Friendship Resources: Books

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Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life’s Fundamental Bond
Lydia Denworth

A revelatory investigation of friendship, with profound implications for our understanding of what humans and animals alike need to thrive across a lifetime.

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The Friendship Formula: How to Say Goodbye to Loneliness and Discover Deeper Connection
Kyler Shumway, MA

This guide takes a logical approach to guiding the reader through the inner self, interpersonal skills, and the purpose of friendship.

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Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships

Robin Dunbar

Robin Dunbar is the world-renowned psychologist and author who famously discovered Dunbar’s number: how our capacity for friendship is limited to around 150 people. In Friends, he looks at friendship in the round, at the way different types of friendship and family relationships intersect, or at the complex of psychological and behavioural mechanisms that underpin friendships and make them possible – and just how complicated the business of making and keeping friends actually is.

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Friendfluence: The Surprising Ways Friends Make Us Who We Are

Carlin Flora

Friendfluence explores the powerful and often under-appreciated influence of friends on our personalities, habits, physical health, and even our chances of success in life. In this fascinating book, packed with the latest research findings, Carlin Flora traces friendship from its evolutionary roots to its starring role in childhood and adolescence to its subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) impact on adults—both positive and negative, online and offline.

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The Psychology of Friendship

Mahzad Hojjat and Anne Moyer

This book explores talking to our pets, connecting on social media, and everything in between. An overview of the psychological research on friendship with contributors from all over the world. Stages of life, gender, race, conflict, and social media are all examined with a friendship lense.

A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion

Fay Bound Alberti

Dr. Fay Bound Alberti, writer and cultural historian, offers a radically new interpretation of loneliness as an emotional language and experience. Using letters and diaries, philosophical tracts, political discussions, and medical literature from the eighteenth century to the present, historian of the emotions Fay Bound Alberti argues that loneliness is not an ahistorical, universal phenomenon. It is, in fact, a modern emotion: before 1800, its language did not exist.

Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection

John T. Cacioppo

Social neuroscientist John T. Cacioppo unveils his pioneering research on the startling effects of loneliness: a sense of isolation or social rejection disrupts not only our thinking abilities and will power but also our immune systems, and can be as damaging as obesity or smoking. A blend of biological and social science, this book demonstrates that, as individuals and as a society, we have everything to gain, and everything to lose, in how well or how poorly we manage our need for social bonds.

Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect

Matthew D. Lieberman

Renowned psychologist Matthew Lieberman explores groundbreaking research in social neuroscience revealing that our need to connect with other people is even more fundamental, more basic, than our need for food or shelter. Based on the latest cutting-edge research, the findings in Social have important real-world implications. “Social reveals that our brains are made for connecting, not only for thinking. Matt Lieberman, a pioneering expert in social neuroscience, explains why fairness tastes like chocolate, why heartache can hurt more than a headache, and how we can use this knowledge to improve our lives at home, school, and work.” -Adam Grant, Wharton professor and bestselling author of Give and Take.

Social Chemistry: Decoding the Patterns of Human Connection

Marissa King

Social Chemistry is a fascinating look at the particulars of impactful networks. Whether you take to networking naturally or think yourself allergic to it, there is practical information here that can help you form more productive relationships, and make better use of those you already have.

The Loneliness Cure: Six Strategies for Finding Real Connections in your Life

Kory Floyd

Communication expert, Kory Floyd, Ph.D., tackles the loneliness epidemic with stories and science. Floyd explains the problems associated with chronic affection deprivation and suggests practical strategies for getting more of the human contact we naturally crave.

Vital Friends: The People You Can’t Afford to Live Without

Tom Rath

Along with several leading researchers, Rath pored through the literature, conducted several experiments, and analyzed more than 5 million interviews from The Gallup Organization’s worldwide database. His team’s discoveries produced Vital Friends, a book that challenges long-held assumptions people have about their relationships. And the team’s landmark discovery — that people who have a “best friend at work” are seven times as likely to be engaged in their job — is sure to rattle the structure of organizations around the world. Drawing on research and case studies from topics as diverse as marriage, management, and architecture, Vital Friends reveals what’s common to all truly essential friendships: a regular focus on what each person is contributing to the friendship — rather than the all-too-common approach of expecting one person to be everything.

