Rozie Kelly’s top five books by women writers – Women’s History Month guest post

Posted on March 4, 2026

I have been given the impossible task! To narrow down a list of just five books by women that I can call favourites. To be honest I could go on and on but, luckily for me and anyone reading this, I am limited by a deadline and a word count. These are all books by authors whose work I return to again and again. Their genius makes me feel stupid, something I delight in. A feeling I love – to read something and be confronted by the fact I could never manage it myself. How delicious.

 

 

No1 – Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home

This short and dreamy novel is what, if held at gunpoint, I would choose as my ultimate favourite book. Levy’s work has influenced me more than any other writer, and this novel more so than any of hers. There is something so perfectly contained, so completely and utterly realised, about this small cast of characters and the window into the world they inhabit. The novel tells the story of the Jacobs family holiday in Nice. On the face of it this seems quite wholesome, but the arrival of a beautiful, chaotic and mentally unwell botanist explodes the lives of everyone involved. I describe it as an explosion, but to read it doesn’t feel like that at all. It’s a dream you might have on an afternoon in the shade after having too much sun, or the morning after drinking too much wine. The impeccable intricacies of the characters seep into you, and before you realise what’s happened you’ve been given this unsettling and anxiety-inducing hallucination on pain and loss and sadness and ego and betrayal.

 

No2 – Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts

Reading any of Maggie Nelson’s work makes me want to go and do three new degrees concurrently and learn a language and become a carpenter all at the same time. It sounds a little facile to say, but simply put, she is just so clever. The book is technically a memoir, detailing her life with her partner and having a child. But it defies categorisation, weaving together complex theory and ruminations on the world we all pack ourselves into (square peg, round hole) with eviscerating honesty and swelling waves of lust and love and primal feeling. It tells the story of their love, and the complexities of existences that defy boundaries without once stooping to explain or justify or pander to the need to make oneself round, to fit said hole.

 

No3 – Melissa Broder’s The Pisces

This book is filthy, funny and brutal. Ostensibly about a woman falling for a merman after a bad break up, The Pisces stabs through the heart of the hellscape of modern capitalism and casual dating and everything in between – lifting the resulting guts and gore up and waving them around under an interrogator’s spotlight. I love the way Broder does character – particularly evident in the group therapy sessions in this novel – they’re funny and ridiculous and recognisable and yet individual and often painfully sad. The way she writes about sex is joyful and disgusting and sexy and miserable and makes space for many kinds of sex that can exist, without shying away or bothering with anything other than on-the-nose dirty language, including, in this case, multiple explicit scenes with a salty mythical creature.

 

No4 – Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat

I first read this bonkers little book at university, and although I loved it then I think perhaps the subtleties passed me by. But it was a recent book club pick and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. It’s so hard to try and describe it to someone who hasn’t read it – it technically sits under the umbrella of thriller, following the main character Lise on a journey that eventually leads to her murder. But it’s also not that. It defies all expectations, calls into question what defines a character as ‘real’, and forces it’s reader on a deeply uncomfortable nicotine high of a reading experience, as you plough through the 128 pages almost against your will. It’s on my list of favourites because it is just the most perfect example of a writer doing exactly what the f**k she wants, with such boldness and precision. The result is riveting, complex, and skewers the expectations placed onto women at the time, now, and likely into the future. She asks, and makes us question, what it means to be asking for it.

 

No5 – Zadie Smith’s On Beauty

The thing that I always revel in most about Zadie Smith’s writing is the sheer scope. She somehow manages to create these enormous and varied casts of characters without ever allowing any individual to become thin or surface level. This, combined with her famous knack for slicing through class/race/identity expectations and stereotypes whilst simultaneously keeping up pacey plotting and witty back and forth results in novels containing expansive, believable worlds. No character escapes her eye for human frailty, and yet she is not cruel. I always finish her books thinking how clearly she sees people, and wondering how on earth she keeps all those balls spinning in the air at the same time. On Beauty is the novel of hers that sticks in my memory the most, I think perhaps because all those elements she does so well are particularly well balanced. A classy cocktail made by an experienced mixologist, who recognises the need for bitter flavours as well as sweet.

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Rozie Kelly is a novelist based in West Yorkshire. After reading English Literature and Creative Writing she moved to Hebden Bridge, where she works for the Arvon Foundation, hosting creative writing courses. She was shortlisted for the PFD Queer Fiction Prize 2023 and was one of the eight participants in the inaugural Prototype Development Programme 2024. She won the 2024 NorthBound Book Award for her debut novel, Kingfisher, which is also longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2026.