5 books about female friendship that we can't wait to read this spring

One way to better understand the beauty and complexity of female friendship is to read stories of others' experiences.

Fictional stories about women's bonds can challenge, validate, or encourage our existing ideas of all that female friendship can be (which can be necessary if you're coming out of a season of friendlessness and wanting to re-evaluate your relational needs). Books about female friendship can also help us better understand our friends' perspectives, which can lead to a relationship with more depth, compassion, and empathy.

5-books-about-female-friendship-that-we-can-t-wait-to-read-this-springHere are books to read this spring that center around women's friendships, just in time for your spring book club meeting:

What are some books about female friendship?

Before reading our list of recommendations, it's important to totally understand the benefits of reading fictional stories about women's friendships:

Can reading about fictional characters' friendships really have an impact on my friendships?

Yes.

Here's why:

First, reading fiction improves your social cognition, which is all about your ability to understand others in different social situations. Being able to pick up on certain cues can help in every stage of friendship, including making friends and navigating conflict.

Another benefit is that it can help you better relate in interracial friendships, according to research from 2014. Opting for books that feature characters of various cultures can help you to reap this particular benefit.

And finally, one of the most commonly cited benefits of reading fiction is an expansion of your ability to empathize with others, through a process known as "emotional transportation."

5 books about friendship to read with your book club this spring

If you're obsessed with a good story about women who navigate the tensions of staying together in spite of their ever-changing worlds, these books about female friendship should be at the top of your TBR list (find each synopsis by scrolling below):

1. Strange Girls by Sarvat Hasin

2. Clutch by Emily Nemens

3. Kin by Tayari Jones

4. Love by the Book by Jessica George

5. Under Water by Tara Menon

6. -scroll to see a bonus title-

   
   
   
   

Okay, you've got your list, but you need mor details.

We've got you:

Share this with your book club to pick your spring selection

Choosing the next book club selection can be nerve-wracking, but here are descriptions of a few options to help you make your pick with ease:

Strange Girls by Sarvat Hasin

Here's your synopsis:

A decade has passed since Ava spoke to Aliya. During the years of silence, Ava’s life has remained at a standstill, while Aliya got the one thing they both wanted more than anything: a book deal. Forced back together at a mutual friend’s bachelorette in London, Ava returns to Aliya’s doorstep, desperate to unpack the truth of their shared history—and what they meant to each other.

When the two first met in the halls of their historic campus, their connection was electric. Aliya and Ava created a world of their own through the stories they wrote, influencing and borrowing from each other’s work. But when the end of college loomed, the real world began to pull them in opposite directions. Was their bond ever truly as strong as Aliya thought? And what would become of the stories they told themselves about each other?

Weaving together the friends’ past and present, Strange Girls is an ingenious portrait of a fraught friendship, and an exploration of the ties forged in the intensity of the college experience, and the scars left when they break.

Clutch by Emily Nemens

As undergrads, Gregg, Reba, Hillary, Bella, and Carson formed the kind of rare bond that college brochures promise—friendship that lasts a lifetime. Two decades later, the women are spread across the country but remain firmly tethered through their ever-unfurling group chat. They’ve made it through COVID and childbirth and midcareer challenges, but no one can anticipate what’s coming down the pike.

The five women converge on Palm Springs for a long overdue reunion: Gregg, who has forged a path as a progressive Texas legislator, is facing a huge decision about her political future. Reba, who moved back to the Bay Area after decades away, is deep in IVF treatments while caring for her aging parents and navigating a San Francisco she hardly recognizes. Hillary's medical career in Chicago is going great—but at home, her husband's struggles with addiction have derailed their life. In New York City, Bella faces the biggest case in her career as a litigator while her home life crumbles around her, and across the river in Brooklyn, Carson is working on a new novel as well as forging a possible relationship with the father she's never met.

Twenty years into their shared friendship, the stakes are higher than ever, and they must help one another reconcile professional ambition with personal tumult. Clutch is a big, beautiful, and deeply absorbing novel that asks how much space and heart we can give to our friends and our families, and what space we can save for ourselves.

