I love novels featuring lonely women, and here are eight of my favourite. Whether the women are happy or sad in their loneliness, looking for company, or just plain weird, I love them all.

Let me know which you’ve read and also loved, and which you’ve never heard of. If you’re interested in buying any from Bookshop.org (UK) then have a browse.

Here’s a little information on why I love these eight books:

Look at Me by Anita Brookner: I have to admit I read this because a couple of reviews of my third novel, Bitter Orange, said this followed a similar story, and I was intrigued. It is about a lonely woman called Frances (!) who becomes entranced by a glamorous couple who play with her for a while before discarding her. Introspective and contemplatory.

Mrs Bridge by Evan S Connell: Over the course of 117 chapters (some as short as a paragraph), we follow Mrs Bridge as she goes about her day-to-day life as a housewife and mother in 1930s Kansas City. She’s been brought up in a certain way, and wants to bring her children up in that way too. She can be bigoted and racist, but she knows this isn’t right, and yet she can’t seem to work out how to break out of her narrow boring existence of the country-club circle. The ending is superb.

Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers: A real comfort read: a mystery, a love affair, and a bit of nicely understated tragedy. Jean, a journalist, lives with her mother in the suburbs of London, when a woman writes in to Jean’s paper that she has had a child by parthenogenesis, Jean sets out to investigate.

Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban: Neaera and William are two lonely people who have never met. They both happen to go to the zoo one day and both – separately – decide that it’s not right that the three fully-grown turtles should be kept in a small tank.

The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzberg: The Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement: “I shot him between the eyes.” As the tale—a plunge into the chilly waters of loneliness, desperation, and bitterness—proceeds, the narrator’s murder of her flighty husband takes on a certain logical inevitability.

The Gloaming by Melanie Finn: My perfect kind of novel. Beautiful writing, with every sentence crafted and considered, but with a gripping story and characters. In Switzerland, Pilgrim’s husband leaves her for another woman and shortly afterwards she has a terrible car accident, the consequences of which reach far across the world. She turns up in Tanzania, traumatised and guilty, waiting and watching for when her shame will catch up with her.

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi: Gifty is a lonely student studying reward-seeking behavior in mice at Stanford. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after a knee injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her.

The Woman Upstairs: I loved this book and I loved Nora. She’s angry inside, sometimes naive, self-absorbed, but so human. Nora is a 39 year old school teacher in Cambridge, Ma. Single and frustrated with how she hasn’t fulfilled her ambition to be an artist, she meets the Shahid family who are in Cambridge for a year, and falls in love with each of them in turn. But maybe they only appear to love her back.

The audio of my sixth novel, Hunger and Thirst is on special offer from Xigxag in the UK. You can listen to it for just £3.99 without needing a subscription. Offer ends at the end of August 2026.