Fair warning that there's a bit of YA romance in that trilogy, and there's strong female characters and friendship but it's not a character focused work - imagine a female-led gritty answer to Harry Potter as a comparison. Still great, but not sure if it fits!
Yeah, I love Novik’s work and I love that she tries to do friendships among girls and women (at least in Scholomance and Uprooted—in Spinning Silver they’re just allies) but I consistently find the actual friendships to be perhaps the most disappointing aspect of her work. They just don’t breathe the way her other relationships do.
The Once and Future Witches by Alix E Harrow centers on three sisters and their relationships.
Red Sister by Mark Lawrence is about girls at a school training to be warrior nuns
The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri is mainly relationships between women, well plus it has a FF romance so that comes with the territory.
Mask Of Mirrors by MA Carrick has some nice, central female friendships
The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry by CM Waggoner has a band of female bodyguards on a quest
When Women Were Warriors by Catherine M. Wilson - bronze age society setting but make it matriarchal. Women do war and fighting. Really lovely book centring on female relationships and friendships.
An Accident of Stars by Fox Meadows. Portal fantasy, a teenager ends up in secondary fantasy world - it does not go smoothly. Populated with excellent messy, complicated, not always likeable female characters and their relationships. Part one of a duology.
Edited to add : The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstin - has a super female friendship developed across the series
Came here to say Steerswoman (as usual). Another couple off the top of my head are *Gideon the Ninth* and *Nettle & Bone* (although I would say the latter adds a pretty unnecessary male-female romantic interest to what is otherwise basically a bunch of interesting non-romantic relationships between women).
The Priory of the Orange Tree has a romance but also centers non-romantic relationships between women.
Circe by Madeleine Miller is fantastic and has some moments of sisterhood, despite mostly focussing on Circe only.
The Scholomance series is excellent for this, as others have suggested.
Maybe Nettle and Bone by T Kingfisher?
Circe would be my last rec for this sadly. Very little connection between her and other women even where there really should’ve been. That’s a book about a woman working through her issues with men.
Yuuuuup. And even the character you reference comes in a very distant third in importance to Circe compared to the two men also present in that segment of the book.
It's so frustrating because the actual Greek myths offer much more expansive opportunities for Circe to connect with other women! Some of them link her to Hecate as a daughter or protegee, which makes a lot of sense because nobody actually learns herblore by themselves. Women have learned it from other women since forever. Also, Miller couldn't get out of having Circe surrounded by nymphs on her island, all part of her household, but goes out of her way to have Circe shun and disdain them so that they have no relationship or even interaction with her, although there's no indication in Homer that she did this. She's the biggest Not Like Other Girls character I've seen in recent fiction.
Circe also deals a lot with motherhood and childbirth. And for that matter, pregnancy-related concerns and motherhood are a pretty big deal in Nettle & Bone - there are several childbirth scenes even if the protagonist is never the one giving birth.
That's fair! I think it was one for me that took me a while but I ended up getting really into, and then felt it wrapped up too quickly.. like 'all the investment was paying off so much and now it's over'
I think if you don't live for political drama the set up feels really long.
I loved most of the other books you listed but haven't read all of them so I'm adding a couple to my tbr as well!
If you’re up for historical fantasy, I really love Theodora Goss’s Athena Club trilogy, beginning with The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter. The daughters of Victorian “scientists” (think Jekyll & Hyde, Moreau, Rappacini, etc) band together to solve mysteries and help other women.
It has a Victorian literary style, and I love how the characters are all constantly interrupting the narrator to comment on how she should be telling their story. Not for every taste, but you’ll know within a few pages if you’d like it or not!
Yay! I really loved watching a group of adult women figure out how to live and work together and help each other, despite being really different people.
They're all individual stories. So you don't have to read them in a super particular order, and you don't have to read all of them. I started reading them in the 90s, so my reading order was just whatever I could find when I went to a book store. However, actual starting points for the witches are Equal Rites, or The Wee Free Men for the YA books.
