Elizabeth Gilbert

At 32, Elizabeth Gilbert had what looked like a perfect life: a house, a husband, a career. She was also desperately unhappy. After a marriage that ended badly and a love affair that ended worse, she decided to spend a year eating in Italy, praying in India, and searching for balance in Bali. The resulting memoir became one of the most controversial books of the 2000s — loved by millions, resented by critics who felt a white woman finding herself abroad was insufficiently self-aware. The honest reading is that Gilbert is aware of exactly those criticisms and addresses them with disarming honesty. Her voice is what people come for: warm, self-deprecating, funnier than you expect, and capable of genuine depth. The book that built her audience.

Gilbert's argument is that creativity is not a special ability but a natural drive — and that the main obstacle to creative living isn't talent or opportunity but fear. She makes the case through a combination of personal essay, philosophy, and stories of other creative people, arguing that the work matters more than the outcome, and that "done" is better than "perfect." She also proposes the idea that ideas have their own kind of agency and will find a different host if you ignore them too long — a claim she makes seriously, not metaphorically, and which is the most interesting and divisive part of the book. Essential reading for anyone who has a project they keep putting off. Opinionated, specific, and practically useful.

Alma Whittaker is born in 1800 into wealth and intellectual privilege — her father built a botanic empire, her home in Philadelphia is one of the great gardens of the Western world. She becomes a world-class expert in mosses, studying their evolution with a rigour that anticipates Darwin, while her life is complicated by a longing she doesn't know how to name and a marriage to a mystical, beautiful man who may not be capable of what she needs. This is Gilbert's most ambitious book: a Victorian-scale novel of ideas, fully realised, with a heroine who thinks and suffers and persists across 500 pages without ever becoming tiresome. It shows what Gilbert can do when she's working at full literary stretch, and surprised many readers who'd only encountered her as a memoirist.

Ninety-five-year-old Vivian Morris answers a letter asking about her relationship with a man named Frank Pike — and the answer takes the entire novel. The story she tells is of her arrival in New York City in 1940, her aunt's declining theatrical company on West 44th Street, the showgirls, costume makers, directors, and one devastating mistake that cost her her place in that world. Gilbert writes the city with genuine affection and period accuracy, and the tone — warm, sensual, un-regretful — is distinctive. Where The Signature of All Things is about a woman who lives in her intellect, City of Girls is about a woman who lives through her body, and neither is treated as the lesser choice. Gilbert's most purely enjoyable book.

The follow-up to Eat Pray Love: Gilbert and Felipe (the Brazilian man she met in Bali) are detained by US immigration and told they must marry before he can re-enter the country. Neither of them wants to marry. Gilbert spends the months they spend travelling through Southeast Asia waiting for their visa processing researching the history of the institution — every study, anthropology, and cultural history she can find — and thinking through whether she can do it without losing herself again. A more intellectual book than its predecessor, and underrated: Gilbert's research into marriage as an institution is genuinely interesting, and her conclusions are honest rather than neat.

Eustace Conway built a teepee in the Appalachian woods at seventeen, crossed the country on horseback in the fastest recorded time, and at thirty-something runs a wilderness school where he teaches children to live off the land. Gilbert's portrait of Conway is a National Book Award finalist — a biography that's also a meditation on American frontier mythology, the particular version of masculinity it produces, and what it costs to be a symbol rather than a person. Gilbert writes Conway's life with the same attentiveness she brings to interior lives, even though Conway is a man who lives entirely externally. Her best piece of pure journalism.

Ruth Thomas returns to a tiny Maine island after four years at boarding school and finds herself caught between two feuding lobstering families who have been at war since before she was born. Gilbert's debut novel is set in a very specific community — working-class New England fishing culture — and written with an intimacy that suggests deep research. Ruth is one of Gilbert's most fully realised heroines: sardonic, competent, capable of love and fury in equal measure. The novel is smaller in ambition than The Signature of All Things but more intimate — a story about belonging and stubbornness and the kind of love that grows slowly in difficult soil. Worth reading before City of Girls to see how she started.

Gilbert's debut: a collection of short stories that won the Pushcart Prize and established her as a writer of significant promise before she was well-known. The stories are set largely in the American West and in urban working-class environments — bars, ranches, diners — and written with a specificity of place and character that shows where her sensibility was developing. For readers interested in seeing where she started: this is a very different writer from the Eat Pray Love author, more interior, more interested in the lives of ordinary people in ordinary circumstances. Recommended for completists and readers who want short fiction with real attention to craft.