Platonic love stories
Because friendship is just as beautiful and complex as romance!
18 books
Truth & Beauty
Ann Patchett
Patchett's memoir of her fierce, complicated friendship with the writer Lucy Grealy. One of the great books about platonic love.
Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close
Aminatou Sow
The book I want to hand every friend I'm scared of drifting from. Sow and Friedman take a close friendship seriously enough to examine how it almost broke.
★ 5Girls They Write Songs About
Carlene Bauer
A decades-long friendship between two women trying to make it in New York. It captures how a friendship can be its own great love story, and its own heartbreak.
★ 5Tin Man
Sarah Winman
A slim, aching novel about the love between two men and the woman who loved them both. It wrecked me.
★ 5Fiona and Jane
Jean Chen Ho
Linked stories tracing two Taiwanese American friends across years and coasts. Quietly a love story about friendship.
★ 5The Interestings
Meg Wolitzer
Friends who meet at an arts camp as teens, followed across decades of talent, envy, and money. Wolitzer nails how friendships shift over a lifetime.
One Day I Shall Astonish the World
Nina Stibbe
A tender, funny novel about a long female friendship and a woman quietly falling apart. Stibbe is so warm.
★ 5Agatha of Little Neon
Claire Luchette
A quartet of nuns gets relocated to run a halfway house in Rhode Island. Odd, funny, and unexpectedly moving.
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
My favorite Austen, obviously. I reread it whenever I want to feel better about everything.
★ 5Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë
One of my favorites, forever. Small, fierce Jane refuses to be anything but herself.
My Brilliant Friend (Neapolitan Novels, #1)
Elena Ferrante
The start of the Neapolitan novels — a fierce, complicated girlhood friendship in postwar Naples. Once I started I couldn't stop.
★ 5The Story of a New Name (Neapolitan Novels, #2)
Elena Ferrante
Book two of the Neapolitan novels, and the Lila-and-Elena friendship only gets more intense. If you loved the first, just keep going.
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (Neapolitan Novels, #3)
Elena Ferrante
Book three, and the friendship gets thornier and more real. I tore through all four.
The Story of the Lost Child (Neapolitan Novels, #4)
Elena Ferrante
The finale of the Neapolitan quartet — a stunning, gutting end to Lenù and Lila.
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
Lisa See
A deep female friendship in 19th-century China, written in a secret women's language. Beautiful and heartbreaking.
★ 5A Little Princess
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Sara Crewe loses everything and holds onto her kindness anyway. I loved it fiercely as a kid, and it still gets me.
Swing Time
Zadie Smith
Two mixed-race girls who love to dance, and the friendship that shapes and divides them. Ambitious Zadie Smith.
★ 5Friendship
Emily Gould
Two best friends in New York hit the point where their lives start to diverge. Gould nails that specific late-twenties friendship ache.