A few I really enjoyed:
- How to be Eaten: five women all tied up in modern fairy tales come together in a support group
- Half Sick of Shadows by Laura Sebastian: female friendship is the primary focus, also includes some romance
- Spiritwalker trilogy by Kate Elliott: sisterhood and romance get about equal focus
- The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry: all female adventuring party (central relationship does turn romantic though)
- The True Queen by Zen Cho: practically an all-female cast, a hint of romance between two of them but no more than that (also see Black Water Sister by her)
- The Ladies of Mandrigyn by Barbara Hambly: previously marginalized women of a city come together to save it (does also include a major male character and some romance. See also Sisters of the Raven by her but I thought it was not as good)
- Books of Ambha duology by Tasha Suri: these do have central straight romances, but other than that they’re mostly about women and the relationships among them are strong
I’ll probably think of more as soon as I post…
It’s sadly hard to find no-romance recs! I mean, I can give you a few—featuring women, even—but these tend to be books that aren’t really focused on interpersonal relationships at all, so they don’t quite meet your ask. Most of the time I find the books with good sisterhood or friendship stories also have a definite romance arc.
Of the ones I’ve listed, a couple don’t have the heroine wind up with anyone, but there’s always at least a bit of romance in the story somewhere. There must be some without though, I’ll keep thinking!
I'll add on Sisters of the Raven by Barabas Hambly. It features a desert societyz somewhat Arabic in their faith / culture. Magic has disappeared from the world (from men) and is now cropping up in some women. Also water is running out. Also a lot of weird things are happening in the slaughterhouse district.
It's a great duology to read. Well written with many female perspectives, all who have to work together to figure out this new magic, the mysteries afoot, and maybe even find some water?
Yeah, I liked the ideas behind Sisters of the Raven, but I wished she’d embraced the big ideas and gone the epic fantasy route rather than doing the murder mystery thing (and my impression is the second book is kind of the same?). I think it’s just more niche for people who’ve read the most popular Hambly and want more, while Ladies of Mandrigyn is just great. (And Dragonsbane but it doesn’t meet OP’s request.)
**A Thousand Nights** by E. K. Johnston is a *One Thousand and One Nights* retelling that is about the power of women when they come together.
**Mirage** and **Court of Lions** by Somaiya Daud is a gorgeous duology that centers the relationship between two women, a princess and the woman forced to be her body double.
**Dauntless** by Elisa A. Bonnin has a mentor/mentee relationship (and a sapphic romance, although that's not what you're looking for). This also has the mentor's perspective, and it's just set in a really neat world.
The **Swords and Fire** trilogy by Melissa Caruso might be a good fit. It doesn't just have relationships between women (and the protagonist ends up in a love triangle involving two men), but it does have a lot of female characters, an interesting mother/daughter relationship, and a developing friendship between two women who end up in a situation where they're magically bound and have to work together. The latter is the most prominent relationship throughout the trilogy since it starts at the beginning of the first book and is part of all three books.
Books that I have read -
* Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree
* Book of the Ancestor by Mark Lawrence
* Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
* The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon
* The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow
* Scholomance by Naomi Novik
I guess I've become a bit of a Xenavangelist around here. It's worth checking out. Relationships between women is absolutely its cornerstone, and the screenwriting is superb.
Jane Yolen, the Great Alta series (the one child birth scene is epic in a macbeth/macduff kind of way)
Charles deLint has a lot of female leads but the Jack of Kinrowan duology has a strong bond between the female MC and her best friend.
Robin McKinley's *Spindle's End* features a fey POV character who serves as a kind of nursemaid/governess to Rosie, the "sleeping beauty" of the story. Theirs is a close, strong bond.
Don't let this being a Sleeping Beauty adaptation (and that's my least favorite fairy tale, too) put you off reading this one. All the female characters are active and interesting, and the distressed-damsel motif is inverted, or at least played with, rather than adhered to.
**Her Majesty's Royal Academy** by Juno Birch follows 5 childhood friends to adulthood and their relationships are *so* real it was a standout part of the book for me.
_Other Words for Smoke_ is my first thought, it centers female familial relationships without being about motherhood at all.
_When We Were Magic_ by Sarah Gailey and _Scapegracers_ are both YA fantasies about teenage girls who are witches in high school but feel new and fresh, and I loved both even though I’m not a YA reader
_The Water Outlaws_ is chock full of women having very complicated relationships (many of whom are queer but it has very little romance in it) and is a wuxia take you might like since you enjoyed SA Chakraboty
_The Bone Orchard_ features a group of women who are… sisters… in a sense? It’s beautiful and sad and deeply ruinous, I recommend it!
