19 Fantastic Books That You Must Read For Women's History Month

Happy Women's History Month! I'm once again asking you to go read more female authors.

1. Regretting Motherhood By Orna Donath

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If being happy is a crime, then sometimes, mothers can be the most law-abiding of all citizens. Donath’s groundbreaking research showcases how motherhood can often be a minefield and whoever is telling you otherwise is serving you a bowlful of baloney.

2. Hao: Stories By Ye Chun

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Hell hath no fury like the Chinese women we encounter in this collection of short stories. It follows these women "who turn to signs and languages as they cross the alien landscapes of migration and motherhood".

3. Ghost Forest By Pik-Shuen Fung

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Ours is a beautiful world…as long as we don’t mind a little dying. Despite all the tragedies that get dropped into their lives, gorgeous gorgeous girls, like Fung’s unnamed protagonist, don’t shy away from unpacking trauma by asking questions and revisiting family history. Fung tells us that feeling like a crumpled-up piece of paper is normal after losing a parent. But then again, happiness is a learnable skill.

4. Hellfire By Leesa Gazi (translated by Shabnam Nadiya)

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Rent is due for some of you. Not for Lovely and Beauty though. Despite being middle-aged, they still live with their mother, Farida, as she prohibits her daughters from leaving the house without her. Out of all the options she could have cosplayed as, Farida picks the Laxman Rekha, and sadly for all three women, things will eventually fall apart.

5. Small Pleasures By Clare Chambers

Sumedha Bharpilania

All that feature-writer Jean wanted were snuggles, but all she got were struggles. Navigating the dramatics of a demanding mother, while investigating whether Gretchen, the subject of the case her employer wanted her to look into, was truly the virgin mother she claimed to be, wasn’t rosy for Jean. But she got by with a little help (and love) from Howard.

6. Nightbitch By Rachel Yoder

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Society really wanted Yoder’s protagonist to be a "certified freak, seven days a week", if by freak, we mean mothering a toddler by martyring one’s own ambitions. But she really said, “Once I transform into my non-human avatar and defy the structures of power, it’s over for you guardians of regressive gender norms!”

7. The Collective By Alison Gaylin

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Reject modernity and embrace tradition by hunting down your daughter’s killer when law fails you, just like our girl Camille did. But be careful who you befriend in the process, as the only things you're allowed to accept without a thorough background check are cookies.

8. The Friend By Sigrid Nunez

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He doesn’t always have to be a punk and she doesn’t necessarily have to do ballet in order to fall in love. Sometimes, he can just be a Great Dane and she can be the one adopting him, following the demise of his previous owner. Together, they would live happily, if not ever after!

9. I Should Have Honor By Khalida Brohi

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When Mary Oliver said, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”, Brohi took the assignment seriously. She is the personification of the feminine urge to keep advocating for women’s emancipation without losing one’s bearings in the face of great opposition. Why be submissive and breedable when you can be infinite and incredible? 

10. Attachment By Florence Noiville

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Society might think that Marie’s love for a man, who is decades older than her, was her way of putting the "fun" in dysfunctional. But her daughter, Anna, resisted the pathologization of her mother’s desire. Attraction can be both sickening and tempting, like a gingerbread house, and requires a nuanced and empathetic understanding from multi-dimensional POVs.

11. Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh By Shrayana Bhattacharya

Sumedha Bharpilania

What do guilt and Indian women’s love for Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan have in common? Both can be carried everywhere! Bhattacharya, equipped with her razor-sharp wit and fifteen years of impeccable research, has pieced together how Shah Rukh’s iconography has empowered women across generations, from all walks of society.

12. Sorrow And Bliss By Meg Mason

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Martha tried telling everyone that while they might live in a society, she lived in a prison of her mind, but nobody paid any heed. After years of struggle, she meets a certain mental health professional who would eventually enable her to take baby steps towards becoming unbothered, moisturised, happy in her lane, focused, and flourishing.  

13. Pandora’s Jar By Natalie Haynes

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Lord, the men you put on earth to speak logic and reason are villainizing women of the Greek myths for not being idealised representatives of their gender. Get in readers, Haynes is giving us a rundown on how an exhausting cultural script has eliminated and misinterpreted Greek mythological women’s narratives.  

14. The Lesbian Cow And Other Stories By Indu Menon (translated by Nandakumar K.)

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While some of us are in his DMs, Menon’s protagonists are stuck in the realm of the grotesque, trying to surface from the trauma and oppression inflicted by many hims. And what didn’t kill these women, made them wish it did. This book is perhaps our cue to stop being in his DMs, if propagating gender-based violence is his one true jam. 

15. Detransition, Baby By Torrey Peters

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Womanhood cannot be confined to binaries, regardless of what the spawns of Satan, aka, proselytisers of heteronormativity say. Cheers to Peters for an astute depiction of our sisters’, and not just "cis-ters'", thoughts on pregnancy and family.

16. Girls Of A Certain Age By Maria Adelmann

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This book really normalised crying, shaking, throwing up, ripping your hair out, and banging your head against the wall, both literally and metaphorically. If you’re looking for an anthology of short stories that collates, and, in certain ways, assuages the collective despair of 21st-century femaleness, swipe right on this one!

17. Bluets By Maggie Nelson

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With Bluets, Nelson has launched a literary revolution by marrying prose with poetry, transgressing formalistic traditions, and countering the genrefication of literature. Borrowing its name from a Joan Mitchell painting, while also being partly autobiographical, Bluets is a manifestation of our narrator resorting to her rich interior life, after a lover stomped on her heart like a cartoon villain.

18. Unwell Women By Elinor Cleghorn

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Ladies, if he:

Misdiagnoses your pain as hysteria.

Deems you an unreliable narrator of your own lived experiences.

Recommends you a lobotomy at the drop of a hat.

He’s not your man. He’s the history of medicine, failing women again and again.

19. Acts Of Desperation By Megan Nolan

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Remember when Taylor Swift said, “I guess you didn't care, and I guess I liked that” and Adele said, “I'd go hungry, I'd go black and blue / I'd go crawling down the avenue / No, there's nothing that I wouldn't do / To make you feel my love”? Nolan’s unnamed protagonist’s love for Ciaran, a man who behaved as if he was on a high-budget commercial propagandising for toxic masculinity, divulges the many complexities and contradictions of female desire.