Fiction
Furies - Margaret Atwood
In this blazing cauldron of a book, fifteen bestselling, award-winning writers have taken up their pens and reclaimed these words, creating an entertaining and irresistible collection of feminist tales for our time.
Visit the Essex Library Service catalogue to view borrowing options
Oh Sister! - Jodie Chapman
Isobel and Jen have spent their entire lives following the rules - of their marriages, and their religion. But when Isobel's husband leaves her, and Jen goes through unimaginable trauma, the religion turns its back. Zelda has never done what's expected of her. Living on the outskirts of the community that she, Jen and Isobel were raised in, she's trying to find herself outside of the confines of the world she left behind. As the lives of these women become entangled, they each face an uncertain future. Will they find the courage to move forwards? Or will a lifetime of expectation prove too hard to escape.
Visit the Essex Library Service catalogue to view borrowing options
Bonnie Garmus - Lessons in Chemistry
Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing. But it's the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute take a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans, the lonely, brilliant, Nobel-prize nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with - of all things - her mind. True chemistry results. Like science, life is unpredictable. Which is why a few years later, Elizabeth Zott finds herself not only a single mother, but the reluctant star of America's most beloved cooking show, Supper at Six. Elizabeth's unusual approach to cooking ('combine one tablespoon acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride') proves revolutionary. But as her following grows, not everyone is happy. Because as it turns out, Elizabeth Zott isn't just teaching women to cook.
Visit the Essex Library Service catalogue to view borrowing options
Elodie Harper - The House with the Golden Door
Amara has escaped her life as a slave in the town's most notorious brothel, but now her existence depends on the affections of her patron: a man she might not know as well as she once thought. At night she dreams of the wolf den, still haunted by her past. Amara longs for the women she was forced to leave behind and worse, finds herself pursued by the man who once owned her. In order to be free, she will need to be as ruthless as he is. Amara knows her existence in Pompeii is subject to Venus, the goddess of love. Yet finding love may prove to be the most dangerous act of all.
Visit the Essex Library Service catalogue to view borrowing options
Emilia Hart- Weyward
Kate, 2019. Kate flees London - and her abusive partner - for Cumbria and Weyward Cottage, inherited from her great-aunt. There, a secret lurks in the bones of the house, hidden ever since the witch-hunts of the 17th century. Violet, 1942. Violet is more interested in collecting insects and climbing trees than in becoming a proper young lady. Until a chain of shocking events changes her life forever.
Visit the Essex Library Service catalogue to view borrowing options
Natalie Haynes – Stone Blind
Growing up with her sisters, Medusa quickly realises that she is the only one who gets older, experiences change, feels weakness. Her mortal lifespan gives her an urgency that her family will never know. When, in Athene's temple, desire pushes Poseidon to commit the unforgivable, Medusa's mortal life is changed forever. Athene, furious at the sacrilege committed, directs her revenge on Medusa. The punishment is that she is turned into a Gorgon: sharp teeth, snakes for hair, and a gaze that will turn any living creature to stone. Appalled by her own reflection, Medusa can no longer look upon anything she loves without destroying it. She condemns herself to a life of solitude in the shadows to limit her murderous range. That is, until Perseus embarks upon a fateful quest to fetch the head of a Gorgon. This is the story of how a young woman became a monster. And how she was never really a monster at all.
Visit the Essex Library Service catalogue to view borrowing options
Monica Heisey- Really good, actually
Maggie's marriage has ended just 608 days after it started, but she's fine - she's doing really good, actually. Sure, she's alone for the first time in her life, can't afford her rent and her obscure PhD is going nowhere but at the age of twenty-nine, Maggie is determined to embrace her new status as a Surprisingly Young Divorce. Soon she's taking up 'sadness hobbies' and getting back out there, sex-wise, oversharing in the group chat and drinking with her high-intensity new divorced friend Amy. As Maggie throws herself headlong into the chaos of her first year of divorce, she finds herself questioning everything, including: Why do we still get married? Did I fail before I even got started? How many Night Burgers until I'm happy?
