Themes
Books About Friendship
Novels where friendship — its formation, its cost, its fractures — sits at the heart of the story.
20 books · ranked
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1
Charlotte's Web
A pig, a clever spider and a barnyard friendship that beats death; the gentle classic about loyalty.
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2
A Walk in the Woods
Two unfit friends attempt the Appalachian Trail; very funny, with real love for wild places.
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3
It
A group of friends face a shape-shifting evil in their home town, then again as adults; a doorstop of fear and friendship.
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4
Never Let Me Go
Three friends at a strange English boarding school slowly learn what they were made for; restrained and heartbreaking.
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5
Northern Lights
A girl and her animal soul-companion journey north into a war over the nature of the soul; thrilling and profound.
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6
The Kite Runner
Friendship, betrayal and the long road to redemption against the backdrop of Afghanistan's upheavals.
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7
Network Effect
Murderbot — the anxious, TV-obsessed security AI who would rather be left alone — returns in the first full-length Murderbot novel, drawn into a crisis involving a kidnapped friend, a hijacked ship and a conspiracy that forces Murderbot to confront its feelings about the humans it protects. Wells's Hugo and Nebula-winning novel combines thriller pacing with one of science fiction's most beloved unconventional narrators.
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8
We Begin at the End
Walk, a small-town California police chief, releases his childhood best friend Vincent from prison thirty years after Vincent killed Walk's sister — and the return sets off a chain of events involving Vincent's niece Duchess, a self-declared outlaw raising her younger brother. Whitaker's CWA Gold Dagger-winning novel is both a literary character study and a propulsive thriller about guilt, loyalty and the children paying for adults' worst days.
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9
King Lear
An ageing king divides his kingdom between his daughters in exchange for declarations of love, disinheriting the one who refuses to perform. What follows is one of literature's most devastating explorations of power, age, loyalty, ingratitude and the cruelty that families inflict on each other.
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10
System Collapse
Murderbot and its allies must prevent a corporate hostile takeover of a newly contacted human colony — while Murderbot deals with the psychological aftermath of trauma from the previous book, in ways its companions notice before it's willing to admit. Wells's Locus Award-winning novel continues the series' blend of action, humour and one of science fiction's most quietly moving explorations of mental health and recovery.
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11
The Color Purple
Celie writes letters to God and to her sister Nettie from the American South of the early 20th century, charting her journey from abuse and silence through love, friendship and creative voice to a hard-won selfhood. Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is one of the defining works of American feminist literature.
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12
The Overstory
Nine Americans whose lives are changed by trees — a chestnut tree photographed for generations, a couple bonded by a sentinel banyan, a scientist who discovers trees communicate — are drawn together in a defence of old-growth forests. Powers's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel makes trees the protagonist of American history and asks whether human consciousness will arrive before or after the damage is done.
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13
Brideshead Revisited
Charles Ryder, a poor Oxford student, is drawn into the wealthy Catholic Flyte family through his friendship with the charming Sebastian, and into their sumptuous country house. Waugh's elegiac novel — told in retrospect by an ageing Ryder — traces the Flyte family's decline and Charles's reluctant confrontation with religious faith, loss and the vanished world of the English Catholic aristocracy.
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14
The Merchant of Venice
A Venetian merchant borrows money from the Jewish moneylender Shylock to help a friend, pledging a pound of his own flesh as forfeit. When the bond falls due, it is Portia — disguised as a lawyer — who finds a legal means to outwit Shylock. Shakespeare's most contested play sits at the intersection of comedy, tragedy and sustained examination of mercy, justice and prejudice.
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15
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Tess Durbeyfield, a peasant girl whose father discovers a dubious claim to noble descent, is sent to seek kinship with the d'Urbervilles and meets with catastrophe. Hardy's most devastating novel follows Tess through betrayal, hardship, murder and execution, asking whether any person can be truly 'pure' in a world that will not let her simply be herself.
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16
Of Human Bondage
Philip Carey, orphaned and self-conscious about his club foot, grows up seeking freedom — from his religious guardian, from his art studies in Paris, from his obsessive and self-destructive love for a waitress named Mildred. Maugham's semi-autobiographical novel is one of the last great Victorian Bildungsromane and one of the most precise accounts of how the wrong person can own you.
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17
Kokoro
A young man forms an intense bond with a solitary older man he calls Sensei, sensing some hidden wound. In a long letter after his death, Sensei confesses the act of betrayal that has defined his life. Soseki's novel is about guilt, friendship and the specifically Meiji-era Japanese confrontation between the old world and the new.
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18
Beautiful World Where Are You
Alice, a novelist exhausted by fame, and Eileen, her childhood friend, correspond by email while navigating damaged relationships and questions about beauty, meaninglessness and what it means to care about art in a world heading toward catastrophe. Rooney's third novel is her most overtly intellectual — a correspondence novel asking what the novel is for.
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19
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
Ageing Hollywood legend Evelyn Hugo grants her only interview to an unknown journalist — and spends it telling the real story of her life, her seven marriages and the love she kept hidden for fifty years. Reid's novel is about celebrity, the performance of identity, female friendship, bisexuality and the price of keeping secrets in a world that would have destroyed you for the truth.
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20
Moth Smoke
Daru Shezad, a former banker in 1990s Lahore, loses his job, becomes addicted to heroin, falls in love with his best friend's wife and descends into a spiral of crime and self-destruction. Hamid's debut is a stylish, fractured narrative set against the backdrop of Pakistan's nuclear tests and the society of privilege and exclusion they exposed.