It is a sensitive salute to the rarely acknowledged earlier generations of queer and trans people who refused to bury their sexual identities in shame and clothing. The term "psychological thriller" is more appropriate but at the same time really quite misleading, in that our central characters are never in any great danger beyond the hazards of spending time among problem kids who can turn violent on occasion. In “Harridan” by Linda Grant (3/5; ⚠ animal cruelty) revolves around an aging woman who relies on her own resourcefulness to get her own way. Her non-fiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth ­ in the Massey series, appeared in 2008, and her most recent novel, The Year of the Flood, in the autumn of 2009. Spitfire” by Ali Smith (4/5) is nostalgic in tone and delves into a daughter’s memories of her mother who once served in WAAF during WWII.

About the Author: Margaret Atwood is the author of more than forty works, including fiction, poetry and critical essays, and her books have been published in over thirty-five countries. Churail” by Kamila Shamsie - pakistāniešu folklorā balstīts maģiskā reālisma stāsts, kurā tēvs mēgina aizbēgt uz Londonu no būtnes, par ko varētu pārvērtusies mirusī sieva (bet vai saknes ir iespējams nogriezt? Wench and Hussy deny women’s rights to free sexuality; Spitfire and She-Devil try to force them into quietness and acceptance; Muckraker and Harridan imply nastiness.is a deeply empathetic, completely unsentimental account of a woman trying to make her way around the world. Her novels are Room , The Sealed Letter , Landing , Life Mask , Slammerkin , Hood and Stir-fry ; short-story collections Astray , Three and a Half Deaths (UK ebook), Touchy Subjects , The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits , and Kissing the Witch ; and literary history including Inseparable , We Are Michael Field , and Passions Between Women as well as two anthologies that span the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Also loved the story by my talented friend Claire Kohda about a 'Tiger Mum', and various (Rachel Seiffart, Chibundu Onuzu) using true historical stories of women's protests. She is the author of more than thirty-five volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and non-fiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid's Tale (1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. She decides to teach her class of problematic fifteen-year-olds about Greek drama and in a series of distinctly improbable conversations that takes up most of the first hundred pages, they discuss plays plays by Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides.

Instead, Haynes used the plot of Alex, a theatre director, teaching juvenile delinquents about Greek drama as a way to ask whether certain themes and issues addressed in Greek drama are still relevant today and how they would be assessed today. They might all contain the familiar Atwood flash of brilliance but this reader, at least, was left wondering about what they might have been if they hadn’t been rushed to the press. It is a delicate, magical meditation on menopause and, indeed, many of the difficult, unarticulated bits and pieces of womanhood. We start the book knowing that a tragedy has occurred but not the details nor the specific players – as things unfold using diary entries, real time action and past flashbacks, it is compelling stuff.And if they get a little carried away in the process, what’s a little extra blood and guts in the grand scheme of things?

Alex, a promising young theatre director, whose boyfriend was killed while intervening to protect a woman in a street brawl, moves to Edinburgh to start a new life and takes on a job teaching in a unit for children expelled from the regular state system. Although essentially aimed at, and written by feminists, these bite-sized tales are so well written that they would almost certainly be appreciated by a wider audience. i do wish there had been more about the other classes she was teaching, just as a sort of contrast point, or even more about the students in the class that was the focus. The only issue I have with this book is the failure of the proofreader - frequent word mistakes, spelling, inconsistency in the conjugation of tenses (as an English teacher) is something I find very distracting.If the sisterhood were an idea that could be compressed into the shape and size of a book, it would be Furies: Stories of the Wicked, Wild and Untamed. Megaera, Tisiphone and Alecto are The Furies: motorcycle riding Goddesses of revenge, kicking ass and celebrating the feminine divine. I listened to the audiobook alongside reading the hardback and there were multiple narrators used throughout, which I very much appreciated. The story is then woven around the aftermath of the killing; why is Alex apparently spying on someone and why is one of her pupils stalking her? Overall I'm so glad I got my hands on this collection and there was so much spirit to it as a collection examining women in all shapes and stages of life (including menopausal and older women in Dragon by Stella Duffy) so I LOVED that aspect of the book.