Here are 100 books that Animal fans have personally recommended if you like
Animal.
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I was born and grew up in Seoul. My bestselling debut novel has been longlisted for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction and the 2024 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize and shortlisted for the 2024 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. My book is inspired by my great-aunt, one of the oldest women who had escaped alone from North Korea. It is available from Harper Perennial in the U.S. and Virago in the UK. The novel’s translations continue to meet readers worldwide, including in Italy, Romania, Greece, Denmark, Spain, Switzerland, and South Korea.
Eileen is one of the most twisted and unconventional literary heroines I’ve ever read. Behind her quiet demeanor and dull face hides her mind, which is like a killer’s, always furious and seething.
While working at a juvenile correctional facility, Eileen meets Rebecca, another key character far removed from most women of their generation. Seductive and deceitful, Rebecca cajoles Eileen into joining her act of crime–a violent, underhanded plan to restore her idea of justice.
Shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize and chosen by David Sedaris as his recommended book for his Fall 2016 tour.
So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me. I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a private juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys. I think of it now as what it really was for all intents and purposes-a prison for boys. I will call it Moorehead. Delvin Moorehead was a terrible landlord I had years later, and so to…
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
When the society, culture, and world we live in become unrecognizable and untenable, the genre of literature that best quells anxiety is satire. As the author of Satire State, I believe laughter is essential to survival and sanity. The tightly woven fabric of a society unravels slowly and then suddenly through a consecutive series of multiple actions by malignant forces. All the while, historical memory is gradually erased, and the new fabric is the only one recognized. Satire is the only way to chronicle the malignancy and force people to think hard. The following five books of satire that address urgent issues made me laugh, cringe, think, and mutter “too real” under my breath.
A brilliant send-up of toxic work culture and self-optimization. This book has the dry, acid wit of *The Office* rewritten by Dorothy Parker.
Butler’s narrator is your worst millennial mood and best unreliable friend. She has contempt for her temp job but commits to the impermanence because she likes “slight atmospheric changes.” Butler is a wonderfully funny writer whose character, Millie, is all of us—who don’t have a trust fund; are forced to collect money doing mind-numbing work; when all we want to do is sit in bed, eat ice cream, and binge watch Netflix shows.
I’m a sucker for unlikeable. A charged word that’s sometimes used about protagonists but mostly only about female protagonists. When they don’t fit a template. When they are imperfect. When they push back. When they are too emotional or too distant or too interior or too driven or too obsessed or too mean or too nice or too smart or not smart enough. The protagonists in these novels are flawed—period. But flawed is complex and perfect is simple and simple is boring and no one wants to read a boring novel.
Marie—a young mother with a young child—is trying to make her way in the brutal restaurant industry toward a more settled life but is constantly battling her own self-destructive tendencies.
“I ask my memory, why did I take each next step?” she says near the beginning of the book, but readers feel that each next, disastrous step seems almost pre-ordained.Love Me Back is an unflinching and hyper-interior deep dive into why people are sometimes their own worst enemy.
"Sharp and dangerous and breathtaking.... A defiant story about a young woman choosing the life and motherhood that is best for her, without apology.” —Roxane Gay, bestselling author of Bad Feminist
Marie is a waitress at an upscale Dallas steakhouse, attuned to the appetites of her patrons and gifted at hiding her private struggle as a young single mother behind an easy smile and a crisp white apron. It’s a world of long hours and late nights, and Marie often gives in to self-destructive impulses, losing herself in a tangle of bodies and urgent highs as her desire for obliteration…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I’m a sucker for unlikeable. A charged word that’s sometimes used about protagonists but mostly only about female protagonists. When they don’t fit a template. When they are imperfect. When they push back. When they are too emotional or too distant or too interior or too driven or too obsessed or too mean or too nice or too smart or not smart enough. The protagonists in these novels are flawed—period. But flawed is complex and perfect is simple and simple is boring and no one wants to read a boring novel.
“The story starts at…the point perhaps at which I became aware of my inability to feel any feelings beyond those set to music by the Walt Disney Company,” Claire, the narrator ofI Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness admits on the novel’s very first page.
