Year in Review: Five books by and about women that we enjoyed this year

In a year rich with powerful storytelling, books by women, and centered on women, offered some compelling reading experiences. 

From reflecting lived realities to stories of pain and loss, and finding one’s way, these stories took us through different worlds and experiences.

Here are five books we loved reading.

Mother Mary Comes to Me - Arundhati Roy

One of the most awaited memoirs of 2025, Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy, proves that she is one of the most prolific and fearless literary voices of our time. 

With a prose that is perhaps unparalleled among contemporary authors of our generation, the memoir reflects love, rebellion, grief, and inheritance with a clarity that is both intimate and incandescent. 

Roy’s storytelling moves effortlessly between tenderness and turmoil, with both mother and daughter humanly navigating the complexities of their love, longing, fear, trauma, and inadequacies.

Evocative and volatile at the same time, the book is easily one of the best-reads of the year.

Finding My Way - Malala Yousafzai

When Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head by the Taliban at the age of 15 for demanding education for girls, her life as she knew it, changed forever. As she recovered in hospital, her family too moved to the UK permanently, uprooting a life they knew and loved in the Swat Valley of Pakistan. Since then, Yousafzai has won the Nobel Prize for Peace, and continues to advocate for girls’ education. 

Her first memoir, I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban, captured her journey from a school girl to a global symbol of resilience and human rights. 

In Finding My Way, her second memoir released this year, Yousafzai chronicles her growing up years, navigating college life in Oxford, friendships, and finding love. 

As she continues to fight for girls' rights, she is also open about the pressure of public expectations and struggling with mental health. The result: a raw, and surprisingly vulnerable memoir from a girl still learning, healing, and finding her way.

The Widow - John Grisham

The master of legal thrillers is back, and his new book, The Widow, centres on a small-time lawyer, Simon Latch, in rural Virginia whose crumbling practice seems to get a new lease of life when an elderly widow walks into his office seeking a will. 

While Eleanor Barnett hints at a fortune worth millions left by her late husband, Latch has to protect her interests, confidentiality, and selfishly, look at his own gain to resurrect his floundering life. 

But when holes appear in Barnett’s stories, and before he can completely piece together what is happening, she meets with an accident and Latch is charged with her murder. What follows after is perhaps more gripping than Grisham’s courtroom dramas as he races against time to uncover the truth, and the real killer. 

Every Grisham fan will love the pace and the twists this one brings and the story arc that features a vulnerable woman and her need for acceptance.

Heart Lamp - Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi 

Winner of the Booker Prize for 2025, Banu Mushtaq’s The Heart Lamp is a collection of short stories that unravel through the lives of girls and women in Muslim communities in South India. Brilliantly told through different lenses—patriarchy, religious and caste oppression, poverty and everyday struggles, Mushtaq gives voices to struggles hardly heard in fiction. 

The stories are raw and real with humour and melancholy cutting through the complexities of the lives of the women she portrays. For instance, The Stolen Saree, one of the stories in the collection, unfolds around a missing saree and takes readers through layers like jealousy, judgement, and ties it to class and honour. The title story, The Heart Lamp is a powerful metaphor for a young girl growing up in a conservative household.

All the Way to the River: Love, Loss and Liberation - Elizabeth Gilbert

When Elizabeth Gilbert opened her heart and soul in her first memoir, Eat,  Pray, Love - One Woman’s Search for Everything across Italy, India, and Indonesia, millions of women across the world resonated with the idea of “finding themselves”. 

Almost 20 years later, Gilbert has divorced the man she introduced us to in her first book, and talks painfully about caring for her close friend and partner Rayya Elias, dying from terminal cancer. The book is about the emotional truth of codependency, and how Gilbert’s identity becomes tied to Elias’ needs, her relief from pain, and survival.

The book throws a few shockers around—Gilbert admits to having fleeting moments of desperation, and crossing lines with medication and substances. The book also reveals her longing, frustration, doubts, inability to cope and the fear of loss. It also shows love can be all-consuming and lead to choices made from fear rather than clarity. And how easy it is to lose yourself while desperately trying to save the one you love.