This Women's History Month, we're turning the spotlight onto remarkable women writers whose work deserves to be read, shared and rediscovered. From overlooked pioneers to once-famous voices ready for a new generation, these are the authors who shaped literary history and still speak powerfully to readers today.
Consider this your invitation to revisit the classics and discover the brilliance that's been waiting on the shelf all along.
The great unsung voice of Irish fictio n
Mary Lavin’s stories feature ordinary people in the tight confines of ordinary life. From rural Ireland and the streets of Dublin they charm, irritate and intrigue in complicated brilliance, appearing to us with unique freshness. Good friendships, bad deeds, frustrations, missteps, hope and laughter are all found in captivating stories where real and astonishing things happen.
The master of speculative psychological unease
Deeply unnerving and utterly original - the book you will need to talk about.
A writer decides to write her next book about a female author and artist unjustly forgotten by history. But what starts as an exciting research project rapidly unravels towards breakdown and horror.
An icon of courage, glamour and resistance
Funny, candid and unconventional: the wildly famous but elusive Josephine Baker tells her own story in this enchanting memoir.
Formed from a series of conversations with the French journalist Marcel Sauvage over a period of more than twenty years, and now translated into English for the first time, this gorgeous book offers an insight into one of the most beguiling figures of the twentieth century.
Dysptian novels by literary iconoclasts
Deep underground, thirty-nine women are kept in isolation in a cage. Above ground, a world awaits. Has it been abandoned? Devastated by a virus?
Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only vague recollection of their lives before. But, as the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl - the fortieth prisoner - sits alone an outcast in the corner.
Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground. The woman who will never know men.
A woman's weekend away in the Austrian mountains takes an inexplicable and sinister turn - and becomes a fight for survival.
This is at once a simple account of potatoes and beans, of hoping for a calf, of counting matches, of forgetting the taste of sugar and the use of one's name, and simultaneously a disturbing dissection of the place of human beings in the natural world.
The finest woman writer of the uncanny
In a quiet medieval city, alone in his shadowy chambers, Dirk Renswoude worships the devil. Then the wind brings the young scholar Theirry to his door. Could this beautiful man share his dark obsession? Under a hushed midnight sky, the pair swear themselves to the black arts, and to one another.
Yet Dirk shies away at the slightest touch. He will not discuss his past. As the duo hex their way across moonlit woodlands and learned cities, it becomes clear that Dirk will stop at nothing to live the life he desires, while concealing one precious secret.