If you want practical help with adult friendship, start with Platonic by Marisa G. Franco, a psychology-informed guide built around attachment styles. If you want to understand friendship through story, start with My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante's novel about two women whose bond runs from childhood in postwar Naples across their lives. Those two titles represent the first fork in the decision: do you need something to act on, or something to feel your way through?
How These Picks Were Chosen
"Best" is doing loose work in most friendship book lists. A novel that makes you cry and a self-help book that offers a worksheet are solving different problems, and no supplied source ranks them against each other on a shared measure.
The titles below are judged on four criteria: whether the book addresses adult friendship specifically or treats it as a side theme, whether it offers something you can apply or something worth reflecting on, how readable it is for a general audience, and whether it is fiction or nonfiction. Popularity appears nowhere in that list. The lists and reviews these picks come from describe and recommend books but do not test them, so treat every description here as a description, not a verdict.
Nonfiction Picks
Platonic: How Understanding Your Attachment Style Can Help You Make and Keep Friends
Marisa G. Franco is described as a psychology professor at the University of Maryland. The book uses attachment theory, distinguishing secure, anxious and avoidant styles, to help readers recognize both their own friendship patterns and those of the people close to them. One review notes that Franco blends research, insight and personal anecdotes into accessible advice.
Best for: readers who want a framework they can apply to patterns they keep repeating. Limitation: the strong account of its approach comes from a single reader's review, and no friendship book of this kind is a guaranteed fix for loneliness.
Friendshipping
Jenn Bane and Trin Garritano frame their book as giving readers the tools to make new friends and revitalize the quality of existing friendships. That is the most explicitly how-to framing in this shortlist.
Best for: readers who want a friendly, lightly irreverent guide they can dip into. Limitation: the available description is brief, so how much the advice draws on research is not established.
Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close
Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman, hosts of the podcast Call Your Girlfriend, wrote this account of one long friendship. Book Riot describes it as an honest and loving look at how we appreciate the relationships built through friendship.
Best for: readers who prefer memoir-style reflection to instruction. Limitation: Book Riot describes it as an honest and loving view of appreciating friendship, not as a step-by-step method.
The Art of Showing Up
Rachel Miller argues that showing up for friends and for yourself can be the essential first step to building long-lasting relationships. It offers a single organizing principle rather than a full system.
Best for: readers who want one low-pressure idea to start with. Limitation: the scope and evidence base are not detailed in the available description.
The Friend Who Got Away
Edited by Jenny Offill, this essay collection gathers twenty women's accounts of friendships that blew up, burned out or faded away.
Best for: readers processing a friendship breakup or a friendship that quietly ended. Limitation: the collection is framed around friendships that blew up, burned out or faded away, so it addresses endings rather than building or maintaining friendships.
Fiction Picks
My Brilliant Friend
The first volume of the Neapolitan Novels follows Elena and Lila from childhood in postwar Naples. The friendship is marked by competition as much as closeness: Lenu, the narrator, spends much of her life afraid of and competing with the more casually delightful Lila.
Best for: fiction readers who want a female friendship rendered across a lifetime, with all its envy and loyalty intact. Limitation: no practical guidance, and emotionally demanding.
A Little Life
Hanya Yanagihara's novel follows four men, Willem, JB, Malcolm and Jude, who meet at college and remain bound together across decades of New York life, success and catastrophe.
Best for: readers prepared for intense, dark material about what friendship can and cannot sustain. Limitation: the most punishing read on this list; not a light introduction to the theme.
Spring Snow
Yukio Mishima's novel sets Kiyoaki Matsugae, a passionate and vain aristocrat, against his studious, diligent best friend Shigekuni Honda.
Best for: readers drawn to friendship as contrast, where each friend exposes what the other lacks. Limitation: a tragic, formal novel that some readers will find distant.
The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini's novel centers on Amir's failure to protect Hassan when it mattered most, and the decades-long reckoning that follows.
Best for: readers interested in friendship, betrayal and class set against Afghan history. Limitation: guilt and atonement dominate; this is not a comforting read.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Stephen Chbosky's novel depicts Charlie, an isolated fifteen-year-old, finding his first real friends in Sam and Patrick.
Best for: teen and adult readers exploring adolescent belonging. Limitation: young-adult focus; it is not about maintaining adult friendships.
A Man Called Ove
Fredrik Backman's novel shows a curmudgeonly man's life opened up by new neighbors, illustrating that others are what make us feel alive.
Best for: readers who want warmth and humor about connection in later life. Limitation: friendship is one theme among grief and community, not the book's subject.
Comparison Table
| Title | Type | Main Focus | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| Platonic | Nonfiction | Attachment styles applied to friendship | Readers wanting a practical framework |
| Friendshipping | Nonfiction | Tools for making and keeping friends | Readers wanting a how-to guide |
| Big Friendship | Nonfiction | One long friendship, reflected on | Memoir readers |
| The Art of Showing Up | Nonfiction | Showing up as a first step | Readers wanting one simple principle |
| The Friend Who Got Away | Nonfiction | Friendships that ended | Readers processing a friendship loss |
| My Brilliant Friend | Fiction | Competitive female friendship across a life | Literary fiction readers |
| A Little Life | Fiction | Four men bound across decades | Readers braced for dark material |
| Spring Snow | Fiction | Friendship of opposites | Readers drawn to contrast and tragedy |
| The Kite Runner | Fiction | Betrayal and reckoning | Readers interested in guilt and atonement |
| The Perks of Being a Wallflower | Fiction | Adolescent belonging | Teen and YA readers |
| A Man Called Ove | Fiction | Connection in later life | Readers wanting warmth and humor |
Which Type to Skip
Readers who want quick, actionable steps will find the novels slow and indirect, even when the friendship at their center is drawn with precision. If your goal is to change something about how you make or keep friends, a narrative will give you recognition, not instructions.
Readers who want to sit with a feeling, or who read to understand rather than to fix, will likely find the practical titles thin. The Friend Who Got Away is the exception in tone, since its essays dwell on loss rather than technique.
Two titles also fall outside the adult-friendship lane: The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a young-adult novel, and The One and Only Ivan, a children's book told from a captive gorilla's point of view about his unlikely friendships, is for younger readers and families rather than adults seeking guidance.
Limitations to Keep in Mind
A book can help you understand friendship. It cannot substitute for the friendships themselves, and no title on this list promises to. The practical titles vary in how much of their advice rests on research: Platonic is explicitly built on attachment theory, while others are described only by their framing. Popularity on a list is not evidence of quality.
Before buying, check the current edition, format and availability for the specific title you choose. None of that information is verified here. If your priority is a curated, expert-recommended view, novelist Emma Jane Unsworth's friendship reading list at Five Books is a useful companion: Five Books friendship recommendations. For a wider take on nonfiction, Book Riot's roundup is a reasonable place to browse: nonfiction books about friendship.
Conclusion
Match the book to the job. For a framework built on attachment theory, start with Platonic. For a how-to framed around tools for making and keeping friends, try Friendshipping. For reflection on a friendship you have lived through, Big Friendship offers an honest, loving view of appreciating friendship, while The Friend Who Got Away gathers essays on friendships that blew up, burned out or faded away. For literary depth, My Brilliant Friend follows Elena and Lila from childhood in postwar Naples, with A Little Life for four men bound across decades and Spring Snow for the friendship of Kiyoaki and Honda.
