Dua Lipa’s Reading List: 10 Books From Her Literary World

Dua Lipa is one of the defining pop figures of her generation, a Grammy-winning artist whose influence now extends beyond music into fashion, film, publishing, and contemporary culture. In 2022, she launched Service95, a weekly newsletter and cultural platform covering books, travel, style, people, and ideas. A year later, she introduced the Service95 Book Club, where she selects a monthly read and often speaks with the author behind it.

Her reading list shows a clear interest in contemporary fiction, feminist writing, modern classics, and books that examine identity, love, class, memory, power, and personal freedom. These are ten books associated with Dua Lipa’s reading world:

WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING by Delia Owens is a coming-of-age novel set in the marshlands of North Carolina, centred on Kya, a girl who grows up isolated from society and later becomes connected to a local murder investigation. Its tension lies between nature, loneliness, survival, and the way communities create myths around women they do not understand.

Where the crawdads sing Delia Owens

SWIMMING IN THE DARK by Tomasz Jedrowski is set in early 1980s Poland and follows a love story between two young men during a period of political decline and social control. It is a novel about desire, secrecy, youth, and the moment when private feeling becomes impossible to separate from history.

Swimming in the Dark Tomasz Jedrowski

A LITTLE LIFE by Hanya Yanagihara is a long, emotionally demanding novel about four college friends who move to New York and build their adult lives around ambition, friendship, success, dependence, and pain. At its centre is Jude, whose past slowly shapes the emotional architecture of the book.

A little life Hanya Yanagihara

NEVER LET ME GO by Kazuo Ishiguro begins like a quiet boarding-school memory and gradually reveals a darker world beneath it. Through Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy, the novel becomes a restrained meditation on love, friendship, memory, and what it means to be human when life has already been defined by others.

Never Let Me Go  Kazuo Ishiguro

ON EARTH WE’RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS by Ocean Vuong is written as a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read it. The novel moves through family history, migration, first love, language, and inherited trauma. It is intimate and fragmented, closer to memory than to a traditional linear narrative.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous  Ocean Vuong

MY BRILLIANT FRIEND by Elena Ferrante, the first novel in the Neapolitan series, follows Elena and Lila from childhood in 1950s Naples. It is a sharp study of female friendship, rivalry, intelligence, class, and the emotional violence of growing up in a world with limited choices for women.

My Brilliant Friend Elena Ferrante

A FINE BALANCE by Rohinton Mistry is set in India in 1975, during a period of political crisis, and brings together four people from very different social backgrounds. Through their shared lives, Mistry writes about poverty, dignity, corruption, friendship, and survival without turning suffering into decoration.

A Fine Balance Rohinton Mistry

THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES by V, formerly Eve Ensler, is a landmark feminist text built from women’s voices and experiences. Its importance is not only literary or theatrical; it opened a public conversation around the female body, shame, safety, pleasure, violence, and autonomy in a direct and unapologetic way.

The Vagina Monologues Eve Ensler

NORMAL PEOPLE by Sally Rooney follows Connell and Marianne from school in the west of Ireland to university in Dublin, tracing the fragile power dynamics between them. The novel is less about romance in a simple sense and more about class, silence, intimacy, and the difficulty of being honest while still learning who you are.

Normal People  Sally Rooney

MEXICAN GOTHIC by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is set in 1950s Mexico and follows Noemí, a stylish young socialite who travels to an isolated mansion after receiving a disturbing message from her cousin. The novel uses gothic horror to explore family secrets, power, colonial inheritance, and the danger hidden inside old houses and old names.

Mexican gothic Silvia Moreno-Garcia