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We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships

Kat Vellos

Author Kat Vellos, experience designer and founder of Better Than Small Talk, tackles the four most common challenges of adult friendship: constant relocation, full schedules, the demands of partnership and family, and our culture’s declining capacity for compassion and intimacy in the age of social media. Combining expert research and personal stories pulled from conversations with hundreds of adults, We Should Get Together is the modern handbook for making and maintaining stronger friendships.

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Frientimacy: How to Deepen Friendships for Lifelong Health and Happiness

Shasta Nelson

Award-winning speaker Shasta Nelson shows how anyone can form stronger, more meaningful friendships, marked by a level of trust she calls frientimacy. With a downloadable workbook and accompanying website, this book is full of tips, explanations, and reflections for the friendship journey. website https://www.shastanelson.com/frientimacy

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Missing Each Other: How to Cultivate Meaningful Connections

Edward Brodkin and Ashley Pallathra

Based on cutting-edge neuroscience research and years of clinical work, psychiatrist Edward Brodkin and therapist Ashley Pallathra take us on a wide-ranging and surprising journey through fields as diverse as social neuroscience and autism research, music performance, pro basketball, and tai chi. They use these stories to introduce the four pillars of human connection: Relaxed Awareness, Listening, Understanding, and Mutual Responsiveness. Accessible and engaging, Missing Each Other explains the science, research, and biology underlying these pillars of human connection and provides exercises through which readers can improve their own skills and abilities in each.

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The Friendship Factor: How to Get Closer to the People You Care for

Alan Loy McGinnis

At the heart of each relationship, says McGinnis, is the friendship factor-the essential ingredient of warmth and caring. With captivating case histories and anecdotes about such famous people as George Burns, Howard Hughes, and C. S. Lewis, McGinnis shares the secret of how to love and be loved.

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Stop Being Lonely: Three Simple Steps to Developing Close Friendships and Deep Relationships

Kira Asatryan

This book focuses more on the how-to than the what or why, and outlines practical ideas about developing close relationships. The simple and straightforward actions Asatryan presents in this wonderfully practical book will guide you toward better relationships and less loneliness in all social contexts.

Friendships Don’t Just Happen!: The Guide to Creating a Meaningful Circle of GirlFriends

Shasta Nelson

Nelson’s book before Frientimacy explores the how-to’s of evaluating, finding, and developing friendship circles. This essential go-to guide reveals how women can enhance their lives by creating valuable friendships in today’s busy, mobile world, from nationally recognized friendship expert and CEO of GirlFriendCircles.com.

Here to Make Friends: How to Make Friends as an Adult: Advice to Help You Expand Your Social Circle, Nurture Meaningful Relationships, and Build a Healthier, Happier Social Life

Hope Kelaher LCSW

Skip the small talk and learn how to build a supportive community, engage with new people, and cultivate authentic, long-lasting friendships at every stage of life. Everyone wants to feel connected. Here to Make Friends is the perfect companion for moving past the sometimes-lonely post-school stage and into lasting, fulfilling friendships.

The Friendship Crisis: Finding, Making, and Keeping Friends When You’re Not a Kid Anymore

Marla Paul

Aimed at women who are new moms, divorcees, widows. Not aimed at men or single women looking to widen their circle. Slightly outdated (2005) due to the rise of technology as a way to connect since this book was published, and full of insightful anecdotes that will serve the intended audience well.

The Friendship Quadrant: Who are my true friends? How do I identify false friends? How do I avoid toxic friends?

Michael & Kassie Boyd with Steele Kizerian

This book is an excellent read for adults and children alike and would do well in any home. The Friendship Quadrant provides a comprehensive toolkit for all ages to navigate the peaks and valleys of interpersonal relationships.

The Friendship Fix

Andrea Bonior, Ph.D.

The Friendship Fix is the complete guide to choosing, losing, and keeping up with your friends. Jam-packed with practical ways to improve your life by improving your circle. From dealing with friends-with-benefits to coworkers from the dark side, from feeling alone to being desperate to defriend a few dozen people, Andrea Bonior, Ph.D. helps you make the most of your friendships, whether they be old, new, online, or in person.

