Nicole Kidman's Favorite Books Make For An Emotional Reading List

"I can just read and read and read," Nicole Kidman once told W Magazine, calling books her ultimate refuge. "It's my place that I can go when I need friends ... more than cinema, more than television, more than any of those things, I've found through books." For the Oscar-winning actress, literature was the emotional training ground for everything that came after.

Growing up in Australia, Kidman tore through Enid Blyton's "Famous Five" and "Secret Seven" series, acting them out and falling in love with the art of storytelling.
"Anne of Green Gables" and "Paddington Bear" were early favorites, too, and that affection for Paddington never faded. "I went on and made 'Paddington' the film because I was so in love with Paddington Bear when I was little," she shared on the "Books, Beach, & Beyond" podcast.

As adolescence set in, so did a taste for heavier fare: the Brontës, Steinbeck, Dostoyevsky. Summers disappeared into the sprawl of Tolstoy, each book a new lesson in empathy. Eventually, that same devotion to the interior lives of characters became the foundation of her work as an actor.

Her reading list is not for the faint of heart. But if you, too, seek stories that leave a mark, you may find a kindred spirit in Kidman — and a few titles worth adding to your shelves.

"What is War and Peace?" — the Russian tome's author, Leo Tolstoy, once mused in an article about his work. "It is not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less an historical chronicle," he concluded. Whatever it is, one thing's certain: it's Nicole Kidman's favorite book, and, as she once revealed to Oprah.com, the reason she became an actor in the first place.

Though the novel's plot pivots on Napoleon's invasion of Russia, its true terrain is far more intimate. "War and Peace" spirals inward, becoming a philosophical, psychological, and spiritual audit of what it means to be human in the midst of chaos. Beneath the epaulettes and empire gowns lies a simmering story stirred by the daily devastations of love, guilt, hope, and history.

At over 1,200 pages, it admittedly demands a lot from its readers. What's more, it could qualify as one of the canon's most tragic classic books (because sometimes, you just need a good cry). But what Kidman likely responded to is the novel's astonishing emotional detail. It's in the hush between battles, the choreography of glances across a ballroom, the ache of unspoken words at a family dinner. It's what has continued to hold readers fast — year after year, and tear after tear — since its publication in 1868.

Before it became prestige television — complete with windswept coastlines and impeccable casting — "Big Little Lies" was a popular thriller book about the brutal interiority of women's lives. It first caught the attention of Reese Witherspoon, whose Hello Sunshine production company had been adapting books with strong female protagonists. When she passed it to Nicole Kidman, the two shared a meeting of minds. "We loved the book," she recalled on the "Books, Beach, & Beyond" podcast, "We just said, this is fantastic." So, over a cup of coffee in Sydney, Kidman sat down with author Liane Moriarty and asked for the rights, promising "one, we'll get it made and two, we'll honor everything you've written."

Moriarty's narrative orbits the familiar terrain of motherhood, marriage, and schoolyard warfare. But it quickly descends into murkier waters. Set against the golden veneer of Monterey, California, the novel ekes out through the lives of three women. The first is Madeleine, brassy and barbed, and still entangled in the emotional fallout of her ex-husband's new marriage. Then, there's Celeste, whose radiance and refinement belie the violence in her home. Jane, too, is a young and wary newcomer with a traumatic past and a son she's desperate to protect.

Playground politics ends with a body. Told with mordant wit and clear-eyed empathy, Moriarty delivers a domestic noir that uncomfortably peels away social niceties. Her women are complex and complicit, and exactly the kind of story Kidman was born to inhabit.

As an avowed admirer of Liane Moriarty, Nicole Kidman told InStyle that she was rereading the author's 2016 novel, "Truly Madly Guilty." Like "Big Little Lies," this one is also headed for the screen, with Kidman and Reese Witherspoon once again behind the adaptation. It's a natural continuation of their collaboration with Moriarty's particular brand of domestic unease and trademarked psychological precision.

The story appears innocuous at first: a last-minute invitation to a casual (albeit hastily arranged) barbecue amongst friends. There is no obvious disaster, but two months later, the gathering continues to cast a long shadow. Clementine, a cellist preparing for a high-stakes audition, and her husband Sam, newly unsettled by changes at work, are still caught in the event's undertow. Are other guests — Clementine's childhood friend Erika, her husband Oliver, and their flamboyant hosts Tiffany and Vid — similarly altered? They know something happened that day, but what?

Nicole Kidman may be one of Australia's most celebrated exports, but "The Fatal Shore" dismantles the country's sunlit narrative of national identity, returning us instead to a beginning of violence and deprivation.

In this monumental work of historical excavation, art critic and historian, Robert Hughes, chronicles the genesis of modern Australia as a meticulous act of imperial dispossession. With forensic intensity, Hughes traces the arc from Georgian Britain's festering slums and overflowing debtor's prisons to the long, punishing voyages that deposited society's most vulnerable into a vast and indifferent continent.

The book immerses readers in the machinery of empire at its most merciless, and Hughes rises as an often blisteringly eloquent anatomist of the social and political forces that made such cruelty systemic. His prose is rigorous and incantatory, producing what Kidman called on the "Books, Beach, & Beyond" podcast "a great book to read, by the way."

Nicole Kidman called "All Fours" riveting on the "Books, Beach, & Beyond" podcast — and if her instincts are anything to go by, you'll feel the same. Miranda July's 2024 novel is a bold, cerebral meditation on desire, motherhood, aging, and reinvention — all seen through the eyes of a 45-year-old artist at a personal and creative crossroads.

The protagonist — a semi-famous artist, wife, and mother — sets out from Los Angeles on a solo drive to New York, ostensibly to begin a new chapter. But not far into the trip, she impulsively veers off course, checking into a roadside motel in an unremarkable town, setting the stage for an unexpected journey of transformation.

Is it a midlife crisis? Or simply a midlife inquiry? The novel becomes a restless, intimate study of a woman reckoning with the scaffolding that holds her life up: domesticity, marriage, ambition, perimenopause, sex. Her narrator navigates it all with incisive wit and startling vulnerability.