7 Award-Winning Novels For Curious Women

by | Sep 10, 2018

award-winning novels for women
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Last updated on May 4th, 2023

Award-winning novels to inspire travel

by Evelyn Hannon, Founder, JourneyWoman

Women who love to travel generally have at least one book on their night table that transports them into another culture. Most women who love to travel are hungry to learn about other religions, other ethnicities, and what it’s like to live in a place other than our own. The following seven award-winning novels have each been recommended to me by other women. I now pass these titles along to you. Enjoy!

The Space Between Us - India

Author: Thrity Umrigar

The author vividly captures the social struggles of modern India in a luminous, addictively readable novel of honour, tradition, class, gender, and family. A portrayal of two women discovering an emotional rapport as they struggle against the confines of a rigid caste system. Click for more!

Warlight - England

Author: Michael Ondaatje

A dramatic story set in the decade after World War II told through the lives of a small group of unexpected characters and two teenagers, fourteen-year-old Nathaniel, and his older sister, Rachel, whose lives are indelibly shaped by their unwitting involvement. In 1945, just after World War II, they stay behind in London when their parents move to Singapore, leaving them in the care of a mysterious figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and they grow both more convinced and less concerned as they come to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women joined by a shared history of unspecified service during the war, all of whom seem, in some way, determined now to protect and educate (in rather unusual ways) Rachel and Nathaniel. Click for more!

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

Author: Jung Chang

The story of three generations in twentieth-century China that blends the intimacy of memoir and the panoramic sweep of eyewitness history. An engrossing record of Mao’s impact on China, an unusual window on the female experience in the modern world, and an inspiring tale of courage and love, Jung Chang describes the extraordinary lives and experiences of her family members. Click for more!

Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk - USA

Author: Kathleen Rooney

New Year’s Eve, 1984: an 85-year-old woman in a mink coat and wide-brimmed navy-blue fedora strolls around Manhattan, encountering colorful characters as she revisits her past and beloved former haunts. Click for more!

Pachinko - Korea

Author: Min Jin Lee

Pachinko follows one Korean family through the generations, beginning in early 1900s Korea with Sunja, the prized daughter of a poor yet proud family, whose unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame them all. Deserted by her lover, Sunja is saved when a young tubercular minister offers to marry and bring her to Japan. So begins a sweeping saga of an exceptional family in exile from its homeland and caught in the indifferent arc of history. Click for more!

A Gentleman in Moscow - Russia

Author: Amor Towles

A Gentleman in Moscow immerses us in another elegantly drawn era with the story of Count Alexander Rostov. When, in 1922, he is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the count is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Click for more!

The Marriage of Opposites - St Thomas, Caribbean

Author: Alice Hoffman

A forbidden love story set on the tropical island of St. Thomas about the extraordinary woman who gave birth to painter Camille Pissarro; the Father of Impressionism. Click for more!

Evelyn started Journeywoman in 1994, and unknowingly became the world's first female travel blogger. She inspired a sisterhood of women, a grassroots movement, to inspire women to travel safely and well, and to connect women travellers around the world. She passed away in 2019, but her legacy lives on.

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