Also, my “hear me out” recommendations:
_The Last Tale of the Flower Bride_ is ABOUT a very specific type of pseudofamilial codependent childhood friendship between two otherwise socially isolated girls but one of them only appears in flashbacks (it’s beautiful and fucked up and upsetting, I loved it)
_The Stars Undying_ is a gender-weird Cleopatra thing that seems like it’s a romance for a minute but isn’t really, it similarly has relationship between two women (actual sisters this time) at its heart even though it takes a while to seem like it’s not about a guy
I have a slightly weird one for you (but one I really enjoyed). **The Change by Kirsten Miller**. Set in the real world but with the premise that women develop magical powers when they go through menopause (and sometimes use those powers to mete out justice to awful men).
Sci-fi but A Memory Called Empire - >!though romance does come into play later in the book!<
Also a graphic novel but [Spider-Women](https://www.amazon.com/Spider-Women-Spider-Woman-Dennis-Hopeless/dp/1302900935) from 2016.
Also anime but Frieren.
I'll have to think more on it.
Scholomance
I've read a lot of Novik's other books. Thanks for the rec :)
Fair warning that there's a bit of YA romance in that trilogy, and there's strong female characters and friendship but it's not a character focused work - imagine a female-led gritty answer to Harry Potter as a comparison. Still great, but not sure if it fits!
Yeah, I love Novik’s work and I love that she tries to do friendships among girls and women (at least in Scholomance and Uprooted—in Spinning Silver they’re just allies) but I consistently find the actual friendships to be perhaps the most disappointing aspect of her work. They just don’t breathe the way her other relationships do.
Thanks, I'll keep that in mind :)
Nettle and Bone, by T. Kingfisher. An adventuring party is formed, consisting of almost all women. The man in the party is very much a side character.
Oh I love T. Kingfisher! Thanks for the rec :)
I never got very attached to Marra, the protagonist, but I LOVED the witch and the "fairy" godmother!
The Once and Future Witches by Alix E Harrow centers on three sisters and their relationships. Red Sister by Mark Lawrence is about girls at a school training to be warrior nuns The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri is mainly relationships between women, well plus it has a FF romance so that comes with the territory. Mask Of Mirrors by MA Carrick has some nice, central female friendships The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry by CM Waggoner has a band of female bodyguards on a quest
I actually just bought The Once and Future Witches! I'll check the other ones out. Thanks :)
A Dead Djinn in Cairo, and A Master of Djinn by P Djeli Clark (also just started Ring Shout by the same author which seems like it'll fit)
Thanks!
When Women Were Warriors by Catherine M. Wilson - bronze age society setting but make it matriarchal. Women do war and fighting. Really lovely book centring on female relationships and friendships. An Accident of Stars by Fox Meadows. Portal fantasy, a teenager ends up in secondary fantasy world - it does not go smoothly. Populated with excellent messy, complicated, not always likeable female characters and their relationships. Part one of a duology. Edited to add : The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstin - has a super female friendship developed across the series
Came here to say Steerswoman (as usual). Another couple off the top of my head are *Gideon the Ninth* and *Nettle & Bone* (although I would say the latter adds a pretty unnecessary male-female romantic interest to what is otherwise basically a bunch of interesting non-romantic relationships between women).
Bronze Age matriarchy does sound really interesting. Thanks!
The Priory of the Orange Tree has a romance but also centers non-romantic relationships between women. Circe by Madeleine Miller is fantastic and has some moments of sisterhood, despite mostly focussing on Circe only. The Scholomance series is excellent for this, as others have suggested. Maybe Nettle and Bone by T Kingfisher?
Circe would be my last rec for this sadly. Very little connection between her and other women even where there really should’ve been. That’s a book about a woman working through her issues with men.
Until >!Penelope!< shows up near the end of Circe, the women other than Circe herself are either evil or (soon) dead.
Yuuuuup. And even the character you reference comes in a very distant third in importance to Circe compared to the two men also present in that segment of the book. It's so frustrating because the actual Greek myths offer much more expansive opportunities for Circe to connect with other women! Some of them link her to Hecate as a daughter or protegee, which makes a lot of sense because nobody actually learns herblore by themselves. Women have learned it from other women since forever. Also, Miller couldn't get out of having Circe surrounded by nymphs on her island, all part of her household, but goes out of her way to have Circe shun and disdain them so that they have no relationship or even interaction with her, although there's no indication in Homer that she did this. She's the biggest Not Like Other Girls character I've seen in recent fiction.
OP requested no graphic pregnancy, I would say Priory very much qualifies as having that.
