The Women

The Women is a historical novel by the American writer Kristin Hannah, published by St. Martin's Press in 2024. It reached number one on the New York Times fiction bestseller list, and Hannah has said she first had the idea for it about twenty years before it appeared.

The novel follows Frances McGrath, known as Frankie, from a sheltered upbringing in Southern California into the Army Nurse Corps and a tour in Vietnam. She arrives believing in the work and finds hospitals full of casualties, friendships that hold her together, and a war that is not described to the people at home the way she has seen it. When she returns, she meets a country that is hostile to the veterans of that war and unwilling to accept that women served in it at all, and the second half of the book is about what that does to her. Hannah builds the story out of a nurse's daily working life rather than the politics of the conflict.

The novel was written after several of Hannah's previous books, including The Nightingale, established her interest in women's experience of war, and it names the corps and the period rather than inventing an alternative history.