What to do these long, dark days when you may be in semi-lockdown: Elena Ferrante's top 40 novels by women (from The Guardian) I've read 13, how about you?
Elena Ferrante’s top 40 books by female authors
- Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Fourth Estate)
- The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (Virago)
- The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar, translated by Anonymous (Europa Editions)
- Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann, translated by Philip Boehm (Penguin Classics)
- A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin (Picador)
- Outline by Rachel Cusk (Faber)
- The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (Harper Perennial)
- A Girl Returned by Donatella Di Pietrantonio, translated by Ann Goldstein (Europa)
- Disoriental by Négar Djavadi, translated by Tina Kover (Europa Editions)
- The Lover by Marguerite Duras, translated by Barbara Bray (Harper Perennial)
- The Years by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison Strayer (Fitzcarraldo)
- Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by Jenny McPhee (Daunts)
- The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer (Bloomsbury)
- Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff (Windmill Books)
- Motherhood by Sheila Heti (Vintage)
- The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek, translated by Joachim Neugroschel (Serpent’s Tail)
- Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd (Picador)
- Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (Flamingo)
- The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing (Flamingo)
- The Passion According to GH by Clarice Lispector, translated by Idra Novey (Penguin Classics)
- Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli (Fourth Estate)
- Arturo’s Island by Elsa Morante, translated by Ann Goldstein (Pushkin)
- Beloved by Toni Morrison (Vintage Classics)
- Dear Life by Alice Munro (Vintage)
- The Bell by Iris Murdoch (Vintage Classics)
- Accabadora by Michela Murgia, translated by Silvester Mazzarella (MacLehose Press)
- Le Bal by Irene Nemirovsky, translated by Sandra Smith (Vintage)
- Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates (Fourth Estate)
- The Love Object: Selected Stories by Edna O’Brien (Faber)
- A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor (Faber)
- Evening Descends Upon the Hills: Stories from Naples by Anna Maria Ortese, translated by Ann Goldstein and Jenny McPhee (Pushkin)
- Gilead by Marylinne Robinson (Virago)
- Normal People by Sally Rooney (Faber)
- The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (Harper Perennial)
- White Teeth by Zadie Smith (Penguin)
- Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (Simon & Schuster)
- The Door by Magda Szabò, translated by Len Rix (Vintage Classics)
- Cassandra by Christa Wolf, translated by Jan van Heurck (Daunts)
- A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (Picador)
- Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar, translated by Grace Frick (Penguin Classics)
