The greatest novels about love tend to be about romantic love. But some of the most emotionally exacting fiction of the past two decades has focused on a different relationship — the bond between women. Not sisterhood in the biological sense, though that appears too, but the peculiar intensity of female friendship: the way it can sustain a life or quietly dismantle it, the jealousy and admiration that coexist in the same chest, the way a best friend can know you more completely than any lover ever manages.
Elena Ferrante put it into words: I wanted to be Lila and I wanted to have Lila. That sentence — that simultaneous impossibility — is what distinguishes the best female friendship fiction from everything around it. These books are not warm and uncomplicated. They are honest.
The past decade has produced an unusual number of exceptional novels on this subject. Reading across this literature is to encounter some of the most emotionally precise writing being published anywhere. Here is where to begin.
My Brilliant Friend (2011) by Elena Ferrante — published in Italian as L’amica geniale and translated into English by Ann Goldstein — is the novel against which all other female friendship fiction now tends to be measured. It opens in the present, with Lila Cerullo apparently choosing to disappear, to erase every trace of herself. Elena Greco, the narrator and Lila’s oldest friend, responds by sitting down to write their entire shared history. The result is four long novels spanning most of the twentieth century in Naples, covering childhood poverty, marriage, labor politics, violence, and the specific texture of two women’s intertwined lives across sixty years.
What makes the series unlike anything else is Ferrante’s refusal to sentimentalize the friendship. Lila and Elena love each other with an intensity that looks like competition from the outside — they have spent their lives measuring themselves against one another, finding each other brilliant and infuriating in equal measure. Elena’s narration is unreliable in the most interesting way: she has devoted her life to being Lila’s equal, and she is never quite certain whether she has managed it. The friendship is not warm. It is consuming.
The Story of the New Name (2012), the second volume, is where many readers feel the series reaches its emotional peak, and the third and fourth — Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2013) and The Story of the Lost Child (2014) — follow the two women across revolutions, betrayals, and the long disappointments of midlife. Reading all four is one of the more significant experiences contemporary fiction offers.
For readers uncertain about the four-book commitment, My Brilliant Friend stands alone effectively. The childhood section — covering the years when Elena and Lila are each other’s entire world, when a girl who can read better than you feels like a catastrophe and a miracle at once — is complete in itself.
Big Little Lies (2014) by Liane Moriarty approaches female friendship from a different angle: the comedy of social performance and what happens when the performances crack. Set among parents at an Australian primary school, the novel follows Madeline, Celeste, and Jane — three women whose friendships become entangled with a crime revealed only at the end. The book is funnier than its premise suggests. Moriarty has a rare ability to make social satire feel like genuine warmth, and the central friendship between these three very different women is drawn with real affection and specificity. What makes the book endure is not its plot mechanics but its account of how women find each other in the cramped geography of a school community, and what they are willing to do to protect each other once they do.
Little Fires Everywhere (2017) by Celeste Ng is more interested in the tensions that live inside a community of women who have made different choices. Set in Shaker Heights, Ohio — a planned community built around the idea of order — the novel centers on the complicated relationship between Elena Richardson, who has constructed her life according to a specific idea of how things should be done, and Mia Warren, a nomadic artist who arrives with her daughter and disrupts everything. The relationship that develops between these two women is defined by class, race, and the specific ways women are taught to judge each other’s choices. Ng’s great achievement is making both women understandable without excusing either. Their daughters, and the other women who orbit this story, are drawn with the same careful attention.
The Girls (2016) by Emma Cline is narrower and darker — a novel about a fourteen-year-old girl’s intoxication with an older girl she meets in 1960s California, and where that intoxication leads her. The friendship between Evie and Suzanne is not equal: Evie worships, Suzanne accepts the worship. The female cult at the novel’s center is less interesting than what Cline is really examining — the experience of being magnetized by another woman, of reorganizing your entire self around the gravitational pull of someone you want to be, and how that feeling, so common in girlhood, can be directed toward terrible ends.
Taylor Jenkins Reid has built a career on novels with female friendship at their center, and she is particularly skilled at depicting women who love each other across decades and through differing choices.
Daisy Jones and the Six (2019) presents its story through oral history — interview fragments assembled as if for a retrospective documentary. Daisy Jones, the band’s lead singer, is the obvious protagonist, but the novel is equally interested in the friendship between Daisy and Karen, the keyboardist, and in what it costs women to be brilliant in male-dominated spaces. The way Daisy and Karen protect and fail and understand each other, mostly without saying so directly, is where the book’s emotional truth lives.