Kin by Tayari Jones

Here's your synopsis:

Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother’s death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners, aspiration, and inequality. Annie, abandoned by her mother as a child and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, culminating in a battle for her life.

A novel about mothers and daughters, friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South, Kin is an exuberant, emotionally rich, unforgettable work from one of the brightest and most irresistible voices in contemporary fiction.

Love by the Book by Jessica George

Remy is lucky. Her debut novel, based on her three best friends, became an instant bestseller when it was released, and her agent and publisher are clamoring for a follow-up. But just as Remy’s creative inspiration seems to leave her, so too do her friends: one moves to New York, one gets pregnant, and one gets back together with her (awful) boyfriend. After an ill-advised one-night stand complicates matters further, Remy is left deeply alone—and unable to find her next book idea.

Simone is successful. A Kindergarten teacher with a passion for kids, and a well-paying side hustle that affords her all the material comforts she desires, she doesn't have time for a robust social life. All Simone needs is her close-knit family—but after the true nature of her work is revealed, they cut her off, and she realizes for the first time just how isolated she is.

When Simone and Remy bump into each other (literally) in a bookstore, it isn’t exactly soulmates at first sight. Simone is guarded and prickly, Remy is insecure and heartbroken, and each woman is harboring a secret. And yet they might just be the missing piece the other has been searching for—if only they can let each other in.

Can Simone help Remy make one of the most important decisions of her life—and can Remy help Simone recover all that she’s lost? In Jessica George’s heartwarming, funny, and soulful second novel, she explores the restorative nature of female friendship and the life-changing power of platonic love.

Under Water by Tara Menon

After Marissa loses her mother at six, the most intimate relationship of her life begins. Her marine biologist father, determined to channel his grief into completing his wife’s research, whisks her across the globe to Thailand. There she meets Arielle, and a fairytale friendship takes hold. During the week, the girls live at the resort owned by Arielle’s parents; on the weekends they join the tight-knit community of researchers on a nearby island. Together the girls discover the fragile wonders of its reefs, forests, and beaches. Together they learn to dive into the deep, holding their breath for minutes at a time, as effortlessly synchronized as the manta rays they come to know by name. Together they learn to swim their way out of danger. But then comes a wave Arielle can’t outpace, leaving Marissa gutted with loss.

Years later, Marissa is back in New York, adrift and haunted by the memory of her friend. Over the course of two fateful days, as another cataclysm approaches the city and the past comes flooding back, she discovers how to sustain herself in a precarious world.

BONUS: Down Time by Andrew Martin

Here's the synopsis:

Without Cassandra, Aaron would probably be dead. Fortunately, she won’t leave him—despite the drinking, flirting, solipsism, armchair socialism, overspending, infidelity, catastrophic depression, and disparate but increasingly frequent spells of drug- and booze-addled debauchery. Unfortunately, she might be reaching the end of her rope.

Cass and Aaron, like the other neurotic, ambivalent intellectuals in their orbit, are getting older. There’s Malcolm, with his own alcoholism and marginally more successful writing career; his partner, Violet, a doctor with little patience for both; Antonia, a teaching fellow whose book about ecocide may get her tenure at a prestigious university near Harvard Square—yes, that one. When Sam, a charming trust-fund punk at the center of this loose network, dies suddenly, and a global pandemic takes hold, all five must contend with the lives they’ve made: their desires and disappointments, habits and hang-ups, pathologies and addictions, and the possibilities of making art and being good as the earth whirls to its end.

Down Time marks the delightful return of Andrew Martin, the author of the pitch-perfect slacker classics Early Work and Cool for America. Compulsively readable and contagiously intelligent, this is a wryly comic social novel of settling down, selling out, growing up, and getting out that turns a terribly funny and hyper-literate eye on our most desperately guarded ambitions: to love and be loved, to know and be known, to stay sane, if only just. 

Don't have any friends to read with? Our How To Make Friends as an Adult Course teaches you to attract the kind of friendships you've been dreaming of.