Emirati Women's Month: 7 Books by Women Worth Adding to Your Shelf

Emirati Women's Day on August 28th grew into something bigger this year. Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak, the Mother of the Nation, stretched the day out into a full Emirati Women's Month, under the slogan "We Emerge Stronger and Better." A whole month set aside to recognise the women shaping the UAE, and honestly, everywhere else too, felt like reason enough to go pull some overdue titles off our own shelves.

The regional voice to start with

Girls of Riyadh by Rajaa Alsanea is the closest thing on our shelves to a homegrown read for the occasion. It is told through a string of emails and follows four young Saudi women working through love, family, and who they are underneath both. It caused real conversation across the Gulf when it first came out, and it still holds up as a look into women's inner lives in this part of the world.

Literary classics that started the conversation

Long before "women's writing" got its own section in a bookshop, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice was quietly taking the marriage plot apart from the inside. Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own made the case, almost a century ago now, that a woman needs money and a room of her own before she can write at all, and that idea still lands the same way it did then. Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman picks Scout Finch back up as an adult, older now and having to make sense of the world her father actually lived in, not the one she remembered.

Modern voices still shaping the shelf

Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale probably does not need an introduction at this point, but it is worth pausing on how singular it was when it first asked what happens when women's bodies become policy. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun tells the Nigerian civil war through the women who lived through it, and it is still one of the sharpest historical novels to come out in the last twenty years.

The one that just makes you smile

Not every book on a list like this has to carry the weight of the century. Agatha Christie's The ABC Murders is proof that one woman built almost an entire genre of publishing on her own, and nearly a hundred years later, it is still just a genuinely fun read.

Why this fits us

Every one of these copies has already been someone else's favourite. That is the whole idea behind Bookends, stories worth retelling, and the people behind them worth remembering too. This month, that includes the women who wrote them.

All seven titles are online or in store, while stock lasts. Most of these are single copies, so the earlier you look, the better your odds.

So, which one is coming home with you?