Visit the Essex Library Service catalogue to view borrowing options
Andrea Levy – Small Island
Returning to England after the war Gilbert Joseph is treated very differently now that he is no longer in an RAF uniform. Joined by his wife Hortense, he rekindles a friendship with Queenie who takes in Jamaican lodgers. Can their dreams of a better life in England overcome the prejudice they face.
Visit the Essex Library Service catalogue to view borrowing options
Sophie Mackintosh- Cursed Bread
A chilling feminist fable, based on the true story of an unsolved historical mystery. Audacious and mesmerising, 'Cursed Bread' is a fevered confession, an entry into memory's hall of mirrors, a fable of obsession and transformation. Sophie Mackintosh spins a darkly gleaming tale of a town gripped by hysteria, envy like poison in the blood, and desire that burns and consumes.
Visit the Essex Library Service
Victoria Mas- The Mad Women’s Ball
The Salpetriere asylum, Paris, 1885. Dr Charcot holds all of Paris in thrall with his displays of hypnotism on women who have been deemed mad, hysterics, and been cast out from society. But the truth is much more complicated - these women are often simply inconvenient, unwanted wives, those who have lost something precious, or wayward daughters. For Parisian society, the highlight of the year is The Mad Women's Ball, when the great and good come to gawk at the patients of the Salpetriere dressed up in their finery for one night only. For the women themselves it is a rare moment of hope. Genevieve is a senior nurse - after the childhood death of her sister Blandine, she shunned religion and has placed her faith in Dr Charcot and science. But everything begins to change when she meets Eugenie, the 19 year old daughter of a bourgeois family who have locked her away in the asylum.
Visit the Essex Library Service catalogue to view borrowing options
Helen Paris- The Invisible Women’s Club
Janet Pimm is used to being invisible. 70 something, with her beloved allotment for company, she simply doesn't need anyone else. But when the local council threaten to close the allotments, Janet will do anything she can to try to save them - even enlisting the help of her irritatingly upbeat and interfering neighbour, Bev. As the two women set off on a journey together, Janet begins to realise that perhaps she isn't so happy to blend into the background after all. And that maybe there's more to Bev than she first thought. As the bulldozers roll in and they fight to save the place Janet loves most, both women find their voice again - no one can silence them now. A story of friendship, female lives post-menopause, community spirit and the importance of connection.
Visit the Essex Library Service catalogue to view borrowing options
Christine Pride and Jo Piazza- We are not like them
Not every story is black and white. Riley and Jen have been best friends since they were children, and they thought their bond was unbreakable. It never mattered to them that Riley is black and Jen is white. And then Jen's husband, a Philadelphia police officer, is involved in the shooting of an unarmed black teenager and everything changes in an instant. This one act could destroy more than just Riley and Jen's friendship. As their community takes sides, so must Jen and Riley, and for the first time in their lives the lifelong friends find themselves on opposing sides. But can anyone win a fight like this?
Visit the Essex Library Service catalogue to view borrowing options
Shoba Rao- Girls Burn Brighter
Poornima and Savitha, born in poverty, have known little kindness in their lives until they meet as teenagers. When an act of devastating cruelty drives Savitha away, Poornima leaves behind everything she has ever known to find her friend. Alternating between the girls' perspectives as they face apparently insurmountable obstacles on their travels through the darkest corners of India's underworld and across an ocean, 'Girls Burn Brighter' introduces two heroines who refuse to lose the hope that burns within.
Visit the Essex Library Service catalogue to view borrowing options
Jennifer Saint- Atalanta
When a daughter is born to the King of Arcadia, she brings only disappointment. Left exposed on a mountainside, the defenceless infant Atalanta is left to the mercy of a passing mother bear and raised alongside the cubs under the protective eye of the goddess Artemis. Swearing that she will prove her worth alongside the famed heroes of Greece, Atalanta leaves her forest to join Jason's band of Argonauts.
