“The main relationship in the book is a triangle. A woman writer has had this very long-term friendship with a problematic older male writer. At the beginning of the book, he commits suicide. He doesn’t leave a note, and the only instruction that he’s left is that he wants our narrator to take care of his Great Dane. Unfortunately, she’s in a tiny Manhattan apartment, and she’s not allowed to have a dog. The dog is in mourning for his master, and so is she. She and this dog are heartbroken. It’s a love triangle, a grief triangle, between the three of them. It becomes about her thinking about her friendship with this man who she knows has, quite unashamedly, slept with lots of his students. It was consensual, but there’s a power differential—he was a professor. He would say, ‘Teaching is erotic. This just happens.’ She confesses she actually slept with him too, but at the very beginning of their relationship. He’s had multiple wives and affairs…It’s a complicated book. It raises a lot of questions. I had lots of debates with my friends who’ve read it, about whether or not she lets the male writer get away with too much. You may see the dog on the cover and ask, ‘Is this a feminist novel?’ But yes, I would argue it is.” Read more...
The Best Feminist Books: 50 Years of Virago Press
Sarah Savitt, Publisher
“It’s about a girl named Nan who goes off to the Pantomime Theatre, which is on the South Coast of England, and sees a girl named Kitty, who is a male impersonator, on the stage and falls in love with her. You’re not sure if it’s a sexual love or a girlish crush but she does go off to London with her and it does turn into a love affair. They begin living together but it becomes complicated because they have to hide. Then Kitty falls in love with a man and Nan is heartbroken and goes off into this strange Edwardian underworld. She sets off as a male-impersonating prostitute for a little bit and goes off with men who think she is a boy, and it’s all very odd. She then gets taken in by an aristocratic woman who wants to keep her as a mistress. Finally, she ends up living with a family who are poor and hardworking and who are saving the underclass from themselves. At this point, all these lovers from her past come back and she has to choose. You feel she is going to go off with Kitty, but is she? What I like is Waters’s sense of being very true. I think she was writing a PhD about London theatre at the turn of the century and then thought, well, I should do something that people want to read. It’s a very complete world; you really feel that you are there and that all these things are happening and you don’t have a moment where you find it hard to suspend your disbelief.” Read more...
Vanora Bennett, Historical Novelist
Demon Copperhead
by Barbara Kingsolver
🏆 Winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
🏆 Winner of the 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction
“This is a real blockbuster of a novel with stunning energy, enormous humor, wit and sheer narrative drive. It’s a retelling of Dickens’s David Copperfield, from the title onwards. In fact, it follows Dickens’s plot fairly closely but Kingsolver moves the action to poor, rural Virginia, to the lives of country dwellers who in American culture have always been dismissed as hillbillies. In a way, it’s a great celebration and reclamation of that so-called hillbilly identity.
But it’s more than that because as the young hero Damon (or Demon) grows up, he becomes embroiled in one of the greatest social crises of contemporary America, which is opioid addiction. It becomes an issue-driven book, but the great disaster of mass addiction in his rural community never overwhelms his voice. It never dampens the wit and the sheer exuberance of the storytelling. In the end, it’s a book about some very, very dark social processes, but at the same time it’s still absolutely uplifting, exhilarating and enjoyable.”
“I’ve been to parts of Appalachia; I do a lot of library outreach. It’s dirt-poor. If you were transported there from New York or Atlanta, you would think you were in some sort of alternate universe, because the poverty is so extreme. The neglect, the drugs, and the opioid crisis—all of those are crimes. The kid in Demon Copperhead is in such a horrible situation that he’s taken away from his family…It’s his attitude that makes it so engaging. The book is dark, but it’s not overwhelmingly dark and horrible because he has such a great sense of humor.” Read more...
Crime Fiction and Social Justice
Karin Slaughter, Thriller and Crime Writer
The Marriage Portrait: A Novel
by Maggie O'Farrell & narrated by Genevieve Gaunt
☆ Shortlisted for the 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction
“I liked what Claire Allfree had to say about it in The Times: “So headily perfumed is her prose it works on the reader almost like a drug.” Sound good? Then I suspect this historical romance (of a kind) will work for you.” Cal Flyn in Notable Novels of Fall 2022
“O’Farrell’s novel is richly atmospheric and deeply researched, although she has altered some historical details for narrative effect. It met with a somewhat mixed critical reception on publication but has found a wide and largely appreciative fan base. If you enjoy lushly descriptive historical fiction, this will be the book for you.” Read more...
The 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction Shortlist
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“Fire Rush is set between London, Bristol, and Jamaica in the late 1970s and early 1980s, is written partly in patois, and brings readers into a world of gangsters, raves, and police brutality. It’s a novel with a strong sense of place, community, and musicality—one that is drawn from the author’s own experiences and took sixteen years to write.” Read more...
The 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction Shortlist
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“Written from the points of view of marine creatures, Pod is a creative, challenging, and quite literally immersive novel. One for open-minded readers with an interest in animal behaviour and writing from unusual perspectives.” Read more...
The 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction Shortlist
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“Morris’s debut novel is set during the Siege of Sarajevo—a four-year ordeal in which the city’s residents were trapped in their homes without heating, power, or clean water, and subjected to daily shelling and sniper fire. It’s been shortlisted for a number of other prizes, including the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize (for ‘evoking the spirit of a place’) and the Author’s Club best first novel award. Will suit fans of humane and literary war novels, such as Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong.“ Read more...
The 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction Shortlist
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“Trespasses, set in 1970s Northern Ireland, is Kennedy’s first novel and it has found considerable acclaim—garnering endorsements from the likes of Sarah Moss, Max Porter, and Nick Hornby. It follows a young, female teacher who falls for a married man as The Troubles tear their community apart. He’s a barrister, he tells her, but this is a place where it doesn’t matter what you do—it’s all about ‘what you are.’ They must keep their relationship a secret from everyone they know, for their own safety as much as for marital continuity. The New York Times called it ‘brilliant, beautiful, heartbreaking.’ Kennedy, who started writing fiction in her forties, previously published a well-regarded collection of formally inventive short stories, The End of the World is a Cul de Sac.“ Read more...
The 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction Shortlist
Cal Flyn, Journalist
