set of issues that have arisen in her absence.

After sustaining injuries in Iraq, Chancellor Madaris was told he’d never walk again. Chance credits his great-grandmother Mama Laverne with giving him the will to heal and prove the doctors wrong. He has a healthy respect for her meddling ways and knows he’ll eventually end up next on her matchmaking list. When Zoey Pritchard was eight, she survived a car accident that took the lives of her mother and father, and was sent to live with her great-aunt who refused to speak about her parents. Zoey has no memory from before the crash, but she’s been having the same dream over and over…

Virginia, 1864—Libby Steadman’s husband has been away for so long that she can barely conjure his voice in her dreams. While she longs for him in the night, fearing him dead in a Union prison camp, her days are spent running a gristmill with her teenage niece, a hired hand, and his wife, all the grain they can produce requisitioned by the Confederate Army. It’s an uneasy life in the Shenandoah Valley, the territory frequently changing hands, control swinging back and forth like a pendulum between North and South, and Libby awakens every morning expecting to see her land a battlefield.

Annie is nine months pregnant and shopping for a crib at IKEA when a massive earthquake hits Portland, Oregon. With no way to reach her husband, no phone or money, and a city left in chaos, there’s nothing to do but walk.

After the unexpected death of her father, college student Jane Sharp longs for a distraction from her grief. She becomes obsessed with true crime, befriending armchair detectives who teach her how to hunt killers from afar. In this morbid internet underground, Jane finds friendship, purpose, and even glory . . .So when news of the shocking deaths of three college girls in Delphine, Idaho, takes the world by storm, and sleuths everywhere race to solve the crimes, Jane and her friends are determined to beat them.

1940, Emilia Romagna. Lili and Esti have been best friends since meeting at the University of Ferrara; when Esti’s son Theo is born, they become as close as sisters. There is a war being fought across borders, and in Italy, Mussolini’s Racial Laws have deemed Lili and Esti descendants of an ‘inferior’ Jewish race, but life somehow goes on—until Germany invades northern Italy, and the friends find themselves in occupied territory.

Ten months. That’s the longest Elisa has stayed anyplace, constantly propelled by her fear that if she puts down roots, a family curse will turn her into a tree. But she’s grown tired of flitting from town to town and in and out of relationships. When she discovers a small town in Massachusetts where mysterious forces make it impossible for the residents to leave, she hopes she can change her fate.

With her name on the Hollywood blacklist and her life on hold, starlet Melanie Cole has little choice in company. There is her next-door neighbor, Elwood, but the screenwriter’s agoraphobia allows for just short chats through open windows. He’s her sole confidante, though, as she and her housekeeper, Eva, an immigrant from war-torn Europe, rarely make conversation. Then one early morning Melanie and Eva spot Elwood’s sister-in-law and caretaker, June, digging in his beloved rose garden. After that they don’t see Elwood at all anymore.

Lena Westbrook, a perfectionist and workaholic, has carefully planned and orchestrated every detail of her life. So when her boyfriend of two years breaks up with her on the night she expects him to propose, she’s heartbroken and confused. Lena flees to her beloved aunt’s home on Seattle’s picturesque Bainbridge Island to lick her wounds but when she awakens the next morning, she is shocked to find herself in Paris—in bed with a handsome French man who seems to think that Lena is his wife.

1946: World War II is over, and Emma Clarkson is poised to take flight. With dreams of attending university, she’s ready to leave behind the wild beauty of Sable Island, the only home she’s ever known. But when a handsome British sea captain is rescued from a nearby shipwreck, her destiny is forever changed. Emma falls deeply in love with Oliver Harris, but their romance is not meant to be. Oliver returns to the sea, while Emma vows to forget him and pursue her own ambitions.

It's 1986, and "beautiful, radical ideas" are in the air. The narrator of Theory & Practice, a young woman originally from Sri Lanka, arrives in Melbourne for graduate school to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In the bohemian neighborhood of St. Kilda she meets artists, activists, students—and Kit. He claims to be in a "deconstructed relationship." They become lovers, and the narrator's feminism comes up against her jealousy. Meanwhile, an entry in Woolf's diary upends what the narrator knows about her literary idol, and throws her own work into disarray.

Kael Daniels is a man who vowed never to love again. The night his younger brother, Jace, was gunned down, Kael was too caught up chasing a woman falling for her, losing focus, and ultimately losing the one person who meant everything to him. That night changed him forever. Hardened him. Taught him that love is a distraction, a weakness he could never afford again. Now, as the most powerful and feared investor in New York, he’s turned his empire from street money into something bigger, something untouchable. But when his father orders him to make Amira St. James fall in love with him and ...

When Emma meets Matthew, a kind, handsome widower, he seems to be just what she needs. Yet as their relationship moves fast, Emma’s friends worry she might be exploited. She’s a rich woman after all. Emma doesn’t care Matthew has no money. But as the memory of his perfect first wife hangs over them, Emma does have one tiny doubt. If Matthew’s wife hadn’t died, he wouldn’t be with her. And Emma wonders if she’s second best. Can she ever fill the dead woman’s shoes?

Babs Dionne, proud Franco-American, doting grandmother, and vicious crime matriarch, rules her small town of Waterville, Maine, with an iron fist. She controls the flow of drugs into Little Canada with the help of her loyal lieutenants, girlfriends since they were teenagers, and her eldest daughter, Lori, a Marine vet struggling with addiction. When a drug kingpin discovers that his numbers are down in the upper northeast, he sends a malevolent force, known only as The Man, to investigate.

Born with a congenital muscle disorder, Shaka spends her days in her room in a care home outside Tokyo, relying on an electric wheelchair to get around and a ventilator to breathe. But if Shaka’s physical life is limited, her quick, mischievous mind has no boundaries: She takes e-learning courses on her iPad, publishes explicit fantasies on websites, and anonymously troll-tweets to see if anyone is paying attention (“In another life, I’d like to work as a high-class prostitute”). One day, she tweets into the void an offer of an enormous sum of money for a sperm donor.

After twenty years in a loveless marriage, Evelyn Henderson will do anything to escape her stifling suburban life. She boards a train for Reno, Nevada, a former frontier town that’s booming thanks to “six-weekers”: women from all walks of life who take up residence there just long enough to secure an uncontested divorce—a right they don’t yet have in their home states.

On an ordinary day in an upscale Atlanta suburb, Maya is making breakfast for her two sons, when her husband drops a red-and-blue striped envelope on the counter and asks a devastating question: Who is Sunny? Maya is sent reeling back to her childhood in Guyana—a time when Sunny was her only name. Unbeknownst to her husband, Maya is not who she claims to be. The letter, from her long-lost sister Roshi, now threatens to expose her true identity and shatter the seemingly perfect existence Maya worked so hard to build.

When Four Stories by American Women was first published by Penguin Classics in 1990, it understandably reflected the second-wave feminist interpretations of that time—a period marked by an impressive recovery of what were then considered to be minor American writers. This updated and expanded volume, Twelve Stories by American Women edited by Arielle Zibrak, offers a more diverse selection of writers—including Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, María Cristina Mena, Zitkala-Ša, Sui Sin Far, and Barbara E. Pope.