The Best Books on Love and Friendship

It’s Valentine’s Day! Ahhhh the day of love.

We love celebrating this day (honestly that was an unintended pun) because we like to acknowledge our appreciation of our wonderful circle friends along with our family. It’s with this in mind that we have rounded up some of the best books published last year that show you that you can have feel love from friends, pets, family…and a character from inside a book.

We did spot a gap in the market. As hard as we tried, we couldn’t find many books about male friendship. Let us know if you in the comments below if you know of any great ones.

Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton

I both laughed out loud, cried and cringed with my own memories when reading this book. When it comes to the trials and triumphs of becoming a grown up, journalist Dolly Alderton has seen and tried it all. In her memoir, she vividly recounts falling in love, wrestling with self-sabotage, finding a job, throwing a socially disastrous Rod-Stewart themed house party, getting drunk, getting dumped, realising that Ivan from the corner shop is the only man you’ve ever been able to rely on, and finding that your mates are always there at the end of every messy night out. Glittering, with wit and insight, heart and humour, this is a book about the struggles of early adulthood in all its grubby, hopeful uncertainty. It’s recently been re-released with an additional chapter capturing Dolly’s thoughts on turning 30. Winner of Autobiography of the Year at the National Book Awards 2018, Everything I know About Love has also been shortlisted for the Waterstones Book of the Year 2018.

The F Word by Lily Pebbles

We featured blogger Lily Pebbles’ book last year when her beautiful pink hard cover edition came out. One year on, she’s released the paperback version – fantastically so as it’s much easier to throw into your handbag when travelling to work. If there’s one piece of invaluable advice for women and girls of all ages, it is that there is nothing more important than creating and maintaining strong, positive and happy friendships with other women. In a culture that largely pits women against each other, Lily wanted to celebrate female friendships… all strings attached! If her 1998 diary is anything to go by, female friendships are incredibly complex and emotional but they’re the mini love stories that make us who we are. For many women, friends are our partners in crime through life; they are the ones who move us into new homes, out of bad relationships, through births and illnesses. In THE F WORD Lily Pebbles sets out to explore and celebrate the essence of female friendship at different life stages and in its many wild and wonderful forms.

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018, this New York Bestseller is a fearless and heartbreaking novel about love, friendship and incarceration. Romy Hall is starting two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility. Her crime? The killing of her stalker. Inside awaits a world where women must hustle and fight for the bare essentials. Outside- the San Francisco of her youth. The Mars Room strip club where she was once a dancer. Her seven-year-old son, Jackson. As Romy forms friendships over liquor brewed in socks and stories shared through sewage pipes her future seems to unfurl in one long, unwavering line – until news from beyond the prison bars forces Romy to try and outrun her destiny.

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

This is a moving story of love, friendship, grief, healing, and the magical bond between a woman and her dog. When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatised by the inexplicable disappearance of its master, and by the threat of eviction: dogs are prohibited in her apartment building. While others worry that grief has made her a victim of magical thinking, the woman refuses to be separated from the dog except for brief periods of time. Isolated from the rest of the world, increasingly obsessed with the dog’s care, determined to read its mind and fathom its heart, she comes dangerously close to unravelling. But while troubles abound, rich and surprising rewards lie in store for both of them. Elegiac and searching, The Friend is both a meditation on loss and a celebration of human-canine devotion.

The Friendship Cure by Kate Leaver

Friendship is like water. We need it to survive, we crave it when it’s scarce, it runs through our veins and yet we forget its value simply because it’s always available. The basic compulsion to make friends is in our DNA; we’ve evolved, chimp-like, to seek out connection with other human beings. We move through life in packs and friendship circles and yet we are stuck in the greatest loneliness epidemic of our time. It’s killing us, making us miserable and causing a public health crisis. But what if friendship is the solution, not the distraction? Journalist Kate Leaver believes that friendship is the essential cure for the modern malaise of solitude, ignorance, ill health and angst. If we only treated camaraderie as a social priority, it could affect everything from our physical health and emotional well-being to our capacity to find a home, keep a job, get married, stay married, succeed, feed and understand ourselves. In this witty, smart book – an appealing blend of science, pop culture and memoir – she meets scientists, speaks to old friends, finds extraordinary stories and uncovers research to look at what friendship is, how it feels, where it can survive, why we need it and what we can do to get the most from it – and how we might change the world if we value it properly.

Text Me When You Get Home by Kayleen Schaefer

After joyful nights out together, female friends say this to one another as a way of cementing their love. It’s about safety but, more than that, it’s about solidarity. From Broad City to Big Little Lies to what women say about their own best friends, the stories we’re telling about female friendship have changed. What used to be written off as infighting between mean girls, or disposable relationships that would be tossed as soon as a guy came along, are no longer that. Now, we’re lifting up our female friendships to the same level as our other important relationships, saying they matter just as much as the bonds we have with our romantic partners, children, parents, or siblings. Journalist Kayleen Schaefer tells her own story of realising what other women could mean to her as she moved through a journey of modern female friendship – from being a competitive teenager to trying to be one of the guys in the workplace to ultimately awakening to the power of female friendship and the soulmates, girl squads, and chosen families that come with it. Schaefer has put together a completely new sociological perspective on the way we see our friends now, one that’s drawn not only from her own story but from interviews with dozens of other women across the country – historians, creators of the most iconic films and television shows about female friendship, celebrities, authors, and other experts. A validation of female friendship unlike any that’s ever existed before, Text Me When You Get Home is a mix of historical research, the author’s own personal experience, and conversations about friendships with women across the country. Everything Schaefer uncovers reveals that these ties are making us, both as individuals and as society as a whole, stronger than ever before.

Enjoy!