Before I became a writer, I worked for a time in the violence against women sector, and I started to see how violence against women was normalised or sanctioned by a complex matrix of laws, norms, and ideas that stick to our society like a spider’s web. I wanted to do my part in unpicking the web—and for me, as a writer, that comes in the form of beginning to break down simplistic stories and archetypes about what women should be, and what they historically might have been, in favour of a liberated future where the true potential of half the human race can be dreamed of, and realised.
This is the book that, after three years of a long and often turgid English degree, made me fall back in love with reading. Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board – is there a better opening line in the English language? The novel tells the story of Janey, an African American woman in Florida in the 1920s, and her three husbands. A candidate for shaming and marginalisation if ever there was one. But Janey resists every constraint that society seeks to impose on her. I read this book whenever I need a good weep.
Cover design by Harlem renaissance artist Lois Mailou Jones
When Janie, at sixteen, is caught kissing shiftless Johnny Taylor, her grandmother swiftly marries her off to an old man with sixty acres. Janie endures two stifling marriages before meeting the man of her dreams, who offers not diamonds, but a packet of flowering seeds ...
'For me, THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD is one of the very greatest American novels of the 20th century. It is so lyrical it should be sentimental; it is so passionate it should be overwrought, but it is instead a rigorous, convincing and dazzling piece…
Simply the best historical novel that I have ever read. Grace, our anti heroine, is constantly cast into different roles—victim, ingenue, murderess. But who is she really? Atwood captures the fundamental elusiveness and complexity of this fascinating historical figure. This is a book that you will want to crawl inside and live within. I recommend it for a rainy weekend with no other plans, preferably while chain-drinking tea.
Sometimes I whisper it over to myself: Murderess. Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt along the floor.' Grace Marks. Female fiend? Femme fatale? Or weak and unwilling victim? Around the true story of one of the most enigmatic and notorious women of the 1840s, Margaret Atwood has created an extraordinarily potent tale of sexuality, cruelty and mystery.
'Brilliant... Atwood's prose is searching. So intimate it seems to be written on the skin' Hilary Mantel
'The outstanding novelist of our age' Sunday Times
The Bedfordshire Warlock is a speculative fiction novel that explores the concept of reincarnation with respect to the inheritance of supernatural powers and a quest to increase those powers to the level of god-like abilities.
The main character, Dorian Leeves, is the reincarnation of a 300-year-old warlock murdered during one…
A fascinating novel that depicts, in unsettlingly flat style, a historic gang-rape of a Palestinian woman by Israeli soldiers. Cut to the present day and a nameless, obsessive narrator becomes an amateur sleuth, preoccupied with understanding what took place. A brilliant meditation on memory, agency, and our relationship with history.
Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba - the catastrophe that led to the displacement and expulsion of more than 700,000 people - and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers capture and rape a young Palestinian woman, and kill and bury her in the sand. Many years later, a woman in Ramallah becomes fascinated to the point of obsession with this 'minor detail' of history. A haunting meditation on war, violence and memory, Minor Detail cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience…
Simply the finest literary achievement of the 21st century by my reckoning. I won’t pick just one of the books, and you can’t make me. The story of Lila and Lenu is a story of poverty, competition between two women, but it’s also the story of the last century. Ferrante is one of the finest observers of human behaviour that I’ve ever read, and I rudely neglected my loved ones when I was in the grip of these novels.
The complete four-volume boxed set of the New York Times–bestselling epic about hardship and female friendship in postwar Naples that has sold over five million copies.
Beginning with My Brilliant Friend, the four Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante follow Elena and Lila, from their rough-edged upbringing in Naples, Italy, not long after WWII, through the many stages of their lives―and along paths that diverge wildly. Sometimes they are separated by jealousy or hostility or physical distance, but the bond between them is unbreakable, for better or for worse.
This volume includes all four novels: My Brilliant Friend; The Story of…
Liveaboard sailor Cass Lynch thinks her big break has finally arrived when she blags her way into skippering a Viking longship for a Hollywood film. However, this means returning to the Shetland Islands, the place she fled as a teenager. When a corpse unexpectedly appears onboard the longship, she can…
I write about violence against women, because I think it’s important and overlooked. Toto Among the Murderers takes place in the north of England in the late 70s and early 80s, when the country was shadowed by the presence of multiple serial killers. It sounds dark, right? But this is a paen to young womanhood, to the fun and freedom that can be inhabited even within the constraints of a world that, too often, allows women to be harmed.
'Vividly portrays the human face of young women on the margins of society, women who defy being statistics, who have their own stories and loves to tell' Sophie Ward
WINNER OF THE PORTICO PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE OCKHAM AWARDS
It is 1973 and Jude - known to her friends as Toto - has just graduated from art school and moves into a house in a run-down part of Leeds. Jude is a chaotic wild child who flirts with the wrong kind of people, drinks too much and gets stoned too often. Never happy to stay in one place for very…
When Emily meets enigmatic and dazzling actress Tamsin, her life changes. Drawn into Tamsin's world of Soho living, boozy dinners, and cocktails at impossibly expensive bars, Emily's life shifts from black and white to technicolour and the two women become inseparable.
Tamsin is the friend Emily has always longed for; beautiful, fun, intelligent, and mysterious and soon Emily is neglecting her previous life—her work assisting vulnerable women, her old friend Lucy—to bask in her glow. But when a bombshell news article about a decades-old sexual assault case breaks, Emily realises that Tamsin has been hiding a secret about her own past. A secret that threatens to unravel everything...
Historical fiction inspired by the story of Mary Leakey, who carved her own path to become one of the world's most distinguished paleoanthropologists.
It's 1983 and seventeen-year-old Grace Clark has just lost her mother when she begrudgingly accompanies her estranged father to an archeological dig at Olduvai Gorge on the…
The Birthright of Sons is a collection of stories centered around the experiences of marginalized people, namely Black and LGBTQ+ men. Although the stories borrow elements from various genres (horror, suspense, romance, magical realism, etc.), they are linked by an exploration of identity and the ways personhood is shaped through…
