The connection between close friends can feel like a superpower, but it can be devastating when things go wrong. These novels explore the joys and complexities of female friendship
From Elena Ferrante’s dazzling saga of a friendship across decades, to Zadie Smith’s exploration of how childhood friendships evolve into adult ones, these nine Booker-nominated novels all examine how potent a force friendship can be in women and girls’ lives.
The writers also reveal what can happen when friendships go awry. The books cover betrayals and bullying, dangerous power imbalances, and the heartbreak of a friendship ending, whether it explodes or ebbs away.
Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2016, Elena Ferrante’s novel is the fourth volume in the saga of a lifelong friendship between two women: brilliant, bookish Elena and fiery, uncontainable Lila. The two women grow from young girls to older adults across the four novels within the Neapolitan Quartet, of which The Story of the Lost Child is the final instalment.
Having moved to Florence, started a family, and published several well-received books, Elena returns to her home city to be with the man she has always loved. Lila, on the other hand, never freed herself from Naples. And her entrepreneurial success only draws her into closer contact with the nepotism, criminal violence and inviolable taboos that infect her neighbourhood. The women have a tumultuous relationship as they contend with each other’s choices.
Writing in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Rachel Cusk said, ‘In Elena and Lila, Ferrante’s modern woman is bisected and given two faces; where in her other works the divided woman speaks to and wrestles with herself, the Neapolitan series externalizes and literalizes those politics to show their almost insurmountable complexity.’
Zadie Smith’s story about friendship, music and identity was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2017.
Two brown girls dream of being dancers – but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about Black bodies and Black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It’s a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early 20s, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either.
Described in the Guardian as a ‘best friend bildungsroman in the Elena Ferrante mould’, Taiye Selasi goes on to say, ‘With shifting identities (brown, white; goth, “conscious”; “big woman”, fallen heroine), our narrator seeks above all a place where she belongs. That place is what a best friend, even an estranged one, can be, especially for a woman. Its comforts cannot be underestimated, not least in a life of great change.’
Guadalupe Nettel’s novel explores one of life’s most consequential decisions: whether or not to have children. Originally written in Spanish, it was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2023.
Alina and Laura are independent and career-driven women in their mid-thirties. Neither of them have built their lives around the future prospect of a family. Laura has taken the drastic decision to be sterilised, but as time goes by Alina becomes drawn to the idea of becoming a mother.
When complications arise in Alina’s pregnancy and Laura becomes attached to her neighbour’s son, both women are forced to reckon with the complexity of their emotions, in Nettel’s sensitive and surgically precise exploration of maternal ambivalence.
Writing in the London Review of Books, Sarah Resnick commented that, ‘It’s friendship, not crisis, that emerges as the novel’s focal point’, while a review in the Economist said, ‘Without resorting to sentimentality, the novel charts its characters’ halting efforts to understand and comfort one another. It is a piercing reflection on the ways acts of care bind people together.’
In her 2019 Booker Prize-winning novel, Bernardine Evaristo presents a gloriously new kind of history of Britain.
The book focuses on the lives of 12 interconnected but very different people – mostly women, mostly Black. They include longtime best friends Amma and Dominque who set up their own radical theatre company in the 1980s, and childhood friends Carole and LaTisha whose paths diverge dramatically as adults: Carole studies at Oxford and ends up working very high-up in banking, while LaTisha drops out and goes on to manage a grocery shop.
Crackling with energy and wit, Girl, Woman, Other follows its 12 characters across the miles and down the years, through different generations and social classes. Sarah Ladipo Manyika in the New Statesman said, ‘As the novel progresses in clever twists and turns, the characters’ lives intersect, culminating in a surprise ending. Their moving tales of pain, joy and friendship are drawn from a wide range of backgrounds and heritages: African, Caribbean, European. This is a story for our times.’
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2018, The Mars Room combines a gritty portrait of life on the margins of contemporary America with a stinging indictment of the US penal system.
Outside is the world from which Romy has been permanently severed: the Mars Room strip club where she once gave lap dances for a living, and her seven-year-old son, Jackson. Inside is Romy’s new reality, specifically Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility in California, with its daily acts of violence and where thousands of incarcerated women hustle to survive.
Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Jennifer Croft said, ‘Part of what the looping structure of The Mars Room accomplishes is an emphasis on all relationships – not only loving and loveless ones, but also those we don’t even realize we’re in.’
In an interview with Vogue, Rachel Kushner explained, ‘The novel is a stage for nuance, exception, contradiction, ambiguity, and the ways in which individual lives don’t fit neatly into stereotypes.’
Haunted by her neglectful upbringing, 24-year-old Eileen is consumed by a profound sense of self-hatred. She’s a loner and a nihilist, a character that Patrick Anderson in the Washington Post described as ‘one of the strangest, most messed-up, most pathetic – and yet, in her own inimitable way, endearing – misfits I’ve encountered in fiction’.
When glamorous new counsellor, Rebecca Saint John, arrives at the boys’ prison where she works, Eileen is beguiled by the newcomer and desperately seeks a connection with her. Their budding but unbalanced friendship quickly turns into a parasitic obsession – one that comes with a price, as Rebecca draws Eileen into a shocking act of violence.
Ottessa Moshfegh’s taut psychological thriller was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016. Booker Prize judge Jon Day called it a ‘dazzling, original novel with noirish flourishes voiced by a wickedly sardonic narrator’.
Zoë Heller’s gripping psychological drama, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2003, features an unreliable narrator and a dysfunctional female friendship.
When Sheba joins a north London secondary school as the new art teacher, fellow teacher Barbara senses the possibility of a friendship. But as Barbara and Sheba’s relationship develops, another does as well: Sheba begins an illicit affair with a 15-year-old schoolboy. When the affair comes to light and Sheba falls prey to the inevitable media circus, Barbara decides to write an account in her friend’s defence – one that reveals not only Sheba’s secrets but also her own.
Margaret Stead in the Guardian described Heller’s characters as ‘convincingly, depressingly human, doomed never to understand each other or themselves… A sympathetic portrayal of the isolation at the heart of human consciousness, Notes on a Scandal finds an elegant balance between dark comedy and tragedy, and concludes on a satisfyingly sinister note.’
Charlotte Wood’s fearless exploration of forgiveness, grief and female friendship was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2024.
Burnt out and in need of retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves Sydney to return to the place she grew up, taking refuge in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of New South Wales. She doesn’t believe in God and finds herself living a strange, reclusive existence almost by accident. Seemingly unconcerned with building friendships with the other women at the convent, the unnamed narrator is then forced to revisit her relationship with Sister Helen Parry, a former classmate and environmental activist who shows up unexpectedly.
In a review for The Conversation, Shady Cosgrove said, ‘Stone Yard Devotional offers line-by-line writing that haunts, and descriptions and ways of seeing the world that linger. The novel’s ideas and questions have made me consider the complicated nature of belonging as a woman in a patriarchal order where women are frequently pitted against each other, and how complicated female relationships can be.’
In Cat’s Eye, artist Elaine Risley returns to Toronto, the city where she grew up, to find herself overwhelmed by her past. Memories of childhood – unbearable betrayal, bullying and cruelty – surface relentlessly. Elaine is forced to confront the spectre of Cordelia, once her best friend and her tormentor, who has haunted her for 40 years.
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1989, Margaret Atwood’s acclaimed novel explores a childhood friendship gone wrong and the impact it can have throughout a life. Writing in the Guardian, Sam Jordison said, ‘But as Atwood herself has often pointed out, the idea that women should all have nurturing relationships with each other is far more strange and constricting than the simple truth that not everyone is kind.’
