Learn something new this Women’s History Month with these nonfiction books! Spanning cultural contexts and time periods, each memoir, historical chronicle, and biography on this list speaks to a crucial facet of the female experience that you’ll be glad to have delved into.

 

Orphan Bachelors by Fae Myenne Ng

Ng was her parents’ precocious first born, the translator, the bossy eldest sister. A child raised by a seafaring father and a seamstress mother, by San Francisco’s Chinatown and its legendary Orphan Bachelors —men without wives or children, the Exclusion Act’s living legacy. Ng absorbed these men’s suspicious, lonely, barren nature; she found storytelling and chosen children in the form of her students as Exclusion’s legacy followed her throughout her life. Weaving together the history of one family, Ng gives voice to her valiant ancestors, her bold and ruthless Orphan Bachelors, and her own inner self, howling in Cantonese, impossible to translate but determined to be heard.

 

“An exemplar of the historical memoir . . . Ng memorializes an enclave stuck in time, its demographics twisted by cruel constraints.”—The Atlantic

 

Wandering Through Life by Donna Leon

In a series of vignettes full of affection, irony, and good humor, Donna Leon, the internationally bestselling author of the Guido Brunetti mysteries, narrates a remarkable life she feels has rather more happened to her than been planned. Having recently celebrated her eightieth birthday, Leon poignantly confronts the dual challenges and pleasures of aging while reflecting on a life of adventure. Starting with a childhood in New Jersey spent visiting her grandfather’s farm and progressing into her young adulthood travelling the world and falling in love with the city of Venice, Wandering Through Life offers Donna Leon at her most personal.

 

“In this book, Ms. Leon puts Brunetti firmly in the background and brings herself to the fore . . . Her book is full of spontaneous decisions and aimless meandering . . . Warm, witty, and engaging.”—Malcolm Forbes, Wall Street Journal

 

Fi by Alexandra Fuller

Named a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book of the Year, Fi: A Memoir of My Son tells the open and vivid story of Alexandra Fuller mourning the sudden death of her twenty-one-year-old son. No stranger to loss—young siblings, a parent, a home country—Alexandra is nonetheless leveled. As she seeks to grieve herself whole, she journeys up and down the Rocky Mountains and finds there are both no answers and countless answers—in poetry, in nature, and in the indigenous wisdom she absorbed as a child in Zimbabwe. By turns disarming, devastating and unexpectedly, blessedly funny, Fi recounts the wild medicine of painstakingly grieving a child in a culture that has no instructions for it.

 

“A book that is as hard to pick up as it is to put down—a gutting, terrifying, profound and defiantly enthralling read . . . This book is a sharp ax. By its end, I was moved and devastated yet somehow strengthened.”—Marion Winik, Washington Post

 

Anne Boleyn & Elizabeth I by Tracy Borman

Much of the fascination with Britain’s legendary Tudors centers around the dramas surrounding Henry VIII and his six wives and Elizabeth I’s rumored liaisons. Yet the most fascinating relationship in that historic era may well be that between the mother and daughter who, individually and collectively, changed the course of British history. In its originality, Anne Boleyn & Elizabeth I sheds new light on two of history’s most famous women—the private desires, hopes, and fears that lay behind their dazzling public personas, and the surprising influence each had on the other during and after their lifetimes. In the process, Tracy Borman reframes our understanding of the entire Tudor era.

 

“A captivating and exquisitely heart-wrenching account of the mother and daughter duo who radically changed English history forever . . . A must-read for any student of history and especially Tudor fans.”—New York Journal of Books

 

How to Think Like a Woman by Regan Penaluna

Gowing up in small-town Iowa, Penaluna daydreamed about the big questions: Who are we and what is this strange world? What she didn’t realize was that the Western philosophical canon taught in American universities, as well as the culture surrounding it, would slowly grind her down through its misogyny, its harassment, its devaluation of women. In How to Think Like a Woman, Penaluna blends memoir, biography, and criticism to tell the stories of four female philosophers, weaving throughout an alternative history of philosophy as well as her own search for love and truth. Funny, honest, and wickedly intelligent, this is a moving meditation on what philosophy could look like if women were treated equally.

 

“Provocative . . . An indictment of sexism in the field.”—New York Times

 

A Woman’s Life is a Human Life by Felicia Kornbluh

A Woman’s Life Is a Human Life delivers the untold story of everyday activists who won resounding victories in demanding bodily and reproductive autonomy. It’s the story of two movements in New York that transformed the politics of reproductive rights: the fight to decriminalize abortion and the fight against sterilization abuse. From dissident Democrats reforming abortion laws, to the nation’s largest abortion referral service established by progressive Christian and Jewish clergy, to Puerto Rican activists, and Black women who took the cause global, Kornbluh documents the diverse ways activists changed the law and worked to create a world that would support all people’s reproductive choices. This dynamic, surprising, and highly readable history shows how grassroots action overcame the odds to create policy change—and how, after the loss of federal protection and broader assaults on reproductive and bodily autonomy, how we might respond today.