Buddy System: Understanding Male Friendships

Geoffrey Greif

Citing interviews with nearly 400 men, therapist and researcher Geoffrey L. Greif takes readers on a guided tour of male friendships, explaining what makes them work, why they are vital to the health of individuals and communities, and how to build the kinds of friendships that can lead to longer and happier lives.

Radical Friendship: Seven Ways to Love Yourself and Find Your People in an Unjust World

Kate Johnson

Grounded in the Buddha’s teachings on spiritual friendship, Radical Friendship shares seven strategies to help us embody our deepest values in all of our relationships. Drawing on her experiences as a leading meditation teacher, as well as personal stories of growing up multiracial in a racist world, Kate Johnson brings a fresh take on time-honored wisdom to help us connect more authentically with ourselves, with our friends and family, and within our communities.

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The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

Priya Parker

A transformative exploration of the power, purpose, and benefits of gatherings in our lives: at work, at school, at home and beyond. Priya understands the magic that happens when people get together for a purpose, and she also understands how miserable it can be without proper planning. Her examples are vast and eye-opening, and she presents her theories with humor and grace.

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Belong: Find Your People, Create Community, and Live a More Connected Life

Radha Agrawal

A book that’s equal parts inspiring and interactive, and packed with prompts, charts, quizzes, and full-color illustrations, Belong takes readers on a two-part journey. Part one is Going IN—a gentle but intentional process of self-discovery and finding out your true energy levels and VIA (values, interests, and abilities). Part two is Going OUT—building on all that you’ve learned about yourself to find those few special people who feed your soul, and discovering, or creating, the ever-widening groups that align with your aims and desires.

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Get Together: How to Build a Community with your People

Bailey Richardson

Get Together is a practical and heartfelt guide to cultivating a community. Whether starting a run crew, connecting with fans online, or sparking a movement of K-12 teachers, the secret to getting people together is this: build your community with people, not for them.

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Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home

Toko-pa Turner

Turner maps out a path to belonging using stories, dreams, origins, and history to understand the path back to belonging.

Bowling Alone: Revised and Updated: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

Robert D. Putnam

Updated to include a new chapter about the influence of social media and the Internet—the 20th-anniversary edition of Bowling Alone remains a seminal work of social analysis, and its examination of what happened to our sense of community remains more relevant than ever in today’s fractured America. Bowling Alone surveyed in detail Americans’ changing behavior over the decades, showing how we had become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and social structures, whether it’s with the PTA, church, clubs, political parties, or bowling leagues. In the revised edition of his classic work, Putnam shows how our shrinking access to the “social capital” that is the reward of communal activity and community sharing still poses a serious threat to our civic and personal health, and how these consequences have a new resonance for our divided country today.

A Tribe Called Bliss: Break Through Superficial Friendships, Create Real Connections, Reach Your Highest Potential

Lori Harder

Lori Harder is a self-love expert with over 6 million listeners on her Earn Your Happy podcast. In A Tribe Called Bliss she shares the exact structure she used to build her own tribe and grow from the anxiety-ridden, unhealthy, introverted underachiever she was to the confident woman who takes risks and leaps out of her comfort zone.

How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community

Mia Birdsong

Through research, interviews, and stories of lived experience, How We Show Up returns us to our inherent connectedness where we find strength, safety, and support in vulnerability and generosity, in asking for help, and in being accountable. Showing up–literally and figuratively–points us toward the promise of our collective vitality and leads us to the liberated well-being we all want.

The Art of Community: Seven Principles for Belonging

Charles Vogl

Vogl defines community as a “group of individuals who share a mutual concern for one another’s welfare.” This is a guidebook for making the jump between in or starting an organization and finding belonging in a community. Emerging or veteran leaders who integrate these principles will build communities that are more resilient, passionate, and harmonious in the face of adversity and uncertainty. Flip to any page to find insight and inspiration.

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How to Make Friends as an Introvert

Nate Nicholson

Excellent practical advice at different stages so you can choose your confidence level, start with very manageable activities and gradually work up to other ideas as you gain in social experience, familiarity and conversational skills.

