5 Books That Feel Like Sisterhood

From sisters by blood to the friends who become family, these are the books we love because they show us what sisterhood can look like in all its many forms.

Sisterhood doesn't always look the same. Sometimes it's the person who grew up beside you. Sometimes it's a friend who teaches you something no one else ever did. Sometimes it's women separated by generations, geography, or circumstance who still find ways to care for one another.

In Issue 01 of Sisterly, we gathered five books that reminded us of those different kinds of connection. Consider this your reading list for when you want a little more sisterhood on your bookshelf.

Lady Tan's Circle of Women

by Lisa See

Sisterhood as survival, skill-sharing, and intimate care.

Set in 15th-century China, Lady Tan's Circle of Women follows women navigating systems that constrain their lives while passing knowledge between one another—particularly knowledge of medicine, the body, and care.

It's a story that reminds us that sisterhood can be practical as much as emotional: I know something that may help you, so I'm going to teach you.

Everything I Know About Love

by Dolly Alderton

Sisterhood as the great love story of adulthood.

There are romances in Dolly Alderton's memoir, but the relationships that endure are her friendships. They're messy, funny, occasionally painful, and deeply sustaining through heartbreak, reinvention, loneliness, and the strange work of becoming yourself.

It's for anyone who has realized that some of the great loves of our lives aren't romantic at all.

Weyward

by Emilia Hart

Sisterhood as ancestral inheritance.

Three women. Three different periods of history. One lineage.

Weyward explores the ways women can remain connected across generations through resilience, intuition, nature, and a refusal to be broken by what tries to silence them.

It's sisterhood stretched across time—the idea that the women who came before us can leave us something even when we never had the chance to know them.

Little Women

by Louisa May Alcott

Sisterhood as growing up side by side.

Few stories capture biological sisterhood quite like the March sisters: the tenderness and rivalry, sacrifice and frustration, enormous love and occasional inability to understand one another.

They change. Their lives diverge. They become more fully themselves. And still, their sisters remain part of who they are.

Rich AF

by Vivian Tu

Sisterhood as financial transparency and empowerment.

Money knowledge has historically been something people gatekeep. Rich AF takes the opposite approach: let's actually talk about it.

We included it because sisterhood can also look like sharing the information that makes another woman's life easier. How do you negotiate? Save? Invest? Protect yourself? Build something?

Sometimes being a sister means saying, here's what I learned so you don't have to figure it out alone.

A reading list with a little more meaning

These five books couldn't be more different, and that's exactly why we chose them.

Together, they remind us that sisterhood can mean care, friendship, inheritance, family, knowledge, protection, honesty, and simply helping another woman find her footing.

This reading list originally appeared in Issue 01: Sisterhood of Sisterly Magazine, an independent print magazine built around the idea that we all deserve a little more big-sister wisdom in our lives.

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