And so we’re primed when she does what is probably considered by many to be the most monstrous thing a woman can do: she leaves her child. Interspersed with sections about family history and old letters that shed light on complicated dynamics, the book moves us through Claire’s journey as she pushes back against the expectations of marriage and motherhood in search of her own, individualized definition.
A darkly funny, soul-rending novel of love in an epoch of collapse-one woman's furious revisiting of family, marriage, work, sex, and motherhood.
Since my baby was born, I have been able to laugh and see the funny side of things. a) As much as I ever did. b) Not quite as much now. c) Not so much now. d) Not at all. Leaving behind her husband and their baby daughter, a writer gets on a flight for a speaking engagement in Reno, not carrying much besides a breast pump and a spiraling case…
My passion started as a personal quest in my twenties, struggling with my relationship with my own mother. When my daughter was born, I knew that I could not repeat the difficult dynamics between my mother and I. What started as a personal quest to understand the underlying dynamics between mothers and daughters quickly grew into a professional quest. Today, I have worked as a mother-daughter therapist with thousands of mothers and daughters of all ages and from different countries and cultures and have developed the Mother-Daughter Attachment® model that helps therapists and mothers and daughters uncover the hidden dynamics in their relationship and create a roadmap for change.
Patriarchy has silenced women for generations, and in my first book, I uncover how women have been taught to “play nice” and be “care-givers” rather than “care-receivers.” Uncovering women’s emotional reality, I expose the culture of female service and how no one is looking after mothers, not even mothers themselves. This book provides exercises to help women claim their voice, needs, and rights in all of their relationships.
"The Silent Female Scream" teaches "how to believe that as a woman you have the right to be heard, valued and respected, and to know that anything less is just not okay." Through case studies and discussion, the author exposes that women's sense of self-worth and entitlement to speak their needs, especially in relationships, is an area that feminism has ignored to its peril. By looking at the legacy of emotional silence that many women have inherited from long before grandmother's day, she warns that emotional silence damages the mother-daughter relationship, women's relationships with themselves and each other, and their…
In 1995 I performed with the Women’s Circus (Australia) at the 4th International Conference and Forum on the Status of Women in Beijing. Our show was called Leaping the Wire and presented thirteen women’s stories from Amnesty International through physical narrative. My story was about a Brazilian woman who had been shot and killed for identifying the police who had rounded up her son and a group of his friends. The Brazilian women expressed their gratitude that I had told their story when they could not. I believe women’s stories are important to be told, to be shared, and I made a commitment to make our stories accessible, first through theatre, and now through my novels.
This non-fiction book helped to reshape my reading of historical and mythological women and to understand representation and the voice of the ‘other’. Hall explores the power and (ab)use of language and how feminine myths and symbols are important to be unveiled and celebrated. Her Jungian perspective introduced me to archetypes, especially in mythology, and remains an inspiration to both my theatre work and my writing.
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
Judith Jones became an important mentor and mother figure to me in my twenties, in the wake of my parents’ deaths. Her personal wisdom and guidance, which I received both in knowing her personally and from the incredible archive she left behind, have been invaluable to me during a particularly tumultuous and transformative decade in my own life. I wrote The Editor as I was coming into my full adulthood, and the books on this list helped shape my thinking along the way at times when I felt stagnant or stuck or needed to rethink both how to write Judith’s life and why her story is so vital to tell.
At a moment when I was stuck in the long process of writing my book–newly divorced, overwhelmed by solo parenting young twins, and exhausted by pandemic shutdowns–this book reinvigorated me as a writer and mother. Phillips artfully demonstrates not only that motherhood and creative lives aren’t mutually exclusive, as the common trope would suggest, but that there are infinite paths to combining the two.
What does it mean to create, not in "a room of one's own" but in a domestic space? Do children and genius rule each other out? In The Baby on the Fire Escape, award-winning biographer Julie Phillips traverses the shifting terrain where motherhood and creativity converge.