Visit the Essex Library Service catalogue to view borrowing options
Kamila Shamsie- Best of Friends
Fourteen-year-old Maryam and Zahra have always been the best of friends, despite their different backgrounds. Maryam takes for granted that she will stay in Karachi and inherit the family business; while Zahra keeps her desires secret, and dreams of escaping abroad. This year, 1988, anything seems possible for the girls; and for Pakistan, emerging from the darkness of dictatorship into a bright future under another young woman, Benazir Bhutto. But a snap decision at a party celebrating the return of democracy brings the girls' childhoods abruptly to an end. Its consequences will shape their futures in ways they cannot imagine.
Sisit the Essex Library Service catalogue to view borrowing options
Essex Authors
Margery Allingham – The Oaken Heart
Successful writer of the Campion crime novels, Margery Allingham was living quietly in the Essex village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy ("Auburn") when the Second World War broke out. Her house became an Air Raid Wardens’ post and a First Aid centre, and Allingham herself became responsible for 275 East London evacuees in a rural community of just over 600. She began The Oaken Heart in the autumn of 1940, to chronicle for her American friends what life was like as the bombs fell, and a German invasion was fully expected. Unsentimental yet personal and rich in detail, this is an evocative first-hand account of day-to-day realities in a small community upended and terrified of the future – like so many villages of the time.
Visit the Essex Library Service catalogue to view borrowing options
Jojo Moyes- Someone Else’s Shoes
Who are you when you are forced to walk in someone else's shoes? Nisha Cantor and Sam Kemp are two very different women. Nisha, 45, lives the globetrotting life of the seriously wealthy, until her husband inexplicably cuts her off entirely. She doesn't even have the shoes she was, until a moment ago, standing in. That's because Sam - 47, middle-aged, struggling to keep herself and her family afloat - has accidentally taken Nisha's gym bag.Now Nisha's got nothing. And Sam's walking tall with shoes that catch eyes - and give her a career an unexpected boost. Except Nisha wants her life back - and she'll start with her shoes.
Visit the Essex Library Service catalogue to view borrowing options
Syd Moore – Grand Illusion
Essex Libraries’ first Author in Residence, Syd Moore, is a bestselling novelist and activist. Her novels are mystery thrillers inspired by myths from the English county of Essex.
The Grand Illusion will be published in April 2024:
June 1940. As World War Two rages, Daphne Devine remains in London, performing each night as assistant to stage magician Jonty Trevelyan, aka the Grand Mystique.
Then the secret service call.
For, aware of Hitler’s belief in the occult, the war office has set up a hidden cohort to exploit this quirk in the enemy’s chain of command.
Daphne and Jonty find themselves far from the glitz and glamour of the theatre, deep inside the lower levels of Wormwood Scrubs prison. Here, they join secret ranks of occultists, surrealists, and other eccentrics co-opted to the war effort. There is one goal: to avert invasion on British shores.
Soon Daphne realises she must risk everything if there is any chance of saving her country.
Visit the Essex Library Service catalogue to view borrowing options
Sarah Perry – Essex Girls
Essex girls are disreputable, disrespectful and disobedient. They speak out of turn, too loudly and too often, in an irritating accent. Their bodies are hyper-sexualised and irredeemably vulgar. They are given to intricate and voluble squabbling. They do not apologise for any of this. And why should they? In this feminist defence of the Essex girl, Sarah Perry re-examines her relationship with her much maligned home county. She summons its most unquiet spirits, from Protestant martyr Rose Allin to the indomitable Abolitionist Anne Knight, sitting them alongside Audre Lorde, Kim Kardashian and Harriet Martineau, and showing us that the Essex girl is not bound by geography. She is a type, representing a very particular kind of female agency, and a very particular kind of disdain: she contains a multitude of women, and it is time to celebrate them.
