The writer and journalist chooses her favourite books about friendship. Her latest book, "The Virago Book of Friendship" – an anthology of writing about female friendship – is out now.
The Spare Room
What would you do if your beloved friend, dying from cancer, came to stay while undergoing treatment at the hands of an alternative therapist whose crazed "cures" you regard as dangerous bunkum? This novel, bottled rage, should come with a health warning of its own.
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Love is Blue: A Wartime Diary
Joan Wyndham, 1986
Vivid, delicious fun, as 19-year-old Joan and her pals Gussy, Pandora and Oscarine, all of them newly bedecked in the blue serge uniform of the WAAF, are billeted in Preston, Lancashire – a very long way indeed from Chelsea. Bed bugs, weak cocoa and doomed love affairs: together, they'll survive them all.
Between Friends: Letters of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby
Edited by Elaine Showalter and English Showalter, 2022
The most full and resonant account of a real-life friendship that I know, this fat book only seems to stoke the mystery of the intense bond between these two ambitious young writers. They’re like ducks on water, all the really important stuff is going on in the murk beneath its surface.
Lace
Shirley Conran, 1982
A story of four very sexy, designer-label-loving friends and the huge secret they agree to share. I read it furtively, but with utmost enthusiasm, beneath my desk at school during chemistry lessons – and yes, among women of my age, the word "goldfish" is indeed akin to a Masonic handshake.
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë, 1847
I can't read, or even think about, the scene in which Jane's school friend Helen Burns dies, without crying. It's so real to me that, in rural graveyards, I half expect to come across her modest grey marble headstone, inscribed with the word "Resurgam".
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