16 Books to Read When You Are Single (None About Fixing You)

Alderton writes about her twenties in London: bad parties, worse boyfriends, a decade of instant messenger and morning-after taxis, and the friend she has loved longest, Farly. It is very funny for two hundred pages and then it stops being funny, because addiction, panic attacks and a best friend getting married are all in here too. The recipes and fake party invitations scattered through the book sound like a gimmick and are not. What lands hardest is her argument that the relationship she spent ten years underrating was the one holding her whole life upright.

Eleanor works in accounts, eats the same lunch every day, and drinks two bottles of vodka each weekend so that Monday arrives faster. She speaks to nobody except her mother on the phone, which is the worst conversation in the book. Then she fixes on a musician she has never met as her future, and separately, the IT guy at work starts including her in things. Honeyman writes Eleanor's narration so precisely that you laugh at her for fifty pages before you work out what you have been laughing at.

Aisha Bhatia lives with a flatmate, drinks too much on weeknights, and is under quiet constant siege from a mother who treats twenty-nine as a deadline. There is a man, an NRI who checks into the hotel, and the plot goes roughly where you think it will. The reason to read it is everything around the plot: the aunties, the matrimonial meetings, the office politics, the very specific Indian humiliation of a stranger at a wedding buffet asking about your marital status before your name.

Bridget counts calories, cigarettes and alcohol units at the top of every diary entry, works in publishing, fancies her boss, and dreads the dinner parties where a smug married couple always asks how her love life is coming along. The book is built from short entries, so it fits neatly into the ten minutes before sleep. Underneath the comedy there is a real portrait of a woman being appraised constantly by everybody in the room, which is why it outlived the decade it was making fun of.

This is part memoir and part art criticism, and it works because Laing is honest about her own state before she is clever about anyone else's. She arrives in New York alone, finds herself unable to speak to another person for days at a stretch, then studies artists who lived inside the same condition: Edward Hopper's windows, Andy Warhol's tape recorder, David Wojnarowicz on the piers, Henry Darger in his rented room. Her real argument is that loneliness is a common human experience which shame turns into a private secret.

Rosenbloom, a travel writer, takes Paris in spring, Istanbul in summer, Florence in autumn and New York in winter, alone by choice, and pays attention to what actually happens on those trips: the table for one, the museum at your own speed, the way food tastes when nobody is talking across it. She brings in research on attention and savouring, but the useful parts are practical. How to eat alone without using your phone as a shield. Where solitude tips over into something harder, and what to do at that point.

Akhilandeswari has spent her life as the daughter, the sister, the aunt and the earner since her father died, and one evening she boards a train south without asking anybody's permission. In the ladies coupe she puts a single question to the five women sharing it, and each answers with her own life: a woman married since her teens, a chemistry teacher whose husband needs to win every exchange, a schoolgirl, a woman whose life has been much harder than the rest. Some answers support Akhila. Several do not, which is the point.

Don Tillman schedules his life to the minute, teaches genetics, and decides the efficient route to a partner is a very long screening questionnaire. Rosie smokes, arrives late, drinks, and is busy trying to identify her biological father, so she fails the screening immediately and gets a completely different project instead. The comedy comes from Don's narration, which reports social disasters with total seriousness and no idea they were disasters. It is a romcom built with an engineer's structure, and it is properly funny rather than merely pleasant.

Zoya Singh Solanki was born at the exact moment India lifted the 1983 World Cup, which turns into a national story when the current team keeps winning after breakfast with her. She becomes a mascot, a brand and a headline, while the captain, Nikhil Khoda, will not believe in luck and is extremely irritating about it. Chauhan writes the funniest dialogue in Indian commercial fiction, with a Delhi Punjabi family talking over each other on every second page, and the cricket is accurate enough to satisfy people who actually watch it.

January writes happy love stories and has stopped believing in them since her father died and left a secret behind. Gus writes bleak literary fiction and thinks happy endings are dishonest. They were rivals in college, they are now neighbours in a small Michigan town, and they make a bet: she writes the depressing book, he writes the romance, and each takes the other on research trips. Henry is far sharper about grief and about writing itself than the cover leads you to expect, and the banter holds up on a second read.

Nikki has dropped out of law, works behind a pub bar, and takes a creative writing job at the Sikh community centre in Southall mostly to keep the peace at home. She expects a basic English class. The widows who turn up want to tell each other stories about sex and longing, in Punjabi, and Nikki becomes the scribe for a project that scandalises the neighbourhood. Under the comedy sits a serious plot about a young woman's death and the men who appoint themselves guardians of everyone else's behaviour.

hooks begins from a definition she borrows from M. Scott Peck, that love is the will to extend yourself for another person's growth, and then applies it everywhere: to parents, to friendship, to romance, to the way boys are raised out of the ability to name what they feel. She is direct, occasionally repetitive, and unusually willing to write about her own failures at this. The chapters on honesty, and on how children learn that love arrives attached to punishment, are the ones people are still quoting years later.

Levine, a psychiatrist, and his co-author Rachel Heller lay out adult attachment theory in three styles: anxious, avoidant and secure. The central claim is that your need for closeness is not a weakness to be trained out of you, and that a great deal of dating misery comes from anxious and avoidant people finding each other again and again. There are quizzes, scripts for hard conversations, and a pile of case studies. It has the shape of a self-help book, so expect repetition, but the framework is genuinely useful for reading your own history.

Ansari teamed up with the sociologist Eric Klinenberg, ran focus groups, and looked at how people date in New York, Tokyo, Buenos Aires and Doha. The finding that stayed with me is generational: an older generation often married somebody from their own building or street, while we search a whole country's worth of options and end up less certain than they were. There are chapters on texting, on having too much choice, and on the gap between what people say they want and who they actually message.

Bolick spent her thirties in New York unmarried, and instead of a straight memoir she braids her own life with five women she calls her awakeners: Maeve Brennan, Neith Boyce, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The pull is the double vision. You get her real relationships and doubts alongside women who faced the same question a century earlier with far fewer options and answered it anyway. The word spinster gets picked up and examined here rather than simply thrown away.

Storr wrote this against a therapeutic culture that had made intimate relationships the only accepted measure of a good life. He works through people who did their best thinking alone, through what enforced isolation actually does to us, through mourning, imagination, and the way a child develops the ability to be by themselves without anxiety. It is a book from 1988 and reads like one: measured, slightly formal, heavy on writers and composers. The central claim has aged better than most psychology of that decade.