Visit the Essex Library Service catalogue to view borrowing options
Laura Purcell – The Whispering Muse
The latest novel from Colchester author, Laura Purcell, centres on The Mercury Theatre in London's West End, where rumours are circulating of a curse. It is said that the lead actress Lilith has made a pact with Melpomene, the tragic muse of Greek mythology, to become the greatest actress to ever grace the stage. Suspicious of Lilith, the jealous wife of the theatre owner sends dresser Jenny to spy on her, and desperate for the money to help her family, Jenny agrees. What Jenny finds is a woman as astonishing in her performance as she is provocative in nature. On stage, it's as though Lilith is possessed by the characters she plays, yet off stage she is as tragic as the Muse who inspires her, and Jenny, sorry for her, befriends the troubled actress. But when strange events begin to take place around the theatre, Jenny wonders if the rumours are true, and fears that when the Muse comes calling for payment, the cost will be too high.
Visit the Essex Library Service catalogue to view borrowing options
Dorothy L Sayers – Gaudy Night
Despite her scandalous career, Harriet Vane has been summoned back to her old Oxford college. When she encounters obscene graffiti and poison pen letters, she thinks her worst fears have been fulfilled. But she is not the only target.
Visit the Essex Library Service catalogue to view borrowing options
Liz Trenow – Secrets of the Lake
Uprooted from London after the death of her mother, Molly, her father and younger brother Jimmy are starting again in a quiet village in the countryside of Colchester. As summer sets in, the heat is almost as oppressive as the village gossip. Molly dreams of becoming a journalist, finding a voice in the world, but most of the time must act as Jimmy's carer; he is Molly's shadow, following her around the village as she falls under the spell of local boy Kit. Kit is clever, funny and a natural-born rebel. Rowing on the waters of the lake with him becomes Molly's escape from domestic duty. But there is something Kit is not telling Molly. As the village gossip starts building up with whispers against Molly's father over missing church funds, everything Molly thought she knew is turned upside down.
Visit the Essex Library Service catalogue to view borrowing options
Kate Worsley – Fox Ash
Worn out by poverty, Lettie Radley and her miner husband Tommy grasp at the offer of their very own smallholding - part of a Government scheme to put the unemployed back to work on the land. Victoria Dutchman-smoth. As Lettie settles in, she finds an unexpected joy in the rhythms of life on the smallholding. She's hopeful that her past, and the terrible secret Tommy has come to Foxash to escape, are far behind them. But the Dells have their own secrets. And as the seasons change, and a man comes knocking at the gate, the scene is set for a terrible reckoning.
Visit the Essex Library Service catalogue to view borrowing options
Non-Fiction
Victoria Dutchman-smith – Hags
What is about about women in their forties and beyond that seems to enrage - almost everyone? In the last few years, as identity politics has taken hold, middle-aged women have found themselves talked and written about as morally inferior beings, the face of bigotry, entitlement and selfishness, to be ignored, pitied or abused. 'Hags' asks the question why these women are treated with such active disdain. Each chapter takes a different theme - care work, beauty, violence, political organization, sex - and explores it in relation to middle-aged women's beliefs, bodies and choices. Victoria Smith traces the attitudes she describes back to the same anxieties about older women that drove early modern witch hunts, and explores the very specific reasons why this type of misogyny is so powerful today.
Visit the Essex Library Service catalogue to view borrowing options
Florence Given - Women Don’t Owe You Pretty
Florence Given's debut book will explore all progressive corners of the feminist conversation; from insecurity projection and refusing to find comfort in other women's flaws, to deciding whether to date or dump them, all the way through to unpacking the male gaze and how it shapes our identity. 'Women Don't Owe You Pretty' is an accessible leap into feminism, for people at all stages of their journey who are seeking to reshape and transform the way they view themselves. In a world that tells women we're either not enough or too much, it's time we stop directing our anger and insecurities onto ourselves, and start fighting back to re-shape the toxic structures of our patriarchal society.
Visit the Essex Library Service catalogue to view borrowing options
Philippa Gregory: Normal Women
Not with the rise and fall of Kings and the occasional Queen - but through social and cultural transition, showing the agency, persistence and effectiveness of women in society. Through the stories of the soldiers, guild widows, highwaywomen, pirates, miners and ship owners, international traders, theatre runners and 'female husbands', 'Normal Women' will redefine 'normal' female behaviour to include heroism, rebellion, crime, treason, money-making, jousting and sainthood. And much rioting. Philippa Gregory has been working on this book for over ten years. It is the work of a lifetime from one of our greatest historical storytellers.
