Review of the Year: Top Books for Women
Gay’s the Word Christmas Books Guide – The Women’s Reading List
How To Be A Woman
Caitlin Moran
320 pages • Ebury Press • June, 2011 • £11.99 [PB]
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A new way of looking at feminism from one of our funniest writers.
“Spectacular! Very, very funny, moving and revealing” Jonathan Ross
“I have been waiting for this book my whole life” Claudia Winkleman
“I adore, admire and – more – am addicted to Caitlin Moran’s writing.” Nigella Lawson
“Moran’s writing sparkles with wit and warmth. Like the confidences of your smartest friend.” Simon Pegg
“Ever since I was eighteen I’ve wanted to be as cool as Caitlin Moran. Now this book has shown me how. Witty, wise and wonderful, this is an indispensable guide to Ladyhood. I laughed. I cried. I found out what my favourite writer calls her vagina.” Lauren Laverne
The Bees
Carol Ann Duffy
96 pages • Picador • July, 2011 • £14.99 [HB]
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‘Wonderful… Duffy is a poet alert to every sound and shape of language. Whether writing sonnets, eclogues, elegies or love songs, she is attuned to the hum of nature, angered by what humans are doing to it, in awe of what two hearts can feel.’ Mark Sanderson, Sunday Telegraph
‘Compassion and empathy are prevalent… Suffused with keen perception and insight, it’s a resonant collection taking in ecology, spirituality, politics, love and more. Duffy displays the breadth of her subject matter and talent throughout.’ Big Issue
The Bees is Carol Ann Duffy’s first collection of new poems as Poet Laureate, and the much-anticipated successor to the T. S. Eliot Prize-winning Rapture. After the intimate focus of the earlier book, The Bees finds Duffy using her full poetic range: there are drinking songs, love poems, poems to the weather, poems of political anger; her celebrated ‘Last Post’ (written for the last surviving soldiers to fight in the First World War) showed that powerful public poetry still has a central place in our culture. There are elegies, too, for beloved friends, and – most movingly – the poet’s own mother. As Duffy’s voice rises in this collection, her music intensifies, and every poem patterns itself into song.
Woven and weaving through the book is its presiding spirit: the bee. Sometimes the bee is Duffy’s subject, sometimes it strays into the poem, or hovers at its edge – and the reader soon begins to anticipate its appearance. In the end, Duffy’s point is clear: the bee symbolizes what we have left of grace in the world, and what is most precious and necessary for us to protect. The Bees is a work of great ecological and spiritual power, and Duffy’s clearest affirmation yet of her belief in the poem as ‘secular prayer’, as the means by which we remind ourselves what is most worthy of our attention and concern, our passion and our praise.
Seriously…I’m Kidding
Ellen DeGeneres
256 pages • Grand Central Publishing • November, 2011 • £11.99
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The much-loved entertainer opens up about her personal life, her talk show, and joining the judges’ table of American Idol. DeGeneres has hosted both the Academy Awards and the Primetime Emmys. As a film actress, she starred in Mr. Wrong, appeared in EDtv and The Love Letter, and provided the voice of Dory in the Disney-Pixar animated film Finding Nemo, for which she awarded a Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress, the first and only time a voice acting won a Saturn Award. She also starred in two television sitcoms, Ellen from 1994 to 1998 and The Ellen Show from 2001 to 2002. She has won twelve Emmys and numerous awards for her work and charitable efforts.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Jeanette Winterson
240 pages • Jonathan Cape • October, 2011 • £14.99 [HB]
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`Vivid, unpredictable, and sometimes mind-rattling memoir… This book… which had been funny enough to make me laugh out loud more times than is advisable on the No 12 bus – turns into something raw and unnerving’ Julie Myerson, Observer
`This is certainly the most moving book of Winterson’s I have ever read… but it wriggles with humour… At one point I was crying so much I had tears in my ears. There is much here that is impressive, but what I find most unusual about it is the way it deepens one’s sympathy, for everyone involved’ –Zoe Williams, Guardian
`In the 26 years since the publication of her highly acclaimed first novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson has proved herself a writer of startling invention, originality and style. Her combination of the magical and the earthy, the rapturous and the matter-of-fact, is unique. It is a strange and felicitous gift, as if the best of Gabriel Garcia Marquez was combined with the best of Alan Bennett… This remarkable account is, among other things, a powerful argument for reading… This memoir is brave and beautiful, a testament to the forces of intelligence, heart and imagination. It is a marvellous book and generous one’ –Cressida Connolly, Speactator
`Both inspiring and appalling, its cruellest details only made digestible by the restrained elegance of Winterson’s prose’ –Fiona Sturges, Independent on Sunday
The shocking, heart-breaking – and often very funny – true story behind Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.
