Women readers

Women authors fared very well at the top of the PW overall bestseller list in 2023. Colleen Hoover, who reigned supreme in 2022, also had a stellar 2023, with her It Ends with Us edging out It Starts with Us for the top-selling title in the year by about 48,000 print copies. A third Hoover novel, Verity, sold more than 935,000 copies.  Read more

I wasn't surprised last week at a literary festival when the chair turned to one of the panellists, a well-respected popular journalist who's written a novel, and asked her: ‘You're writing for a Mumsnet audience with this book, aren't you?'. Implicit in it is the dismissiveness rife whenever women write and read fiction that isn't a) literary b) crime or thriller.  Read more

To us, and many of you, reading fiction is like breathing - something we would struggle to live without. But why is it that novels are so vital to women today? Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Exeter Helen Taylor explores this in her new book Why Women Read Fiction.  Read more