What does it look like when women across the globe are writing at their highest level simultaneously? Honestly, it looks like 2024–2025.
From Kerala to Seoul, from quiet, powerful debuts to global bestsellers, there’s just been so much incredible work lately, and it all feels different. Urgent and real. This collection is a small list of books every woman should read. Seven recent reads that I genuinely think are worth your time, the kind that remind you why reading even matters.
Orbital
Samantha Harvey's luminous, singular novel unfolds over a single day aboard the International Space Station, following six astronauts as they complete sixteen orbits of Earth. There is no thriller plot here, no villain, no countdown. That is precisely the point. What Orbital offers is something far rarer in contemporary fiction, a sustained meditation on what it means to be human, witnessed from the most extreme distance from humanity.
Harvey's prose is breathtakingly beautiful, capturing each astronaut's inner world, grief, love, wonder, and regret as they watch Earth's coastlines and storm systems from 250 miles above. When it won the Booker Prize in 2024, the judges called it a novel that does what only the greatest literature can. It changes you.
Mother Mary Comes to Me
Arundhati Roy—one of India's greatest living writers and author of The God of Small Things, ventures into memoir for the very first time. Mother Mary Comes to Me is a deeply personal and long-awaited account of her relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, an educator, Christian activist, and formidable personality who famously battled the Syrian Church over women's inheritance rights and won long before #MeToo gave such fights a hashtag.
Inspired by Mary's passing in 2022, the memoir traces Roy's childhood in Kerala, her difficult flight from home at eighteen, and a lifetime of trying to understand the woman who shaped every fiber of her worldview. Described as simultaneously disturbing and fascinating, humorous and deeply moving, this book offers the most direct access yet to the mind behind one of this century's most singular literary careers.
The Women
Kristin Hannah's most ambitious novel yet follows Frances 'Frankie' McGrath, a twenty-year-old nursing student from California who enlists in the Army Nurse Corps during the Vietnam War. Raised in a sheltered, conservative household, Frankie is utterly unprepared for what she encounters in the chaos of a war zone and equally unprepared for what awaits her when she returns home to an America that refuses to acknowledge the women who served.
The Women sheds light on one of history's most overlooked chapters: the more than 11,000 women who served in Vietnam, many of whom came home to silence, shame, and PTSD that went undiagnosed for decades. This book is a story about sacrifice, female friendship, trauma, and the enduring strength required to survive bearing witness to the worst of humanity.
Heart Lamp
Heart Lamp is a watershed achievement in Indian and world literature. This collection of twelve short stories, originally written in Kannada and translated into English by Deepa Bhasthi, became both the first short story anthology and the first work written in Kannada to win the International Booker Prize. Banu Mushtaq's stories illuminate the lives of Muslim women in South India with a clarity and compassion that is simultaneously hyperlocal and fiercely universal.
The translator Deepa Bhasthi received equal praise, with judges describing her work as 'a radical translation that ruffles language to create new textures in a plurality of Englishes. This book is not only a masterpiece of regional Indian literature, but it is also one of the most significant works of world literature published in 2025 and a profound source of pride for Indian readers.
We Do Not Part
Han Kang, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 2024, brings her characteristic poetic intensity to this haunting novel about historical trauma and the limits of memory. We Do Not Part follows a writer named Kyungha who is drawn into the story of the 1948 Jeju Island massacre, in which over 30,000 people were killed by government forces. The novel's central question is one that resonates far beyond Korea: What do we owe the dead?
The Nobel Committee described Han Kang's work as having 'intense poetic prose' that 'exposes the fragility of human life.' For Indian readers, the parallels with India's own silenced histories, Partition, caste violence, and colonial atrocities make this novel resonate with a particular urgency. We Do Not Part is essential reading for anyone who believes literature's deepest purpose is witnessing.
Conclusion
What makes these books stand out is not just the stories they tell but also the way they reflect the moment we are living in. These are not loud, dramatic narratives trying to prove a point. They are quieter, more personal, and shaped by uncertainty, connection, loneliness, and the search for meaning in everyday life.
Some of these books will stay with you because they feel familiar. Others because they challenge the way you see things. You might find comfort in one, discomfort in another, or simply a shift in perspective you did not expect. That range is what makes them worth reading.
If you are someone who looks for books that feel real rather than perfect, this list is a good place to begin. These are not just stories to pass the time; they are the kind you return to, think about, and carry with you in small, lasting ways.