Happy Accidents
Jane Lynch
224 pages • Fourth Estate • September, 2011 • £18.99 [HB]
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`A blow-by-blow dry account of how a bubble-permed boozer from Illinois cleaned up her act to become one of the hottest names in Hollywood.’ Sunday Telegraph
This is the hilarious and inspiring story of how Jane Lynch changed from a real-life Sue Sylvester to the happy and fulfilled actress she is today.
In 1974, a fourteen-year-old girl in Dolton, Illinois, had a dream. A dream to become an actress, like her idols Ron Howard and Vicki Lawrence. But it was a long way from the South Side of Chicago to Hollywood, and it didn’t help that she’d recently dropped out of the school play, The Ugly Duckling.
But the funny thing is, it all came true. Through a series of happy accidents, Jane Lynch created an improbable – and hilarious – path to success. In those early years, despite her dreams, she was also consumed with anxiety, feeling out of place in both her body and her family. To deal with her worries about her sexuality, she escaped in positive ways – such as joining a high school chorus not unlike the one in Glee – but also found destructive outlets. She started drinking almost every night her freshman year of high school and developed a mean and judgmental streak that turned her into someone similar to her on-screen nemesis, Sue Sylvester.
Then, at thirty-one, she started to get her life together. She was finally able to embrace her sexuality, come out to her parents, and quit drinking for good. Soon after, a Frosted Flakes commercial and a chance meeting in a coffee shop led to a role in the Christopher Guest movie Best in Show, which helped her get cast in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Similar coincidences led to roles in movies starring Will Ferrell, Paul Rudd, and even Meryl Streep in 2009’s Julie & Julia. Then, of course, came the two lucky accidents that truly changed her life. Getting lost in a hotel led to an introduction to her future wife, Lara. Then, a series she’d signed up for was abruptly cancelled, making it possible for her to take the role of Sue Sylvester in Glee, which made her a megastar.
Today, Jane Lynch has finally found the contentment she thought she’d never have. Part comic memoir and a story of real-life luck, this is a book equally for the rabid Glee fan and for anyone who needs a new perspective on life, love, and success.
Ash
Malinda Lo
304 pages • Hodder • June, 2011 • £5.99 [PB]
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In the world of Ash, fairies are an older race of people who walk the line between life and death, reality and magic. As orphaned Ash grows up, a servant in her stepmother’s home, she begans to realise that her beloved mother, Elinor was very much in tune with these underworld folk, and that she herself has the power to see them too. Against the sheer misery of her stepmother’s cruelty, greed and ambition in preparing her two charmless daughters for presentation at court, and hopefully Royal or aristocratic marriage, Ash befriends one of these fairies-a mysterious, handsome man-who grants her wishes and restores hope to Ash’s existence, even though she knows there will be a price to pay. But most important of all, she also meets Kaisa, a huntress employed by the king, and it is Kaisa who truly awakens Ash’s desires for both love and self-respect…Ash escapes a life with her grim and self-serving stepmother and finds her beloved one…
Ash is a fairy tale about possibility and recognizing the opportunities for change. From the deepest grief comes the chance for transformation. This is teen fiction that will entrance adult readers.