With fierce empathy and vivid prose, Phillips evokes the intimate struggles of brilliant artists and writers, including Doris Lessing, who had to choose between her motherhood and herself; Ursula K. Le Guin, who found productive stability in family life; Audre Lorde, whose queer, polyamorous union allowed her to raise children on her own terms…
As an attorney, former TV broadcaster, and workplace consultant, I’ve devoted my career to empowering women and confronting systemic inequities. My passion stems from personal experience navigating the complexities of workplace harassment, which inspired me to write my book and guide others through similar challenges. I am continually drawn to books that illuminate the hidden power structures and offer practical tools for resilience, empowerment, and self-advocacy. The works on this list have profoundly shaped my perspective, providing inspiration and clarity in both my professional and personal journey. I hope they resonate with you as deeply as they have with me.
This book transformed the way I think about confidence. Kay and Shipman combine science and personal stories to tackle why women often underestimate their abilities and how to change that.
Reading this helped me see that confidence is a skill—not an inherent trait—and it inspired me to take bold steps both personally and professionally. I recommend it to anyone looking to own their power.
The New York Times bestseller, now in paperback and updated with a new introduction
Confidence. We want it. We need it. But it can be maddeningly enigmatic and out of reach. The authors of the New York Times bestseller Womenomics deconstruct this essential, elusive, and misunderstood quality and offer a blueprint for bringing more of it into our lives.
Is confidence hardwired into the DNA of a lucky few, or can anyone learn it? Is it best expressed by bravado, or is there another way to show confidence? Which is more important: confidence or competence? Why do so many women,…
As a veteran business and finance journalist, I’ve always been amazed at the huge gender gap that still exists in so many parts of the economy and society despite all the strides we’ve ostensibly made. When I became a mother, it became even clearer to me that gender norms are still so entrenched in culture and still have a huge bearing on women’s economic and professional lives. I’ve written about this topic for a whole host of publications, from the BBC to The Washington Post. I have an MBA from Columbia Business School and am an associate Instructor in the Strategic Communications program at Columbia’s School of Professional Studies.
I loved this book because it simultaneously gives us a taste of the fierce spirit of the women’s liberation movement but also demonstrates what was wrong with Friedan’s particular flavor of feminism at the time: namely, that it was centered around white and mostly privileged women.
Reading this book is like being transported back to the 1960s and being a fly on the wall in the homes of women who were done with the patriarchy, who wanted to have careers and earn money, but were also grappling with their own roles in society.
It’s a historical document but also, in some ways, the 1960s equivalent of reality TV. It’s a ferocious cri de coeur that is delightful in its assertiveness.
Landmark, groundbreaking, classic-these adjectives barely do justice to the pioneering vision and lasting impact of The Feminine Mystique. Published in 1963, it gave a pitch-perfect description of "the problem that has no name": the insidious beliefs and institutions that undermined women's confidence in their intellectual capabilities and kept them in the home. Writing in a time when the average woman first married in her teens and 60 percent of women students dropped out of college to marry, Betty Friedan captured the frustrations and thwarted ambitions of a generation and showed women how they could reclaim their lives. Part social chronicle,…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
As an attorney, former TV broadcaster, and workplace consultant, I’ve devoted my career to empowering women and confronting systemic inequities. My passion stems from personal experience navigating the complexities of workplace harassment, which inspired me to write my book and guide others through similar challenges. I am continually drawn to books that illuminate the hidden power structures and offer practical tools for resilience, empowerment, and self-advocacy. The works on this list have profoundly shaped my perspective, providing inspiration and clarity in both my professional and personal journey. I hope they resonate with you as deeply as they have with me.
This book gave me permission to embrace and harness my anger as a tool for change. Chemaly’s exploration of how society suppresses women’s anger—and why we must reclaim it—is profound and eye-opening.
Her writing is sharp, relatable, and filled with research that helps contextualize why our anger is not only valid but vital. It left me feeling more equipped to channel my emotions into meaningful action.
A conversation-shifting book urging 21st-century women to understand their anger, embrace its power, and use it as a tool for positive change
'How many women cry when angry because we've held it in for so long? How many discover that anger turned inward is depression? Soraya Chemaly's Rage Becomes Her will be good for women. After all, women have a lot to be angry about.' GLORIA STEINEM
Women are angry, and it isn't hard to figure out why. We are underpaid, overworked, thwarted and diminished. The assertive among us are labelled bitches, while the expressive among us are considered shrill.…