Visit the Essex Library Service catalogue to view borrowing options
Kelly Homes – Unique
In 2022, Dame Kelly came out publicly as being gay and revealed that for the first 52 years of her life she'd been living a LIFE OF FEAR. Now in a heart-rending and inspirational new memoir she tells of her journey from hiding her sexuality as a young soldier at a time when being gay in the military was illegal, to her fears of being outed as she stood on the podium at the Athens Olympics, the games which catapulted her to fame as a double-gold medallist.
Visit the Essex Library Service catalogue to view borrowing options
Nathania Holt - Wise Gals
In the wake of World War II, four agents were critical in helping build a new organisation now known as the CIA. Adelaide Hawkins, Mary Hutchison, Eloise Page, and Elizabeth Sudmeier, called the 'wise gals' by their male colleagues because of their sharp sense of humour and even quicker intelligence, they were not the stereotypical femme fatale of spy novels. They were smart, courageous, and groundbreaking agents at the top of their class, instrumental in both developing innovative tools for intelligence gathering - and insisting (in their own unique ways) that they receive the credit and pay their expertise deserved.
Visit the Essex Library Service catalogue to view borrowing options
Arwa Mahdawi- Strong Female Lead
Women have been taught to 'lean in' and act like men to get ahead. But as the financial, environmental, and social systems crumble, isn't it time we had a different plan? The first two decades of the 21st century have seen financial collapse, a global pandemic, the devastation of our environment and the disintegration of democracies. But while some at the top are telling us 'it is what is it', there's a new generation of leaders showing the world how to be better. They're building trust, investing wisely and acting decisively. And they've got one thing in common. In this book, Arwa Mahdawi investigates the qualities demonstrated by female leaders who show us how it's done, including original research and interviews.
Visit the Essex Library Service catalogue to view borrowing options
Kate Mosse - Warrior queens and quiet revolutionaries
A journey through history of the women who built the world, but whom the world forgot.
Visit the Essex Library Service catalogue to view borrowing options
Caroline Criado Perez- Invisible Women
Award-winning campaigner and writer Caroline Criado Perez shows us how, in a world largely built for and by men, we are systematically ignoring half the population. She exposes the gender data gap - a gap in our knowledge that is at the root of perpetual, systemic discrimination against women, and that has created a pervasive but invisible bias with a profound effect on women's lives. Caroline brings together for the first time an impressive range of case studies, stories and new research from across the world that illustrate the hidden ways in which women are excluded from the very building blocks of the world we live in, and the impact this has on their health and wellbeing.
Visit the Essex Library Service catalogue to view borrowing options
Britney Spears -The woman in me
In June 2021, the whole world was listening as Britney Spears spoke in open court. The impact of sharing her voice - her truth - was undeniable, and it changed the course of her life and the lives of countless others. She reveals for the first time her incredible journey - and the strength at the core of one of the greatest performers in pop music history. Written with remarkable candour and humour, Spears's groundbreaking book illuminates the enduring power of music and love - and the importance of a woman telling her own story, on her own terms, at last.
Visit the Essex Library Service catalogue to view borrowing options
Sarina Wiegman - What it Takes
As FIFA's most decorated female football manager and a former player, Sarina Wiegman has led both the Netherlands and England women's national teams to historic victories. She stands out as a true pioneer in the game, and her coaching philosophy has earned her a reputation as one of the most successful coaches in football history. This personal account of Sarina's life journey begins with her early passion for football, and covers her key moments on the pitch as well as her ascension to the top of the coaching world. Join Sarina as she talks us through her rollercoaster ride of victories and challenges, the tough decisions she had to make both on and off the pitch, and the relentless pursuit of excellence that saw her rise to become an indomitable figure in the world of sports.
Visit the Essex Library Service catalogue to view borrowing options