Red Dust Road
Jackie Kay
304 pages • Picador • March, 2011 • £8.99 [PB]
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Winner of Scottish Book of the Year 2011
‘Kay excels at any literary genre she turns her hand to – poetry, fiction, drama and now memoir. Yet, like the best memoirs, this one is written with novelist and poetic flair. Characters come alive with pitch-perfect speech, language is lyrically and imaginatively rendered, there is page-turning suspense. Even the structure defies expectation… Red Dust Road is a fantastic, probing and heart-warming read’ Independent
From the moment when, as a little girl, she realizes that her skin is a different colour from that of her beloved mum and dad, to the tracing and finding of her birth parents, her Highland mother and Nigerian father, the journey that Jackie Kay undertakes in Red Dust Road is full of unexpected twists, turns and deep emotions.
In a book shining with warmth, humour and compassion, she discovers that inheritance is about much more than genes: that we are shaped by songs as much as by cells, and that our internal landscapes are as important as those through which we move.
Taking the reader from Glasgow to Lagos and beyond, Red Dust Road is revelatory, redemptive and courageous, unique in its voice and universal in its reach. It is a heart-stopping story of parents and siblings, friends and strangers, belonging and beliefs, biology and destiny, and love.
Wildthorn
Jane Eagland
368 pages • Picador • March, 2011 • £6.99 [PB]
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Jane Eagland’s Wildthorn, a historical romance set in Victorian England, won the 23rd Lambda Literary Awards in the children’s and young adult category, an honor given annually by the U.S.-based Lambda Literary Foundation to works that celebrate or explore LGBT themes.
Seventeen-year-old Louisa Cosgrove longs to break free from her respectable life as a Victorian doctor’s daughter. But her dreams become a nightmare when Louisa is sent to Wildthorn Hall: labelled a lunatic, deprived of her liberty and even her real name. As she unravels the betrayals that led to her incarceration, she realizes there are many kinds of prison. She must be honest with herself – and others – in order to be set free. And love may be the key . . .
You
Joanna Briscoe
368 pages • Bloomsbury • July, 2011 • £11.99
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From the best-selling author of Sleep With Me.
`A meditation on the lengths we will go to for love … Briscoe is a lushly evocative writer … beguilingly good.’ Observer
Cecilia is obsessively in love with her teacher, the older, married Mr. Dahl. She plots and speculates, yet she never guesses that what she dreams of could actually happen. Is it her imagination, or is the high-minded Mr. Dahl responding to her? Cecilia’s mother Dora wants the good life. She and her husband moved to Dartmoor so their children could run wild, free to make their own choices and mistakes. But Dora discovers that there is more to the countryside idyll, and indeed to her own marriage, than she assumed, when she finds herself fascinated by the very last, the very worst person she could fall for: the elegant and dangerous Elisabeth Dahl. Now, after twenty years, Cecilia is coming home, to face Dora, and to face her past. But the excitement and pain she had thought were buried cannot be buried. The past is a dangerous place. You, the unnerving and exceptional new novel from Joanna Briscoe, is a stunning story of sex, memory and family lies.
Virginia Woolf
Alexandra Harris
192 pages • Thames & Hudson • September, 2011 • £14.95 [HB]
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New book from the winner of the Guardian First Book Award.
`Harris’s [book] is a pencil sketch in clear brisk lines. As an introduction to Woolf, Harris’s study will do very well: she writes beautifully, with an eye for lucid detail, and is for the most part in firm command of her material’ Sunday Times
`The critical evaluations of Woolf’s novels are elegant and searching; the analysis of Orlando is especially acute … an ideal introduction’ Financial Times
Alexandra Harris’s hugely acclaimed book Romantic Moderns (winner of the 2010 Guardian First Book Award) overturned our picture of modernist culture during the interwar years. In this, her second book, she brings her attention to one of the towering figures of literary modernism. It is an intensely pleasurable read that weaves together the life and work of Virginia Woolf, and serves as an ideal introduction to both. Following the chronology of Woolfs life, it considers each of the novels in context, gives due prominence to her dazzlingly inventive essays, traces the contentious course of her afterlife and shows why, seventy years after her death, Virginia Woolf continues to haunt and inspire us
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