"Strong female character" too often means a woman who is good at violence. The more interesting version is a woman with real agency: she wants something specific, she makes the decisions, and she is allowed to be wrong.
This is an editorial pick rather than a filter, because it is a judgement call and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
Madeline Miller · 393 pages · 2018
The minor witch from the Odyssey gets three thousand years, an island, and finally a first-person voice. Quieter and angrier than Achilles.
Taylor Jenkins Reid · 389 pages · 2017
An ageing film legend finally tells her story, and picks an unknown journalist to hear it. The reason she picked her is the last chapter.
Samantha Shannon · 804 pages · 2019
A standalone doorstopper with four viewpoint characters, two dragon traditions that despise each other, and a queen who has to produce an heir before the world ends.
Leigh Bardugo · 465 pages · 2015
Six criminals, one impossible break-in, and a narrator for each of them. The plot is a heist; the reason people reread it is the six of them.
Holly Black · 370 pages · 2018
A mortal girl raised in Faerie by the man who murdered her parents decides she would rather have power than safety. Everyone in it is lying.
R. F. Kuang · 336 pages · 2023
A struggling writer watches her successful friend die and steals the unpublished manuscript. Then narrates the whole thing at you, justifying it.
Emily Henry · 377 pages · 2022
A cutthroat literary agent keeps running into the editor she cannot stand in the small town she is only visiting for her sister. Deliberately inverts the Hallmark plot.
Leigh Bardugo · 458 pages · 2019
Yale's secret societies really do practise magic, and Alex Stern was recruited to watch them because she can see the dead. Adult, and genuinely nasty in places.
Tracy Deonn · 501 pages · 2020
Weeks after her mother dies, Bree starts at a residential programme at UNC and walks into a secret order of Arthurian descendants. Southern Black rootcraft against Round Table legacy.
Heather Fawcett · 336 pages · 2023
A prickly Cambridge dryadologist goes to a freezing northern village to finish her field guide to the fae. Her insufferably charming colleague turns up uninvited.