Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Books Like The Women by Kristin Hannah
The Women is not really a war novel. It is a novel about coming home. Frankie McGrath goes to Vietnam at twenty-two, does extraordinary things under impossible conditions, and returns to a country that does not want to acknowledge she was ever there. The war is the first fifty pages of what happens to her. The rest of the book is the aftermath — the silence, the erasure, the slow and difficult work of becoming herself again in a world that has moved on without her. These seven books ask the same question from different angles: what does a woman do when what she survived is more than the world around her can hold?
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Historical Fiction · Memoir · Updated 2026
The Nightingale
Two sisters in Nazi-occupied France, both doing what the war demands of them — one by staying, one by joining the Resistance. Hannah wrote The Nightingale before The Women, and it is the book that made her. If you read The Women first, this is the obvious next step. The emotional register is identical: the cost of courage, the weight of what women carry alone, and the particular grief of surviving when others did not.
What connects it to The Women is not the setting or the war but the question underneath both books: what does it cost a woman to do what needs to be done, when no one is watching and no one will remember? Vianne and Isabelle are Frankie McGrath’s literary sisters. Read it immediately after.
All the Light We Cannot See
A blind French girl and a German soldier, their paths converging across occupied Europe in WWII. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. The writing is extraordinary — precise and almost unbearably tender — and the novel takes the same approach as The Women: the war is the context, never the point. The point is always the people inside it, and what they choose when choosing feels impossible.
This is the book to read if what moved you about The Women was the moral weight of it — the sense that every small act of decency costs something, and that ordinary people become capable of both extraordinary good and extraordinary harm when the world stops holding its shape.
The Choice
In 1944, sixteen-year-old Edith is sent to Auschwitz. Josef Mengele forces her to dance for his amusement the night her parents are killed. She survives. Decades later, she becomes a psychologist who helps others find what she fought for herself: that no matter what is done to us, we always have a choice in how we respond. This is not a comfortable book. It earns every word it says about healing.
The connection to The Women is the homecoming. Both Frankie and Edith return from the unsurvivable to a world that wants to move on — and both have to build a self out of what remains. Eger’s answer to that problem is the most honest I have read anywhere. Read this if Frankie’s silence after Vietnam stayed with you.
Educated
No war, no uniform. But the same essential story: a young woman is shaped by a world that was never built for her, and has to decide who she is once she gets out. Westover grew up in a survivalist family in rural Idaho with no formal education and clawed her way to a PhD at Cambridge. The hardest part is not the getting out. It is going home afterwards, and what home means once you have changed beyond recognition.
What makes Educated feel like a sibling to The Women is its emotional honesty about the cost of becoming yourself — the specific pain of no longer fitting in the place you came from, and the grief of loving people you can no longer be close to. Frankie knows this feeling exactly.
I Am Malala
Malala was fifteen when the Taliban shot her on her school bus in Pakistan. She survived, and kept going. Her memoir is calm and fierce in equal measure — the account of a young woman who refuses to be made invisible in a world that wants her silent. It is also, like The Women, a book about what it means to be a girl who wants something, in a place that has decided she should not.
What Malala and Frankie share is the refusal to accept that courage is only available to men, and that the things women do in impossible circumstances do not count as bravery because no one bothered to name them. Both books name them.
Our Women on the Ground
Nineteen Arab women journalists reporting from conflict zones across the Middle East — Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Lebanon. Not fiction. Real women, real wars, real costs. This is what The Women looks like without the distance of historical fiction. They go into the war zone because someone has to. They come back changed, to a world that does not quite know what to do with them.
Frankie McGrath would recognise every woman in this book. The experience of being erased from the story you risked your life to tell — of being there and then not counted as having been there — runs through this collection the same way it runs through The Women. This is the non-fiction version of the same grief.
Tell Me Who I Am
Alex Lewis wakes from a motorcycle accident at eighteen with no memory except his twin brother Marcus. Marcus becomes the keeper of his entire identity — and for twenty years, keeps a devastating secret about their childhood. This is a different kind of war story. The battle is between what we remember and what we are told, between what we can bear to know and what we need to.
Both books are about what happens when someone comes back from something — and the people who love them have to decide what to say about who they were. The homecoming in The Women and the homecoming in Tell Me Who I Am ask the same question: what do you owe someone you love? The truth, or protection from it?
Not sure where to start?
If you want the book that is most directly connected to The Women
→ Start with The Nightingale. Same author, same emotional register, and it will feel like staying in the world you just left.
If you want something true rather than fiction
→ Read The Choice by Edith Eger. It is the most honest book I have read about what it actually takes to come back from the unsurvivable — and it will change how you read Frankie’s story.
If you want the book that makes The Women feel like part of a larger conversation
→ Read Our Women on the Ground. These are the real Frankies — the women who went, who saw, who came back, and whose names you do not know.
Frequently asked questions about books like The Women
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From the bookshelf
“We are the women our country forgot.” — Frankie McGrath, The Women
If this list resonated with you, you'll find more books like these on my personal bookshelf — hand-picked for readers who want books that stay with them long after the last page.
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Books Like The Women by Kristin Hannah — 7 reads for when you need more
Meta description:
Finished The Women and not ready to move on? 7 books with the same emotional core — women shaped by war and circumstance who have to rebuild who they are. Including picks from my shelf.
OG Title:
Books Like The Women by Kristin Hannah — 7 reads for when you need more
OG Description:
Finished The Women and not ready to move on? 7 books with the same emotional core — women shaped by war and circumstance who have to rebuild who they are. Including picks from my shelf.
