The best books about young women in big trouble

I have reread this novel several times since I discovered it in the 1990s, and it continues to surprise and thrill me. Smilla Jasperson is the most original heroine I’ve ever come across. Rude, tortured, brilliant, philosophical, strong, vulnerable—she is half Greenlandic Inuit/half Danish, and her heart has been broken by the loss of both mother and country. At the start of the novel it is broken again when a young, neglected boy, she’d finally allowed herself to love, dies. The authorities claim it’s accidental but Smilla immediately knows, because she understands snow, that he has been killed. The plot follows her investigation and extraction of justice—in all its raw violence. Smilla verges on the superheroic, but somehow Peter Høeg made me believe in her completely. 

I was recently drawn to this book because of its unusual central characters—two young women, Julie and Maddie, from very different backgrounds, who become friends during WW2. Both women are doing crucial work, not being the object of desire for a man, not competing with one another. I read it in one sitting. The ingenious structure starts with a ‘confession’ by SOE recruit Julie, written under torture by the Nazis in France, which reveals the depth of her friendship with Maddie, a pilot, supposedly just transporting planes for the RAF, who ends up hiding in occupied France trying to free her friend from the most appalling fate. I found it clever, moving, and unputdownable. Code Name Verity is marketed as YA but was quite graphic enough for this adult!

I know nearly nothing about the Far East—so was delighted to experience a taste of Japan through this compassionate, original novel told from the point of view of young American nurse, Diana, as she takes the job of nanny to the toddler Yuki, after divorce has forced Yuki’s mother from the family home. Immersed in a different culture, Diana feels confusion, fascination, and a growing love for Yuki. The tension builds as she begins to understand the real danger the child is in. Diana faces psychological peril as she tries to break the chain of damage for Yuki—and herself. As a mother of three, I often can’t bear child jeopardy in a plot, but the author’s intelligent writing is compelling and sensitive, not gratuitous. 

When I teach creative writing, I often use this excellent historical novel set in the USSR during WW2 as an example. There are scenes from this book seared into my memory—they are so powerful, visceral, and moving.. Helen Dunmore is able to put the reader in the centre of the most harrowing circumstances, where people are starving, freezing, and dying in the thousands, and yet allow us to care about the individual and feel uplifted by their struggle. In Leningrad, Anna has already lost her mother, who died giving birth to her baby brother, Kolya. During the brutal siege of 1941-44, Anna must somehow keep her young brother alive without losing her humanity. A story of one ordinary woman pushed to extraordinary bravery—representing so many.

This highly original spy thriller gripped me from the first page. It jumps between the 1970s and WW2, with locations in Britain, America, Paris, and Belgium. Ruth Gilmartin’s mother Sally, to all intents and purposes a sweet old lady living in a small English village, decides to reveal that she is in fact Eva Delectorskya, a Russian recruited by the British Secret Service, and she wants her daughter, a single mother teaching EFL, to help her find and take revenge on the double agent who sold her out decades before. The writing is tight and elegant, leaving lots of room for the big issues of motherhood, trust, treachery, and standing up to power.