01 December 2021
The countdown to Christmas has begun! Whether you’re shopping for a friend who loves their feminist fiction or a family member who is obsessed with trying out new recipes, we’ve curated a diverse selection of reads so that you can say ‘bye’ to any and all Christmas shopping panicking.
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PASSING: TAKING NETFLIX BY STORM
Get your family and friends this favourite taking the world – and Netflix – by storm. Now a major film starring Tessa Thompson, Ruth Negga and Alexander Skarsgård, Passing by Nella Larsen is a story about childhood friends Claire and Irene. Both are light-skinned enough to pass as white, but only one of them has chosen to cross the colour line and live with the secret hanging over her.
IN THE DREAM HOUSE
‘Ravishingly beautiful’ Observer
‘Excruciatingly honest and yet vibrantly creative’ Irish Times
‘Provocative and rich’ Economist
‘Daring, chilling, and unlike anything else you’ve ever read’ Esquire
‘An absolute must-read’ Stylist
In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing experience with a charismatic but volatile woman, this is a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse.
BASICALLY, ALL OF THE GAITSKILLS
Spend this holiday season with the one and only Mary Gaitskill. Lovers of essays will devour Oppositions, a collection of provocative and searchingly analytical writing. If you’re into fiction, This is Pleasure is also a masterful fictional contribution to the #MeToo debate.
IF YOU LOVED SQUID GAME
We all watched Squid Game, right? Looking for another riveting story that focuses on power, corruption as well as critiques the capitalist system? Well, look no further. The Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-Eun is a satirical Korean eco-thriller with a fierce feminist sensibility.
Yona has been stuck behind a desk for years working as a programming coordinator for Jungle, a travel company specialising in package holidays to destinations ravaged by disaster. When a senior colleague touches her inappropriately she tries to complain, and in an attempt to bury her allegations, the company make her an attractive proposition: a free ticket for one of their most sought-after trips, to the desert island of Mui.
She accepts the offer and travels to the remote island, where the major attraction is a supposedly-dramatic sinkhole. Yona realises that the company has dangerous plans to fabricate an environmental catastrophe to make the trip more interesting, but when she tries to raise the alarm, she discovers she has put her own life in danger.
DETRANSITION, BABY: AN IRRESISTIBLE READ
Longlisted for the Women’s Prize 2021 and Top Ten The Times Bestseller, Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters is a uniquely trans take on love, motherhood, and those exes who you just can’t quit.
This phenomenal book is for anyone who wants to get lost in a page-turner – think a ‘modern Sex and the City’. We promise you, once you start reading this, you’re gonna wish for that first-read butterflies all over again.
COOK AS YOU ARE: REAL-LIFE RECIPES
If the home cook in your life is on a quest for new recipes, they’ll be in great hands with Ruby Tandoh’s new book. Cook As You Are is for all of us – the real home cooks, juggling babies or long commutes, who might have limited resources and limited time. From last-minute inspiration to delicious meals for one, easy one-pot dinners to no-chop recipes for when life keeps your hands full.
ALL OF YOU, EVERY SINGLE ONE
All of You, Every Single One by Beatrice Hitchman is an exhilarating queer love story set in early twentieth-century Vienna.
‘I know,’ he says, ‘too much. You’ll learn to be too much, too.’ Then, gently, ‘I think it might help.’
When Julia flees her unhappy marriage for the handsome tailor Eve Perret, she expects her life from now on will be a challenge, not least because the year is 1911. They leave everything behind to settle in Vienna, but their happiness is increasingly diminished by Julia’s longing for a child.
Ada Bauer’s wealthy industrialist family have sent her to Dr Freud in the hope that he can fix her mutism and do so without a scandal. But help will soon come for Ada from an unexpected quarter and change many lives irrevocably.
All of You Every Single One is an epic novel about family, freedom and how true love might survive impossible odds.
LIBERTIE
‘A soaring exploration of what “freedom” truly means … an elegantly layered, beautifully rendered tour de force that is not to be missed’ Roxane Gay
With rave reviews from Roxane Gay and a Times Book of the Month, Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge is a book about what freedom actually means – and where to find it.
LOSE YOUR MOTHER
From Saidiya Hartman comes a profound and harrowing meditation by a descendant of slaves who journeyed to Africa to understand her past.
The slave, Saidiya Hartman observes, is a stranger torn from family, home, and country. To lose your mother is to be severed from your kin, to forget your past, and to inhabit the world as an outsider. In Lose Your Mother, Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana.
There are no known survivors of Hartman’s lineage, no relatives to find. She is a stranger in search of strangers, and this fact leads her into intimate engagements with the people she encounters along the way, and with figures from the past, vividly dramatising the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and American history.
SEA CHANGE: FOR THE HISTORY BUFFS
‘Unsettling and strange, Sea Change, cements Nathan’s reputation as one of our most interesting historical novelists.’ The Times
From acclaimed author of The Warlow Experiment, Sea Change by Alix Nathan is the moving story of a mother and daughter separated in Regency England.
FOR PROFANE AND OPINIONATED WOMEN EVERYWHERE
Essex Girls are disreputable, disrespectful and disobedient. They speak out of turn, too loudly and too often, in an accent irritating to the ruling classes. 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? Essex Girls by Sarah Perry is the ultimate gift for opinionated women everywhere.