Women & Society

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Rosa Mistika

Euphrase Kezilahabi

In a rural Tanzanian village, young Rosa grows up in a family where the home offers little protection from cruelty. Her father’s alcoholism and abuse cast a shadow over Rosa and her four younger sisters, while the expectations placed on girls leave them few ways to escape. When Rosa earns a place at a boarding school away from home, she hopes for a fresh start. Instead, she enters a world where sexual desire, manipulation, and unequal power complicate her search for independence. As she learns to navigate the double standards imposed on women, her attempts to gain control over her own life come at a devastating cost. First published in 1971, this groundbreaking novel challenged social and religious conventions in Tanzania, confronting domestic violence, sexual coercion, and women’s autonomy with striking directness.

The Lies We Tell

The Lies We Tell

Set across Northern Nigeria, The Lies We Tell is a collection of short stories exploring the private lives of Hausa women and the secrets, compromises, and unspoken truths that shape their relationships. From the dye pits of Zaria to the rooftops of Abuja, Fatima Bala portrays women navigating family expectations, love, marriage, and the complicated demands of tradition. Grandmothers whisper to unseen spirits, young women confront the limits imposed on their ambitions, and families preserve fragile bonds through silences that can protect as easily as they can wound. Blending wit, tenderness, grief, and elements of the supernatural, these stories reveal the hidden negotiations behind everyday life. Bala examines how women inherit expectations across generations, how affection can become a form of power, and how the truths people conceal sometimes sustain the very relationships they threaten to destroy. The Lies We Tell offers an intimate portrait of contemporary Northern Nigerian life, giving voice to women whose experiences are often kept behind closed doors.

Park Avenue

Money can buy almost anything—but it cannot guarantee love, loyalty, or a clean family reputation. Jia Song, the ambitious daughter of Korean immigrant bodega owners, has spent her life chasing the luxuries she once admired from behind a shop counter. Now a rising star at a prestigious Manhattan law firm, she is closer than ever to the glamorous future she imagined. But her latest assignment plunges her into the spectacularly messy private lives of the Parks, a Korean American family whose billion-dollar beauty empire is threatened by scandal. The family patriarch wants a divorce from his terminally ill wife, while their three adult children wage war against their father and one another. Jia has just thirty days to investigate the family’s finances, uncover the truth, and protect her clients’ interests. As her investigation takes her from New York to Seoul and beyond, she discovers that the Parks’ wealth conceals secrets far darker than she expected. Glamorous, sharp-witted, and full of betrayal, Park Avenue explores ambition, family loyalty, and the price of success. Behind the designer handbags and extravagant lifestyles lies a question Jia must confront herself: what if getting everything you’ve ever wanted means losing sight of what truly matters?

United States 2026

Turbulence

What happens when the life you carefully built begins to feel like a life you never chose? Dunya Dawood once dreamed of becoming a documentary filmmaker. Then she fell in love, married, and moved to the Middle East, where her ambitions gradually gave way to the demands of domestic life. A decade later, pregnant with her second child, she boards a flight to New York and finds herself unexpectedly separated from her husband and young son in business class. For the first time in years, Dunya has space to think. As the plane crosses continents, she revisits the decisions that brought her here, questioning the compromises she made between love, faith, family expectations, and her own ambitions. But when a shocking discovery triggers an unexpected crisis mid-flight, she faces a decision that could change everything. In Turbulence, Hafsa Lodi explores the complicated intersection of Muslim identity, feminism, marriage, and motherhood. Thoughtful and emotionally intimate, the novel asks whether women can challenge the expectations placed upon them without abandoning the people and beliefs they hold dear.

United Arab Emirates United States 2026

My Husband and Other Rats

My Husband and Other Rats

Alison Solomon is facing a spectacular catalogue of midlife disasters. Her husband has left her for a younger woman, her elderly mother is struggling with dementia, and she has received a cancer diagnosis. As if that weren’t enough, a mysterious woman appears outside her house, and an actual rat seems to have moved into her kitchen. Encouraged by everyone around her to seek therapy, Alison embarks on a chaotic search for someone who can help her make sense of her unraveling life. With the support of sharp-witted friends, unexpected family revelations, and an eccentric rat catcher, she navigates heartbreak, grief, and the absurdities of everyday existence. Funny, tender, and refreshingly honest, My Husband and Other Rats explores the messiness of middle age, the resilience of women, and the possibility of finding laughter even when everything seems to be falling apart.