Improve Your Social Skills

Daniel Wendler

Contains 200+ pages of step-by-step, easy-to-understand explanations of social interaction, written by a professional social skills coach whose TEDx talk on overcoming the social challenges of Asperger’s Syndrome has been viewed over 130,000 times

Level Up Your Social Life: The Gamer’s Guide To Social Success

Daniel Wendler

If you can succeed at video games, you can succeed socially. That’s the promise of Level Up Your Social Life. Level Up Your Social Life uses the video game concepts that you’re already familiar with to teach you how to succeed socially. Want to be better at conversation? Pong holds the secret. Want to make more friends? Mario Kart can show you how.

The Science of Making Friends: Helping Socially Challenged Teens and Young Adults

Elizabeth Laugeson

This book offers parents a step-by-step guide to making and keeping friends for teens and young adults with social challenges―such as those diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, bipolar, or other conditions. With the book’s concrete rules and steps of social etiquette, parents will be able to assist in improving conversational skills, expanding social opportunities, and developing strategies for handling peer rejection.

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Hey Friend: 100 Ways to Connect with 100 People in 100 Days

Keisha Mabry

In this book readers will learn how to: make friends everywhere (on planes, on trains, in lines and while they dine); be connectors not networkers and yes there’s a difference; connect with 21st-century techniques like hashtags, swag, podcasts, retweets and street teams; share their “who” not their “do” when meeting peeps that are new and use 100 creative techniques to curate new friendships while cultivating the friendships they already have. Geared towards (and written by) the younger generation, this book takes a modern look at the reality of being a 20 -30 something and trying to connect. Placed in the interactive category because if you read through the book and take no action, your levels of connection will not change.

The Intentional Friend: A 31-Day Guide to Authentic Friendship

Claire McCarter

An interactive and reflective guide designed to help you contemplate friendship. Full of action steps and spaces to write and reflect. Marketed towards women, and everyone can benefit from reflection.

Frientimacy Workbook

Shasta Nelson

A workbook to accompany Frientimacy

Connected from afar: A Guide for Staying Close When You’re Far Away

Kat Vellos

Get six months of weekly connection prompts you can start using with your friends today. In this quick and easy guide, Kat Vellos, author of We Should Get Together and creator of Better than Small Talk, gives you the tools to breathe new life and fresh connection into your existing friendships. You can even try these activities with family members and romantic partners, too. Filled with creative activities, conversation starters, journaling prompts and art project ideas, Connected from Afar will help you feel closer and more connected, no matter how far away you are.

Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person

Shonda Rhimes

She’s the creator and producer of some of the most groundbreaking and audacious shows on television today. Her iconic characters live boldly and speak their minds. So who would suspect that Shonda Rhimes is an introvert? That she hired a publicist so she could avoid public appearances? That she suffered panic attacks before media interviews?

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

Olivia Laing

A dazzling work of biography, memoir, and cultural criticism on the subject of loneliness, told through the lives of iconic artists, by the acclaimed author of The Trip to Echo Spring. Named the best book of the year by NPR, Newsweek, Slate, Pop Sugar, Marie Claire, Elle, Publishers Weekly, and Lit Hub.

The Opposite of Loneliness

Marina Keegan

A posthumous collection of essays and stories from the talented young Yale graduate whose title essay captured the world’s attention in 2012 and turned her into an icon for her generation. Keegan represented the millennial perspective on friendship, dating, and life in her honest and reflective essays and stories.

Flavors of Friendship

Zonya Brewton

“Flavors of Friendship” shares stories and poetry for the many friendships about special times, special places, love and loss. An encouraging and uplifting piece of literature that warms the soul and brings renewed appreciation for the myriad flavors of friendships in our lives. Zonya encourages us to appreciate all of our “flavors of friends” and to call on those friends based on what we need at the time. She stresses that like us, our friends are not perfect, but all add value to our lives. She also talks about our being ready to give of ourselves to our friends, as well.

Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close

Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman

Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman tell the story of their equally messy and life-affirming Big Friendship in this honest and hilarious book that chronicles their first decade in one another’s lives. As the hosts of the hit podcast Call Your Girlfriend, they’ve become known for frank and intimate conversations. In this book, they bring that energy to their own friendship—its joys and its pitfalls.