 

“Necessary reading for anyone worried about this post-Dobbs world.”—Kirkus Reviews

 

Manifesto by Bernardine Evaristo

The Booker Prize-winning author’s nonfiction debut is an intimate and inspirational account of Evaristo’s life and career as she rebelled against the mainstream to fight to bring her creative work into the world. She recalls her childhood and teenaged years as a young actor and playwright in London, details her early political awakenings and activism, and recounts her determination to tell stories that were absent in the literary world around her. Manifesto is a unique inspiration to us all to persist in doing work that we believe in, even when we might feel overlooked or discounted, following in Evaristo’s footsteps, from first vision, to continued perseverance, to eventual triumph.

 

“Manifesto, which could otherwise be called Portrait of the Artist as a Young Black Woman, is a much needed accounting of a Black woman’s coming of age through the journey of creating a profoundly authentic creative life . . . A nonfiction bildungsroman that is a towering monument to the creative life of Black women.”—Hope Wabuke, NPR

 

The Elements of Marie Curie by Dava Sobel

A unique approach to Marie Curie, highlighting her remarkable life alongside the women who became her legacy—from France’s Marguerite Perey, who discovered the element francium, and Norway’s Ellen Gleditsch, to Mme. Curie’s elder daughter, Irène, winner of the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. For decades the only woman in the room at international scientific gatherings that probed new theories about the interior of the atom, Marie Curie traveled far and wide, despite constant illness, to share the secrets of radioactivity, a term she coined. With the consummate skill that made bestsellers of Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter, and the appreciation for women in science at the heart of her most recent The Glass Universe, Dava Sobel has crafted a radiant biography and a masterpiece of storytelling, illuminating the life and enduring influence of one of the most consequential figures of our time.

 

“The Elements of Marie Curie is much more than a biography. It is a tribute to a woman who redefined what was possible for women in science, inspiring generations to follow her.”—Chen Ly, New Scientist

 

Radical by Xiaolu Guo

One of the most acclaimed Chinese-born writers of her generation, Xiaolu Guo’s memoir is an exploration of a city, an electrically honest rendering of what it means to be an outsider, and the sojourn that upended her sense of self as a woman, partner, mother, and artist. In this feminist lexicon Guo examines how concepts translate (or do not) across cultures, illuminating the integral role language plays in forming our sense of self. Radical is an expression of one artist’s fascination with Western culture and her nostalgia for Eastern landscapes, and an attempt to describe the space in between.

 

“[Guo] writes beautifully . . . [she] is the eponymous radical. The feminist, the lover and the artist strain against the demands of motherhood and the obligations of monogamy.”—Cindy Yu, Spectator (UK)

 

Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal? By Jeanette Winterson

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?—the novel that established Jeanette Winterson as a major figure in world literature—is a memoir about a life’s work to find happiness. It is a book full of stories: about a girl locked out of her home, sitting on the doorstep all night; about a religious zealot disguised as a mother who has two sets of false teeth and a revolver in the dresser, waiting for Armageddon; about growing up in a north England industrial town now changed beyond recognition; about the universe as a cosmic dustbin. It is the story of how a painful past, which Winterson thought she had written over and repainted, rose to haunt her later in life, sending her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her biological mother. It is also a book about other people’s literature, one that shows how fiction and poetry can form a string of guiding lights, a life raft that supports us when we are sinking.

 

“Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is raucous. It hums with a dark refulgence from its first pages . . . Singular and electric . . . [Winterson’s] life with her adoptive parents was often appalling, but it made her the writer she is.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

 

The Answer is in the Wound by Kelly Sundberg

Coming out 8/26/2025.

For readers of In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado and The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison, The Answer Is in the Wound is a beautiful, devastating, and nuanced examination into embracing a new reality after trauma and finding power and beauty in it. A narrative following a process of discovery as Sundberg’s personal story of leaving an abusive marriage is juxtaposed against established research, The Answer Is in the Wound offers a redemptive arc for trauma survivors, arguing for healing through an acceptance of their new state of being. Sundberg uses metaphors like the act of erasure—shown in erasure poetry created from her abusive ex-husband’s apologetic emails—and includes theories from psychiatrists and researchers like Judith Herman and Peter A. Levine to construct a balanced meditation on trauma and the imprint it leaves.

 

“In The Answer Is in the Wound, Kelly Sundberg explores what it means to be alchemized by trauma into something, and someone, new . . . [T]his innovative collection is at once lyrical and brutal, intimate and culturally relevant. I’ve never read anything like it.”—Maggie Smith, New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful