Your Ultimate Feminist Reading List

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Set in a near dystopian future, this hugely influential novel follows Offred, a handmaid to an important official in the fictional Republic of Gilead, there to provide him and his wife with children. The book explores social control, race and politics as well as gender and 30 years after its publication, the story remains powerfully resonant and a kind of banner call for feminist fiction.

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Walker’s Pulitzer-winning novel is set in Georgia in the 1930s and looks at the sexism and racism heroine Celie faces as a black woman. A violent, confronting but ultimately uplifting novel of sisterhood and triumph over awful prejudice that remains powerful today for it’s call to recognise the power of your own voice.

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

Winterson has said that her first, semi-autobiographical book Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit was the story she wrote about her childhood that she could survive, and that this memoir, now that she is older and braver, is the full truth. At times bleak, but incredibly moving and full of Winterson’s characteristic wit.

Only Ever Yours by Louise O’Neill

This debut won the inaugural YA Book Prize this year and for good reason. A brutal, brilliant novel, it reads much like a teen The Handmaid’s Tale in its dystopian setting of a school when girls are brought up being judged only on their appearance to be wives or prostitutes to men.

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

This beautifully-written testament to female friendship and bravery is set during the Second World War. It opens as one of the women is captured by the Gestapo and is forced to spill secrets. As she talks she reveals her friendship with pilot Maddie and the events that led her to France.

I Am An Emotional Creature by Eve Ensler

When I left my job as a secondary school librarian, I gave some of my students copies of this book as a leaving present. It’s a collection of poems and monologues told from the perspective of teenage girls across the world. It’s beautiful and defiant, and a call to reclaim yourself.

Cherry Pie by Hollie Poetry

My favourite poetry collection of recent years is by Arts Foundation winner and YouTube poetry sensation Hollie Poetry. A highlight is a response to Flo-Rida’s Blow My Whistle suggesting he masters oral sex before telling women to blow his whistle.

Becoming Unbecoming by Una

An incredibly powerful new graphic novel. The author tells her own story of sexual abuse against the background of the hunt for a serial murderer in Yorkshire that took place during her childhood. The illustrations are beautiful and the words are a powerful demand listen to women’s voices.

Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls by Alissa Nutting

Nutting’s 2010 collection of short stories are a darkly funny set of tales about gender and women’s bodies. The stories are heady and weird and include a woman lusting after a garden gnome.

How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran

The book that made me identify as a feminist when it was published in 2011. It’s incredibly funny but also a brilliantly simply introduction to thinking like a feminist and the important of gender equality.

Girls Will be Girls by Emer O’Toole

The subtitle of this book is ‘Dressing Up, Playing Parts and Daring to Act Differently’ and in it O’Toole explores the performance of gender and how and why we conform to stereotypes. It makes a great next step up from How to be a Woman.

We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche

If you’re not sure if we need feminism, or the word feminist, or you know someone who thinks that way, this is the pamphlet to give them. It will only take 20 minutes to read and it offers a simple, intelligent, very-hard-to-argue-with explanation of why we should all be feminists.

A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

This is based on a 1928 lecture Woolf gave to women at Cambridge University. It argues, in Woolf’s incomparable style, about the importance of access to education for women, and looks at the way men and women are treated differently in fiction and real life.

Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

A book of essays by a ‘flawed feminist’ Gay explores the contradictions and difficulties of being a feminist, and a feminist of colour, and the pressure to get it all right all of the time - but that this shouldn’t stop us trying.

Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde

In this collection of 15 essays and speeches, radical feminist Lorde, who died in 1992, deals with sexism, racism, homophobia and class. Originally published in 1984, what she is saying is still relevant and important, maybe even more so in light of how little things have changed.