The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing

Bronnie Ware

A heartfelt retelling of how significant these regrets are and how we can positively address these issues while we still have the time. The Top Five Regrets of the Dying gives hope for a better world. It is a story told through sharing her inspiring and honest journey, which will leave you feeling kinder towards yourself and others, and more determined to live the life you are truly here to live.

Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong

Eric Barker

Several good points regarding friendship’s impact on one’s success are sprinkled throughout the book, and the Author’s blog has several great posts regarding friendship that are quoted or sourced throughout the AMOL friendship section. Blog: https://www.bakadesuyo.com/

Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization

Scott Barry Kaufman

A bold reimagining of Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs–and new insights for realizing your full potential and living your most creative, fulfilled, and connected life.

The 100 Simple Secrets of Happy People: What Scientists Have Learned and How You Can Use It

David Niven

Niven distills the scientific findings of over a thousand of the most important studies on happiness into easy-to-digest nuggets of advice. Each of the hundred practices is illustrated with a clear example and illuminated by a straightforward explanation of the science behind it to show you how to transform a ho-hum existence into a full and happy life.

Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing

Bronnie Ware

During the time she spent tending to those who were dying, Bronnie’s life was transformed. Later, she wrote an Internet blog post, outlining the most common regrets that the people she had cared for had expressed. The post gained so much momentum that it was viewed by more than three million readers worldwide in its first year. At the request of many, Bronnie subsequently wrote a book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, to share her story.

Friend of a Friend . . .: Understanding the Hidden Networks That Can Transform Your Life and Your Career

David Burkus

Based on entertaining case studies and scientific research, this practical and revelatory guide shares what the best networkers really do. Forget the outdated advice you’ve already heard. Learn how to make use of the hidden networks you already have.

Mastermind Dinners

Jayson Gaignard

Entrepreneur Jayson Gaignard attributes his success to hosting dinner parties as a way of networking and making deeper connections. Meaningful personal connections are the core of any successful network, and the way to build them is to actually meet people – preferably in a comfortable, casual environment, like at a dinner. Use this book as a playbook to your successful network.

Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success

Adam Grant

Adam Grant, an award-winning researcher and Wharton’s highest-rated professor, examines the surprising forces that shape why some people rise to the top of the success ladder while others sink to the bottom. Praised by social scientists, business theorists, and corporate leaders, Give and Take opens up an approach to work, interactions, and productivity that is nothing short of revolutionary.

How to Win Friends & Influence People

Dale Carnegie

Dale Carnegie’s rock-solid, time-tested advice has carried countless people up the ladder of success in their business and personal lives. One of the most groundbreaking and timeless bestsellers of all time.

How to Win Friends and Influence People for Teen Girls

Donna Dale Carnegie

Donna Dale Carnegie, daughter of the late motivational author and teacher Dale Carnegie, brings her father’s time-tested, invaluable lessons to the newest generation of young women on their way to becoming savvy, self-assured friends and leaders. How to Win Friends and Influence People for Teen Girls offers concrete advice on teen topics such as peer pressure, gossip, and popularity. Teen girls will learn the most powerful ways to influence others, defuse arguments, admit mistakes, and make self-defining choices.

Messy Beautiful Friendship: Finding and Nurturing Deep and Lasting Relationships

Christine Hoover

(Religious context) Christine Hoover offers women a fresh, biblical vision for friendship that allows for the messiness of our lives and the realities of our schedules. Filled with biblical wisdom, practical advice and compelling personal stories.

Abide: A 21-Day Study on Friendship

Andrea Lebeau

(Religious context) Written by a reformed-Baptist and self-proclaimed former ‘mean girl’, we invite you to come sit with us at our table and learn with us as we dive deep into the life God has set before us.

Never Unfriended: The Secret to Finding & Keeping Lasting Friendships

Lisa-Jo Baker

(Religious context) Starting with that guarantee from the most faithful friend who ever lived—Jesus—this book is a step-by-step guide to friendships you can trust. It answers the questions that lurk under the surface of every friendship—What are we afraid of? What can’t we change? What can we change? And where do we start?—with personal stories and practical tips to help you make friends, and be the friend that lasts.

Friend-ish: Reclaiming Real Friendship in a Culture of Confusion

Kelly Needham

(Religious context) Bible teacher Kelly Needham debunks our world’s view of friendship and casts a biblical vision for friendship as God “meant it to be.”

Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know

Malcolm Gladwell

This book is less about friendship and more about understanding how we build trust and the tools and strategies we use to understand strangers. A gripping guidebook on how to master the art of talking to strangers.

Growing Friendships: A Kids’ Guide to Making and Keeping Friends

Dr. Eileen Kennedy-Moore and Christine McLaughlin

From psychologist and children’s friendships expert, Eileen Kennedy-Moore, and parenting and health writer, Christine McLaughlin, comes a social development primer that gives kids the answers they need to make and keep friends.

Happy Campers: 9 Summer Camp Secrets for Raising Kids Who Become Thriving Adults

Audrey Monke

Audrey “Sunshine” Monke, mother of five and camp owner-director, shares nine powerful parenting techniques (inspired by the research-based practices of summer camp) to help kids thrive and families become closer.

The Friendship Cure: Reconnecting in the Modern World

Kate Leaver

Her much-anticipated manifesto, The Friendship Cure, looks at what friendship means, how it can survive, why we need it, and what we can do to get the most from it. Why do some friendships last a lifetime, while others are only temporary? How do you “break up” with a toxic friend? How do you make friends as an adult? Can men and women really be platonic? What are the curative qualities of friendship, and how we can deploy friendship to actually live longer, better lives?From behavioral scientists to besties, Kate draws upon the extraordinary research from academics, scientists, and psychotherapists, and stories from friends of friends, strangers from the Internet, and her “squad” to get to the bottom of these and other facets of friendship.

The Mask of Masculinity: How Men Can Embrace Vulnerability, Create Strong Relationships, and Live Their Fullest Lives

Lewis Howes

Howes explores the various masks men tend to put on how to open up and embrace the journey of self-discovery and vulnerability.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Stephen Chbosky

The critically acclaimed debut novel from Stephen Chbosky, Perks follows observant “wallflower” Charlie as he charts a course through the strange world between adolescence and adulthood. First dates, family drama, and new friends. Sex, drugs, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Devastating loss, young love, and life on the fringes. Caught between trying to live his life and trying to run from it, Charlie must learn to navigate those wild and poignant roller-coaster days known as growing up.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower Official Trailer

Cat’s Eye

Margaret Atwood

Cat’s Eye is the story of Elaine Risley, a controversial painter who returns to Toronto, the city of her youth, for a retrospective of her art. Engulfed by vivid images of the past, she reminisces about a trio of girls who initiated her into the fierce politics of childhood and its secret world of friendship, longing, and betrayal.

Little Women

Louisa May Alcott

Little Women was originally published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869. It follows the lives of the four March sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy— from childhood to womanhood and is loosely based on the author and her three sisters. Although Little Women was a novel for girls, it differed notably from the current writings for children, especially girls.

The Interestings

Meg Wolitzer

The summer that Nixon resigns, six teenagers at a summer camp for the arts become inseparable. Decades later the bond remains powerful, but so much else has changed. In The Interestings, Wolitzer follows these characters from the height of youth through middle age, as their talents, fortunes, and degrees of satisfaction diverge.

The Group

Mary McCarthy

Mary McCarthy’s most celebrated novel follows the lives of eight Vassar graduates, known simply to their classmates as “the group.” Through the years, some of the friends grow apart and some become entangled in each other’s affairs, but all vow not to become like their mothers and fathers. It is only when one of them passes away that they all come back together again to mourn the loss of a friend, a confidante, and most importantly, a member of the group.

The Myth of You and Me

Leah Stewart

Searingly honest, beautiful, and full of fragile urgency, The Myth of You and Me is a celebration and portrait of a friendship that will appeal to anyone who still feels the absence of that first true friend.

Conversations with Friends

Sally Rooney

Written with gemlike precision and marked by a sly sense of humor, Conversations with Friends is wonderfully alive to the pleasures and dangers of youth, and the messy edges of female friendship.

A Little Life

Hanya Yanagihara

A Little Life follows four college classmates as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. Connected by their devotion to each other, Yanagihara explores the families we are born into and those we create for ourselves.

The Harry Potter Series

J.K. Rowling

“There are some things you can’t share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them.”

