The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some.

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Shrill – Lindy West

Coming of age in a culture that demands women be as small, quiet, and compliant as possible–like a porcelain dove that will also have sex with you–writer and humorist Lindy West quickly discovered that she was anything but.

A Petrol Scented Spring – Ajay Close

Arabella Scott, suffragette and hunger striker, is held in solitary confinement for five weeks, force-fed by the prison doctor, Hugh Ferguson Watson. Two years later, his wife, Donella, is trapped in a sexless marriage with a man haunted by the past. What happened between the doctor and his prisoner patient? Fifty years on, Donella is still trying to find out. A Petrol Scented Spring is a riveting novel of repression, jealousy and love, and the struggle for women’s emancipation.

Only Ever Yours – Louise O’Neill

Only Ever Yours, Louise O’Neill

freida and isabel have been best friends their whole lives.
Now, aged sixteen and in their final year at the School, they expect to be selected as companions – wives to wealthy and powerful men. The alternative – life as a concubine – is too horrible to contemplate.
But as the intensity of the final year takes hold, the pressure to remain perfect becomes almost unbearable. isabel starts to self-destruct, putting her beauty – her only asset – in peril.
And then, the boys arrive, eager to choose a bride.
freida must fight for her future – even if it means betraying the best friend, the only love, she has ever known…

Book challenge #33: A book you started but never finished

A Room Of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf

“But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction – what has that got to do with a room of one’s own? I will try to explain.”

Book challenge #14: A mystery or thriller

The Hourglass Factory, Lucy Ribchester

Books-recommended-by-Chloe is a regular theme of my reading – she gave me this one at Christmas, too, as well as Warpaint. It’s been sitting on my bedside table ever since, picked up occasionally, read for a bit, then forgot about for a bit because it’s too hefty to carry on my commute. But I took it to Wales with me last week and, having finished Five Quarters of the Orange, I got stuck into it on the train home. Which was lucky, because there was an extremely irritating pair of people across the aisle from me, having an unnecessarily loud conversation about work. For two hours. No thankyou. But I digress.