United Kingdom 2026

Herlands: Lessons From Societies Where Women Make the Rules

Herlands: Lessons From Societies Where Women Make the Rules

What would the world look like if women made the rules? BBC correspondent Megha Mohan travels across continents to discover communities where women create their own systems of power, belonging, and survival. From South Korea’s controversial feminist online movements to women’s communal living spaces in Europe and the Rain Queens of South Africa, she uncovers stories that challenge conventional ideas about leadership, family, and social order. Inspired by her own great-grandmother’s matrilineal community in South India, Mohan combines historical research with firsthand reporting to explore how women have built alternative ways of living, often outside patriarchal structures. Herlands is an illuminating investigation into women’s solidarity, collective power, and the possibilities of reimagining society.

United Kingdom 2026

Uprising

On a sinking island off the coast of Bangladesh, a community of women and children lives under the brutal control of Amma, a madam who buys and sells women trapped in sexual exploitation. The children grow up watching their mothers endure violence and servitude, dreaming of a freedom they can barely imagine. Everything begins to change when Kusum Khan, an educated young woman from the city, arrives on the island and refuses to accept her fate. Inspired by her defiance, the women begin to challenge the system that has kept them captive for generations. Told through the collective voice of the island’s children, Uprising is a powerful story of resistance, female solidarity, and the fight to reclaim one’s life. Against the backdrop of environmental vulnerability and entrenched inequality, Tahmima Anam explores how even the most oppressed can find the courage to imagine another world.

Bangladesh 2026

Daughters of the Same Secret

Daughters of the Same Secret

Haneen Al-Sayegh

In a secluded Druze village in Lebanon’s Mount Lebanon mountains, Amal dreams of a life beyond the boundaries her family and community have drawn for her. Her father, a religious shaykh and blacksmith, believes he has the right to shape the futures of his four daughters. But Amal longs to pursue higher education and study English literature at the American University of Beirut. When a wealthy local businessman offers her a possible way out, she makes a bargain that promises freedom but brings new complications. As marriage, motherhood, and social expectations threaten to consume her ambitions, Amal must find the courage to claim ownership of her life. Poetic and deeply moving, this novel explores the hidden struggles of women caught between tradition and independence, revealing the quiet acts of resistance that can transform generations.

Jaded

Summer 1986, at Kelsey College. Professors Sam and Vera Ward have been married for decades, but their relationship follows an unusual arrangement: each academic year, Sam may take one student as a lover, provided the affair ends within twelve months. Their carefully controlled tradition begins to unravel when they choose Jade, a mysterious and fiercely intelligent young woman who has plans of her own. As desire turns into obsession and manipulation, the boundaries between predator and prey begin to collapse. Secrets become weapons, loyalties shift, and the power dynamics that once held the Wards’ marriage together threaten to destroy them all. Seductive, unsettling, and sharply observed, Jaded explores sexual politics, complicity, ambition, and the dangerous games people play to maintain control.

United States 2027

The Society of Forgotten Wives

The Society of Forgotten Wives

In 1919 New York, Hazel Brister leaves her privileged past behind to rebuild her life on the Lower East Side. When a woman arrives seeking help finding her missing husband, Hazel uncovers a troubling pattern: a group of women have all been abandoned by husbands who have mysteriously vanished. Hoping to uncover the truth and launch her journalism career, Hazel joins forces with these resourceful women—but their investigation reveals dangerous secrets that reach closer to home than she ever imagined. Inspired by true events, this is a story of female solidarity, resilience, and women reclaiming their futures.

United States 2027

The Jewel of Sugar Hill

The Jewel of Sugar Hill

In 1800s New York, Eliza Brown is determined to escape her humble beginnings and claim a place among the city’s elite. When she catches the attention of political figure Aaron Burr, she sees an opportunity to secure her future—but her ambitions threaten to expose secrets from her past. More than two centuries later, disgraced architect Abby Dorrance investigates her father’s mysterious death at the historic Morris-Jumel Mansion in Harlem. As she uncovers the house’s hidden history, Abby must choose between protecting her family’s legacy and saving the landmark from destruction. Moving between two eras, this compelling novel follows two ambitious women determined to shape their own destinies against society’s expectations.

United States 2027

Daughters of the Pink City

Daughters of the Pink City

Jaipur, colonial India. Sixteen-year-old Deepa’s life is turned upside down when her mother mysteriously disappears, leaving her and her younger brother in the care of strict grandparents. In a world governed by tradition and rigid expectations for women, Deepa discovers kathak, a classical Indian dance that awakens her passion and offers a glimpse of freedom. Secretly training with a courtesan, she risks defying her family to pursue her art—and uncovers buried secrets about forbidden love, betrayal, and her mother’s past. A richly layered historical novel about female resilience, artistic expression, and the courage to choose your own destiny.

About this theme

Books: 50
Countries: 23

Countries with this theme

United Arab Emirates