This article was first published in the latest issue of The Week magazine. If you want to read more like it, you can try six risk-free issues of the magazine here.
Jojo Moyes is the author of the best-sellers "Me Before You" and "The Giver of Stars." In Moyes' forthcoming comic novel, "We All Live Here," a woman with a fixer-upper London home and too much on her plate finds herself having to take in her estranged father.
'Three Women' by Lisa Taddeo (2019)
This book has become a kind of litmus test for me: I've given it to more friends than I can remember. A journalistic deep dive into female desire and the lies we tell ourselves, it provokes visceral reactions. After I read it, I tracked Lisa down and insisted we become friends. She's a one-off. Buy it here.
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'The Sun Also Rises' by Ernest Hemingway (1926)
It's fashionable these days not to like Ernest Hemingway, especially for his misogyny, but he also wrote scathingly about men's treatment of women. Lady Brett Ashley is one of the great female characters in literature. "Yes... Isn't it pretty to think so?" is a devastating last line to a love story. Buy it here.
'Small Things Like These' by Claire Keegan (2021)
Claire Keegan's novels, while short, waste not a single word. I loved this not just because of the surgical precision of the descriptions, and the haunting, narrow focus of the story, set in a small Irish town. I loved it because it was essentially about a rarity in modern fiction: a good man. Buy it here.
'Standard Deviation' by Katherine Heiny (2017)
When I read this novel about a New York City couple, their child, and the husband's ex-wife, it made me laugh so much in public that my family disowned me. It was also the first time I had felt unnervingly "seen" in print. I still wonder whether Heiny actually scooped out the contents of my head to create Audra. Buy it here.
'The Black Stallion' by Walter Farley (1941)
An American children's classic, this book, with its tales of survival, loyalty, and childhood courage, has somehow worked its way under my skin and stayed with me my whole life. Buy it here.
'Nobody's Perfect' by Anthony Lane (2002)
Anthony Lane was The New Yorker's film critic from 1993 to 2024, and his reviews — despite the title he chose for this collection — are written in perfect prose. Funny, astute, and often surprising, they are always a pleasure to dip into, even if you have zero interest in the films he is writing about. Buy it here.
This article was first published in the latest issue of The Week magazine. If you want to read more like it, you can try six risk-free issues of the magazine here.
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