The best novels about women who love their job and do not feel guilty about it

I’m a sucker for books set in the ‘80s and for books set in the future, and this book is both! You’ve got time travel and astronauts and danger, but alongside the action, Swyler has crafted beautiful, multi-layered characters. I fell in love with them all, particularly Nedda, who loves space as a child and loves it just as whole-heartedly when she’s a crew member on a spaceship.

The novel tapped into a couple of my favorite themes: 1) the bonds of parents and children and 2) what it means to do the right thing. I’m always more interested in good than evil, and these characters understand what it means to choose the greater good. A smart, powerfully written book that will make you care deeply about what happens next.

Oh, this book is perfect from the first page. It captures motherhood wonderfully and specifically—in this case, mothering two teenage boys—and it just as successfully captures the Maine coast and the complicated, sometimes fragile ecosystem of a marriage.

Jill is a documentary filmmaker who’s temporarily a single parent to her boys while her husband, a fisherman, recovers in a hospital from a boating accident. There’s nothing flashy about the story—it’s a smart, lovely, often funny look at one woman’s life. It’s a deeply contented life, by the way, which means the stakes are very high when the foundation of it starts to look shaky.

If you’d told me it was possible, I wouldn’t have believed you—Lily King’s written a novel where the love story you care most about is the one between a writer and her unpublished novel. If you’re a writer, you should read this. If you’ve ever loved a thing past all logic and reason, if you stayed up past midnight to get in a few more minutes or a few more hours plugging away at it—if you have a passion—you should read this.

If you love stunning sentences and paragraphs that leave you staring into space, mesmerized, read it.

Penelope Lively is a rock star in England, but she’s never been quite as known in the U.S. I love all her work, but this one is my favorite. 

We meet Claudia Hampton towards the end of her life. She’s a historian, razor-sharp, fascinating and fascinated, and even at her most self-absorbed, it’s impossible not to love her. I’d name her as one of the greatest female characters of all time, just as complex and shapeshifting as we all are in real life. Every sentence is a gift. If you like Elizabeth Strout or Ann Patchett, you should give this one a go.

I’ve never read anything quite like this novel centering on a female photographer, Helen Adams, covering the Vietnam War. Years after reading it, I can still picture scenes and, I swear, feel the heaviness of the air and hear the fruit falling from the trees. Soli has talked about how she got tired of reading wonderful novels where the men went off and had wartime adventures and the women just dropped off the page. So she wrote her own wartime saga.

Helen Adams never drops off the page—she leaps off them. The writing is as lush as the landscape, and you’ll fall entirely into the world of the book. There’s war and treachery and duty and passion, and nothing is ever simple.