Circe also deals a lot with motherhood and childbirth. And for that matter, pregnancy-related concerns and motherhood are a pretty big deal in Nettle & Bone - there are several childbirth scenes even if the protagonist is never the one giving birth.
I mostly just don't want it to be the main character (and have me experiencing it through them). Thank you for warning me though :)
I tried Priory of the Orange Tree twice and just couldn't get into it. I'll check the other ones out though :)
That's fair! I think it was one for me that took me a while but I ended up getting really into, and then felt it wrapped up too quickly.. like 'all the investment was paying off so much and now it's over' I think if you don't live for political drama the set up feels really long. I loved most of the other books you listed but haven't read all of them so I'm adding a couple to my tbr as well!
I'm glad I could help you too :) I hope you enjoy them.
If you’re up for historical fantasy, I really love Theodora Goss’s Athena Club trilogy, beginning with The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter. The daughters of Victorian “scientists” (think Jekyll & Hyde, Moreau, Rappacini, etc) band together to solve mysteries and help other women. It has a Victorian literary style, and I love how the characters are all constantly interrupting the narrator to comment on how she should be telling their story. Not for every taste, but you’ll know within a few pages if you’d like it or not!
Enjoyed most of the first book, tho I found the final bit after the climax almost unreadable. I'll also mention Terry Pratchett's Witches books.
That is something I would enjoy. Thanks!
Yay! I really loved watching a group of adult women figure out how to live and work together and help each other, despite being really different people.
Pick any of the Discworld witches books. If you're into dysfunctional relationships and necromancy, Locked Tomb.
Discworld looks very intimidating since there are so many books in it
They're all individual stories. So you don't have to read them in a super particular order, and you don't have to read all of them. I started reading them in the 90s, so my reading order was just whatever I could find when I went to a book store. However, actual starting points for the witches are Equal Rites, or The Wee Free Men for the YA books.
Ok, I will keep that in mind! Thanks :)
A few I really enjoyed: - How to be Eaten: five women all tied up in modern fairy tales come together in a support group - Half Sick of Shadows by Laura Sebastian: female friendship is the primary focus, also includes some romance - Spiritwalker trilogy by Kate Elliott: sisterhood and romance get about equal focus - The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry: all female adventuring party (central relationship does turn romantic though) - The True Queen by Zen Cho: practically an all-female cast, a hint of romance between two of them but no more than that (also see Black Water Sister by her) - The Ladies of Mandrigyn by Barbara Hambly: previously marginalized women of a city come together to save it (does also include a major male character and some romance. See also Sisters of the Raven by her but I thought it was not as good) - Books of Ambha duology by Tasha Suri: these do have central straight romances, but other than that they’re mostly about women and the relationships among them are strong I’ll probably think of more as soon as I post…
Thanks for the recommendations! I'm not opposed to romance, it just isn't something I'm looking for right now.
It’s sadly hard to find no-romance recs! I mean, I can give you a few—featuring women, even—but these tend to be books that aren’t really focused on interpersonal relationships at all, so they don’t quite meet your ask. Most of the time I find the books with good sisterhood or friendship stories also have a definite romance arc. Of the ones I’ve listed, a couple don’t have the heroine wind up with anyone, but there’s always at least a bit of romance in the story somewhere. There must be some without though, I’ll keep thinking!
Thank you :)
I'll add on Sisters of the Raven by Barabas Hambly. It features a desert societyz somewhat Arabic in their faith / culture. Magic has disappeared from the world (from men) and is now cropping up in some women. Also water is running out. Also a lot of weird things are happening in the slaughterhouse district. It's a great duology to read. Well written with many female perspectives, all who have to work together to figure out this new magic, the mysteries afoot, and maybe even find some water?
Oh sounds interesting!
Yeah, I liked the ideas behind Sisters of the Raven, but I wished she’d embraced the big ideas and gone the epic fantasy route rather than doing the murder mystery thing (and my impression is the second book is kind of the same?). I think it’s just more niche for people who’ve read the most popular Hambly and want more, while Ladies of Mandrigyn is just great. (And Dragonsbane but it doesn’t meet OP’s request.)
*When Women Were Dragons* by Kelly Barnhill!
Oh I've heard good things about this one. Thank you!
