A Reading List for International Women’s Day
Happy International Women’s Day! To celebrate, we’ve put together a reading list of great books celebrating and honoring powerful women. Let us know what you’re reading today.
The Wonders by Elena Medel
An international sensation, The Wonders follows María and Alicia through the streets of Madrid as they search for meaning and stability in a precarious world and unknowingly trace each other’s footfalls across time. María moved to the city in 1969, leaving her daughter with her family but hoping to save enough to take care of her.Two generations later, in 2018, Alicia was working at the snack shop in Madrid’s Atocha train station when it overflowed with female protesters. She couldn’t have known that María was among them. Readers will fall in love with María and Alicia, whose stories finally converge in the chaos of the protests, the weight of the years of silence hanging thickly in the air between them. The Wonders brings half a century of the feminist movement to life, and launches an inimitable new voice in fiction. Medel’s lyrical sensibility reveals her roots as a poet, but her fast-paced and expansive storytelling show she’s a novelist ahead of her time.
Factory Girls by Michelle Gallen
A funny, fierce, and unforgettable read about Maeve Murray, a young woman working a summer job in a shirt factory in Northern Ireland, while tensions rise both inside and outside the factory walls. Bitingly hilarious, clear-eyed, and steeped in the vernacular of its time and place, Factory Girls tackles questions of wealth and power, religion and nationalism, and how young women maintain hope for themselves and the future during divided, violent times.
Young Jane Young by Gabrielle Zevin
His Only Wife by Peace Adzo Medie
A witty, moving, and smart debut novel, His Only Wife introduces us to Afi Tekple, a brave young woman traversing the minefield of modern life with its taboos and injustices in Ghana. In a world of men who want their wives to be beautiful, to be good cooks and mothers, to grant their husbands forbearance, Afi is a delightful, brave, and relatable heroine who just may break all the rules.
In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez
In this extraordinary novel, the voices of all sisters–Minerva, Patria, María Teresa, and Dedé–speak across the decades to tell their stories, from secret crushes to gunrunning, and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillo’s rule in the Dominican Republic. Through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez’s imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again in this novel of courage and love, and the human costs of political oppression.
Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Díaz
Jaquira Díaz writes a fierce and eloquent memoir of her challenging girlhood and triumphant coming of age in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach. She maps a way out of despair toward love and hope to become her version of the girl she always wanted to be.
“I kept thinking about how this book might be the first time a queer Latina, a queer Afro-Latina, sees herself in a book, and how that would have been important to me growing up,” Jaquira said of her debut.
Mighty Justice by Dovey Johnson Roundtree and Katie McCabe
In this memoir, you’ll meet Dovey Johnson Roundtree—the groundbreaking civil rights attorney, soldier, and minister—the unforgettable trailblazer we should all know more about, a woman who “proved . . . a single individual can turn the tides of history,” as Michelle Obama said.