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001) Official Trailer

Bridge to Terabithia

Katherine Paterson

This beloved Newbery Medal-winning novel by bestselling author Katherine Paterson is a modern classic of friendship and loss.

Bridge to Terabithia – Trailer

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

Ann Brashares

Once there was a pair of pants. Just an ordinary pair of jeans. But these pants, the Traveling Pants, went on to do great things. This is the story of the four friends—Lena, Tibby, Bridget, and Carmen—who made it possible.

Looking for Alaska

John Green

Looking for Alaska brilliantly chronicles the indelible impact one life can have on another. A modern classic, this stunning debut marked #1 bestselling author John Green’s arrival as a groundbreaking new voice in contemporary fiction.

Charlotte’s Web

E.B. White

E.B. White’s Newbery Honor Book is a tender novel of friendship, love, life, and death that will continue to be enjoyed by generations to come.

Charlotte’s Web (2006) Trailer

Golden Compass

Philip Pullman​​

The modern fantasy classic that Entertainment Weekly named an “All-Time Greatest Novel” and Newsweek hailed as a “Top 100 Book of All Time.” Philip Pullman takes readers to a world where humans have animal familiars and where parallel universes are within reach.

The Golden Compass Trailer

Holes

Louis Sachar

Stanley Yelnats is under a curse. A curse that began with his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather and has since followed generations of Yelnatses. Now Stanley has been unjustly sent to a boys’ detention center, Camp Green Lake, where the boys build character by spending all day, every day digging holes exactly five feet wide and five feet deep. There is no lake at Camp Green Lake. But there are an awful lot of holes.

Holes Trailer

I Think I Am In Friend-Love With You

Yumi Sakugawa

A Collection of Comics About Friendship. What’s friend-love? It’s that super-awesome bond you share with someone who makes you happy every time you text each other, or meet up for an epic outing. It’s not love-love. You don’t want to swap saliva; you want to swap favorite books. But it’s just as intense and just as amazing.

My Friend is Sad

Mo Willems

Children’s Picture Book. Elephant Gerald is down in the dumps. Piggie is determined to cheer him up by dressing as a cowboy, a clown, and even a robot! But what does it take to make a sad elephant happy? The answer will make even pessimistic elephants smile.

Big Wolf & Little Wolf: A Tender Tale of Loneliness, Belonging, and How Friendship Transforms Us

Nadine Brun-Cosme | Olivier Tallec

Children’s Picture Book.A Tender Tale of Loneliness, Belonging, and How Friendship Transforms Us.

The Complete Tales and Poems of Winnie-the-Pooh

A.A. Milne | Ernest H. Shepard

Children’s stories and poems. Along with his young friend, Christopher Robin, Pooh delighted readers from the very beginning. His often befuddled perceptions and adorable insights won the hearts of everyone around him, including his close group of friends.

Calvin and Hobbes

Bill Watterson

A Collection of Comics. Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes has been a worldwide favorite since its introduction in 1985. The strip follows the richly imaginative adventures of Calvin and his trusty tiger, Hobbes. Whether a poignant look at serious family issues or a round of time-travel (with the aid of a well-labeled cardboard box), Calvin and Hobbes will astound and delight you.

I Like You

Stoddard Warburg | Jacqueline Chwast

Children’s Picture Book. This special book expresses the true meaning of friendship in a long list of ways with charming accompanying illustrations.

I Like You Read Aloud

Lobster Is the Best Medicine

Liz Climo

A Collection of Comics About Friendship. Comic artist Liz Climo captures the true spirit of friendship with this quirkily charming collection. Her animal kingdom is a place where sharks, otters, porcupines, and even crustaceans come together to show the best of what friends have to offer.

Strictly No Elephants

Lisa Mantchev | Taeeun Yoo

Children’s Picture Book. Today is Pet Club day. There will be cats and dogs and fish, but strictly no elephants are allowed. The Pet Club doesn’t understand that pets come in all shapes and sizes, just like friends. Now it is time for a boy and his tiny pet elephant to show them what it means to be a true friend.

Frog and Toad Series

Arnold Lobel

From writing letters to going swimming, telling stories to finding lost buttons, Frog and Toad are always there for each other—just as best friends should be.