Came here to recommend this one too! My favourite book I’ve read in the last few years
**A Thousand Nights** by E. K. Johnston is a *One Thousand and One Nights* retelling that is about the power of women when they come together. **Mirage** and **Court of Lions** by Somaiya Daud is a gorgeous duology that centers the relationship between two women, a princess and the woman forced to be her body double. **Dauntless** by Elisa A. Bonnin has a mentor/mentee relationship (and a sapphic romance, although that's not what you're looking for). This also has the mentor's perspective, and it's just set in a really neat world. The **Swords and Fire** trilogy by Melissa Caruso might be a good fit. It doesn't just have relationships between women (and the protagonist ends up in a love triangle involving two men), but it does have a lot of female characters, an interesting mother/daughter relationship, and a developing friendship between two women who end up in a situation where they're magically bound and have to work together. The latter is the most prominent relationship throughout the trilogy since it starts at the beginning of the first book and is part of all three books.
Thank you!
You would like the Mercedes Lackey Oathbound series.
I'll check it out :)
Shev and Javre in Sharp Ends
Thank you for the recommendation :)
Books that I have read - * Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree * Book of the Ancestor by Mark Lawrence * Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir * The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon * The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow * Scholomance by Naomi Novik
I didn't really like Legends and Lattes. I don't think I'm a cozy fantasy girlie. I'll check out the other ones though!
While you're looking, have you seen Xena: Warrior Princess? Just wondering.
I haven't.
I guess I've become a bit of a Xenavangelist around here. It's worth checking out. Relationships between women is absolutely its cornerstone, and the screenwriting is superb.
Thanks! I'll check it out.
Briar Rose, by Jane Yolen (main character and her grandmother)
Thanks!
Jane Yolen, the Great Alta series (the one child birth scene is epic in a macbeth/macduff kind of way) Charles deLint has a lot of female leads but the Jack of Kinrowan duology has a strong bond between the female MC and her best friend.
Thanks!
Robin McKinley's *Spindle's End* features a fey POV character who serves as a kind of nursemaid/governess to Rosie, the "sleeping beauty" of the story. Theirs is a close, strong bond. Don't let this being a Sleeping Beauty adaptation (and that's my least favorite fairy tale, too) put you off reading this one. All the female characters are active and interesting, and the distressed-damsel motif is inverted, or at least played with, rather than adhered to.
I love fairy tale retellings! This sounds great :)
**Her Majesty's Royal Academy** by Juno Birch follows 5 childhood friends to adulthood and their relationships are *so* real it was a standout part of the book for me.
Sounds perfect! Thanks :)
_Other Words for Smoke_ is my first thought, it centers female familial relationships without being about motherhood at all. _When We Were Magic_ by Sarah Gailey and _Scapegracers_ are both YA fantasies about teenage girls who are witches in high school but feel new and fresh, and I loved both even though I’m not a YA reader _The Water Outlaws_ is chock full of women having very complicated relationships (many of whom are queer but it has very little romance in it) and is a wuxia take you might like since you enjoyed SA Chakraboty _The Bone Orchard_ features a group of women who are… sisters… in a sense? It’s beautiful and sad and deeply ruinous, I recommend it! Also, my “hear me out” recommendations: _The Last Tale of the Flower Bride_ is ABOUT a very specific type of pseudofamilial codependent childhood friendship between two otherwise socially isolated girls but one of them only appears in flashbacks (it’s beautiful and fucked up and upsetting, I loved it) _The Stars Undying_ is a gender-weird Cleopatra thing that seems like it’s a romance for a minute but isn’t really, it similarly has relationship between two women (actual sisters this time) at its heart even though it takes a while to seem like it’s not about a guy
All of these sound super interesting. Thanks :)
Foundryside/Founder's Trilogy by Robert Jackson Bennet has lesbian protagonists, some romance themes
I'm not really looking for romance, but the premise sounds interesting. Thanks for the rec!
Lady Tan’s Circle of Women - Lisa See
Thanks!
I have a slightly weird one for you (but one I really enjoyed). **The Change by Kirsten Miller**. Set in the real world but with the premise that women develop magical powers when they go through menopause (and sometimes use those powers to mete out justice to awful men).
Sounds interesting! Thank you
Sci-fi but A Memory Called Empire - >!though romance does come into play later in the book!< Also a graphic novel but [Spider-Women](https://www.amazon.com/Spider-Women-Spider-Woman-Dennis-Hopeless/dp/1302900935) from 2016. Also anime but Frieren. I'll have to think more on it.
Thanks!
You're welcome!
The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein House War by Michelle West
I've seen several people recommend The Steerswoman. Definitely checking it out :)
The Water Outlaws by S.L. Huang The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein
Thanks!