Malibu Rising (2021) is structured around a single legendary party thrown by four famous siblings at their Malibu beach house, but extends backward across decades to tell the story of their mother, June, and the friendships and betrayals that shaped a generation before them. The bonds between the female characters — sisters, mothers and daughters, women who chose each other — are the novel’s real architecture.
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (2017) wraps a female friendship inside a secret: aging Hollywood icon Evelyn Hugo grants one final interview to a young journalist, and the story she tells is not what the journalist expected. The friendship between Evelyn and Monique frames the narrative, but the relationships Evelyn describes from her own past — with the women who made her survival possible, with her great love — are what the book is finally about. Reid argues, without being schematic about it, that the defining relationships of a life are often not the romantic ones.
The Vanishing Half (2020) by Brit Bennett follows identical twin sisters — Desiree and Stella Vignes — who grow up in a small Black community in Louisiana and then diverge completely, one living openly as a Black woman, one passing as white. The novel tracks both sisters across decades and then into the next generation. The bond between Desiree and Stella is a love story of its own kind: the most intimate possible knowledge of another person, complicated by the radically different paths they have chosen and the silences those paths require. Bennett writes about the specific grief of a friendship — of a sisterhood — that was also the primary relationship of a life, and what it means to abandon it.
Homegoing (2016) by Yaa Gyasi takes a longer and wider view — a multigenerational novel that follows two half-sisters born in eighteenth-century Ghana, then traces one chapter per generation through each of their descendants’ parallel lives in Ghana and America. The female relationships that recur across those generations — between mothers and daughters, between women who recognize something essential in each other across enormous differences of circumstance — carry a particular weight because Gyasi is writing about transmission: what is passed down, what is lost, what cannot be explained but is felt anyway. It is not a comfortable book. It is a necessary one.
Not all female friendship fiction works in epic scale. Some of the most precise books in this tradition operate in a smaller key.
Conversations with Friends (2017) by Sally Rooney, her debut novel, follows Frances — a twenty-one-year-old student who performs spoken-word poetry with her ex-girlfriend and current best friend, Bobbi — as both of them become entangled with an older couple. The friendship between Frances and Bobbi, with its history and its unspoken agreements and its complicated arithmetic of need and obligation, is as interesting as any of the novel’s romantic elements. Rooney is unusually good at depicting the way women manage each other’s emotional lives: what Frances is willing to do for Bobbi, what she conceals, and what she cannot.
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine (2017) by Gail Honeyman approaches female friendship from the perspective of its absence. Eleanor is a woman so thoroughly damaged that she does not know she is lonely — she has constructed an elaborate self-sufficient existence and genuinely believes it is working. The relationships she slowly, reluctantly develops over the course of the novel represent a different kind of female friendship narrative: not the consuming intensity of Ferrante, but the quiet, improbable miracle of connection being offered to someone who never expected to receive it.
Olive Kitteridge (2008) by Elizabeth Strout, which won the Pulitzer Prize, is a collection of linked stories set in coastal Maine, all connected by the fierce, difficult, often unkind figure of Olive herself. Strout’s portrait of how women relate to each other across a lifetime — the neighbors and former students and strangers whose paths intersect with Olive’s — offers one of the most honest accounts of female sociality in contemporary American fiction. The friendships here are not close. They are the relations that people who share a geography build with each other over decades: not intimacy, but knowledge, which is sometimes more durable.
Across these novels, a few commitments recur. The friendships depicted are not uncomplicated — the women in them lie to each other, outgrow each other, fail each other spectacularly, and sometimes, in the best cases, come back. The authors resist every impulse toward tidy resolution.
There is also, in most of these books, a precise attention to how the wider world shapes friendship: class pressure, racial hierarchy, the specific weight of being a woman in spaces not designed with women in mind. These friendships are not set apart from the social world but embedded in it, shaped by the same forces that shape everything else about these women’s lives.
What unites them, finally, is emotional honesty — a willingness to describe what female friendship actually feels like rather than what it looks like from the outside. The jealousy and the pride in another woman’s success existing simultaneously. The particular ache of growing apart. The surprise of realizing that a friendship has quietly become the spine of your life. These books take female friendship seriously as a subject — not as background to romance, not as consolation for the love that matters more, but as one of the most interesting and consequential forms of human attachment there is.
Working through a list like this — especially series like Ferrante’s four-volume Neapolitan Quartet — is easier when you have somewhere to track what you have read and what you thought of it. Bookdot lets you log every book, leave private notes on each one, organize your TBR list, and track your progress across multi-volume series without losing your place.
Track every book on your female friendship reading list — and discover what to read next — with Bookdot.
