The best books on women pushed to the edge

I inhaled this non-fiction book like a fever dream.

It pulled together the boiling cauldron of the #MeToo movement with such brilliance and clarity that I felt like Traister had taken me by the hand and flicked on the lights.

It also reframed female anger for me, as an emotion that society shames women for and that we have been conditioned to silence and dislike within ourselves.

That all may sound incendiary and to a point it is, but the book is also eminently readable, and I’ve handed it to many men, who’ve read it reluctantly but come back to tell me that it was life-changing for them too.

The distillation is that the playing field is still not level for the genders and that healthy female rage is a powerful and vital force.

"On some level, if not intellectual then animal, there has always been an understanding of the power of women's anger: that as an oppressed majority… women have long had within them the potential to rise up in fury, to take over a country in which they've never really been offered their fair or representative stake. Perhaps the reason that women's anger is so broadly denigrated—treated as so ugly, so alienating, and so irrational—is because we have known all along that with it came the explosive power to upturn the very systems that have sought to contain it."

"This book is about what happens when women are the storytellers too – when we speak from our authentic voices, when we flex our values, when we become protagonists in the tales we tell about what it is to be human."

I reference this wonderful, non-fiction book in my novel several times. Once when Odessa the main character sees it on her bookshelf.

Another time when Odessa talks about the shocking myth of Cassandra, who was given the gift of prophecy by Apollo but when she wouldn’t sleep with him he cursed her that no one would believe her.

And the third reference is at the end of my novel, Odessa’s dog bears Casandra as her mighty name. As an embodiment of all that will be listened to and believed. Cassandra Speaks had a profound impact on me as a woman, a mother, a sister, a human, and as a writer.

"The world would have been different - and better - if women had had an equal say in the development of literature, medicine, chemistry, physics, peace, and economics. Better, not because women are better, but because they are more than half of humanity, representing more than half of what it means to be human."

This Stella prize-winning novel is so mysterious, the ominous atmosphere shudders off the page.

It’s a modern-day parable about ten women who are abducted and held prisoner in the Australian desert. Gradually they realised the common thread between them is they’ve all been involved in a sex scandal with a powerful man.

Wood ingeniously takes to the patriarchy with a blow torch. It’s breathtakingly powerful. Reading the final line, I shut my eyes and my heart hurt. In a good way. 

"Would it be said they were abandoned or taken, the way people said a girl was attacked, a woman was raped, this femaleness always at the centre, as if womanhood itself were the cause of these things? As if the girls somehow, through the natural way of things, did it to themselves."

This mesmerised me and I still think about it often.

A daughter has taken her mother to Spain to see a doctor who they hope will be able to cure her from a mysterious physical paralysis. 

This is a throbbing sun-bleached, Mediterranean world, explorations of troubled familial bonds, of the nature of sexuality, an examination of exile, reminding me at times of Virginia Woolf in its interiority – and the writing is masterly: “My love for my mother is like an axe. It cuts very deep.”

A constellation of symbols scattered throughout with such a deft touch that it left me in love with Levy and wishing she was my friend in real life not just in the magic world of the written page.

This 19th-century story is all the things, with a saucy illicit undertow it explores identity, love, deception, and heredity.

It’s written in two halves, two voices of the women whose lives are intertwined and ultimately who fall in love. It challenges hetero-patriarchal norms of Victorian England and yes, it is another feminist novel but it’s also erotic, eminently readable, and with a totally satisfying and brilliantly crafted ending.

Fingersmith is an archaic term for a petty thief, but given the content of the story, it is evidently a double entendre. Waters is so clever it makes you want to clap. I burst with admiration whenever I read her. 

"I felt that thread that had come between us, tugging, tugging at my heart - so hard, it hurt me. A hundred times I almost rose, almost went in to her; a hundred times I thought, Go to her! Why are you waiting? Go back to her side! But every time, I thought of what would happen if I did. I knew that I couldn't lie beside her, without wanting to touch her. I couldn't have felt her breath upon my mouth, without wanting to kiss her. And I couldn't have kissed her, without wanting to save her."