Readings' community engagement and programming manager, Chris Gordon, on books that provide a restorative dose of female friendship.
My girlfriends and I message each other questions. We ask things such as: Was I bonkers last night? Was I too much? Too little? Sometimes we write to one another about our day: When will this event/meeting/day end? We send recommendations to one another: Have you tried this restaurant/watched this show/read this book? Often, we send passages to one another from books we are reading: This is how I feel! Or, This reminds me of you. Or variations on, This is how we will be when we are old/on holiday/next out together.
There seems to have been a rise recently in works of literature (and film and television) about women’s friendships. I know this is not a new theme (Jane Austen! Elena Ferrante! Helen Garner!) but the importance of it all now seems to have hit a new zeitgeist. I reckon this is because at the heart of it all, women’s friendships have always been rooted in survival, and right now we need this kinship to get us through the despair of the day.
So, if you, like me, have decided that reading about women’s friendships is a great antidote to the current news cycle, here is my list of top recent releases for your pleasure. For me, reading these books has been a comfort – they have reassured me that kindness does exist. There is no rhyme or reason to the list below, it’s all my own choices, but each title has filled me with something relatively simple: hope.
The winner of the 2025 International Booker Prize, Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq and translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. These portraits of women testify to Mushtaq's years as a journalist, but also to how women work together and for one another. It is a book that shows how we rely on each other.
The Confidence Woman by Sophie Quick explores and hilariously skewers contemporary cults of self-optimisation, while also creating a moving and all-too-real portrait of what it is like to be a single mother in the north of Melbourne. Turns out, life is easier with a friend who has your back and understands the pressures of school and playgrounds.
Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout is the book where Lucy Barton has finally become friends with Olive Kitteridge, who is now living in a retirement village and is still sharp as a tack. The women discuss unrecorded lives – people they know and how their lives went this way or that. It was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction this year.
Jacinta Parsons’ A Wisdom of Age is a long conversation between Parsons and the women who inspire her, are friends with her and just happen to be in their 80s. My girlfriend sent me a passage from this book over the weekend: ‘We’ve seen and done it all over the years and most importantly, we see each other.’
The inspirational Broken Brains by Jamila Rizvi and Rosie Waterland values how friendship can make all the difference to recovery. Both women, who have been friends for years and have experienced vastly distinct kinds of “broken brains”, talk about how those with friends live longer, which is a proven fact.
Finishing on a related and interesting but not surprising note, did you know that both the Women’s Prize and Australia’s own Stella Prize were both created by groups of friends?
