We are so excited to be collaborating with the Feminist Book Society to choose some brilliant feminist fiction. They have chosen a selection of contemporary and classic feminist fiction for you to explore ranging from medieval France, to contemporary America to another planet 250 years in the future. All these books are guaranteed brilliant reads that will blow your or your gift recipient’s mind!
Rosie and Eli from FBS tell us more about their choices below:
NightBitch by Rachel Yoder
At its core, this is a wildly entertaining, completely unexpected love song to the destructiveness and creativity of female rage. The prose is crisp, elegant and just… so cool.
Our protagonist is a lonely, middle class, American suburban mother of a toddler. She thinks she’s turning into a dog. We were carried away by Rachel Yoder’s skill and the unfolding power of this story. It called to mind what we loved about discovering Angela Carter as teenagers: the power of defying boundaries and embracing transformation.
We, like many, are people who have struggled with feminist rage – the shame we’re taught to feel versus the delicious power of learning to channel and embrace it – and this book resonated with us so powerfully. It made us laugh, it made us want to search out the wisdom of the women around us, and connect with the subversive lore of women who have gone before us.
This is not an easy book to describe – which is one of its strengths – but it is absolutely one of our top novels of the last few years.
Matrix by Lauren Groff
There’s a revolutionary feel to this exceptional novel. It’s that rare combination of expertly crafted and textured historical fiction and incisive, visionary engagement with our present times. We fell hopelessly for the formidable, tender, passionate and ambitious exile, Marie de France (a nod to a ‘real’ 12th century woman that history never bothered to record much about). We’d follow her anywhere, even to a cold and dysfunctional convent in a stinking, muddy and potentially dangerous corner of England.
Lauren Groff breathes life into the bones of this reluctant prioress with lush and luxurious literary skill. History tells us Marie wrote poetry, and the lyricism of the book nods to that – in the power of Groff’s short, sparkling sentences, and in the depths of emotion and connection expressed in few words.
The complex, ambitious community of multi-layered women, existing together in all stages of life, driving forward together for messy but mutual progress is irresistible, and like nothing we have ever read before. And as we follow the queer, sensuous rebellious woman at the helm – sometimes reluctant, sometimes relishing her own power to the extreme – light is shone upon a model of leadership and an ideal of a community sorely needed today.
On closing the book, Lauren Groff’s playful vision of a matriarchal powerhouse leaves you feeling like you’ve experienced a spiritual revelation of your own.
Dawn by Octavia E. Butler
Science fiction was the domain of men for so long that when we came across this 1987 novel, it showed us that women can truly write whatever they want. Octavia E. Butler is best known by many for the brilliant Kindred, but Dawn was our first encounter of her spiralling, imaginative sci-fi (and we haven’t looked back).
The first in her Lilith’s Brood trilogy, this novel follows the amnesiac Lilith Iyapo as she uncovers the truth of a post-nuclear human race, 250 years in the future, with the taut reveal of a thriller. We’re talking interspecies mating, sensory tentacles, evolutionary biology, gender politics, grief, imprisonment, and notions of humanity. This may be a very different novel to what you’re used to, but we urge you to give it a go.
We are so excited to be collaborating with the Feminist Book Society to choose some brilliant feminist fiction. They have chosen a selection of contemporary and classic feminist fiction for you to explore ranging from medieval France, to contemporary America to another planet 250 years in the future. All these books are guaranteed brilliant reads that will blow your or your gift recipient’s mind!
Rosie and Eli from FBS tell us more about their choices below:
NightBitch by Rachel Yoder
At its core, this is a wildly entertaining, completely unexpected love song to the destructiveness and creativity of female rage. The prose is crisp, elegant and just… so cool.
Our protagonist is a lonely, middle class, American suburban mother of a toddler. She thinks she’s turning into a dog. We were carried away by Rachel Yoder’s skill and the unfolding power of this story. It called to mind what we loved about discovering Angela Carter as teenagers: the power of defying boundaries and embracing transformation.
We, like many, are people who have struggled with feminist rage – the shame we’re taught to feel versus the delicious power of learning to channel and embrace it – and this book resonated with us so powerfully. It made us laugh, it made us want to search out the wisdom of the women around us, and connect with the subversive lore of women who have gone before us.
This is not an easy book to describe – which is one of its strengths – but it is absolutely one of our top novels of the last few years.
Matrix by Lauren Groff
There’s a revolutionary feel to this exceptional novel. It’s that rare combination of expertly crafted and textured historical fiction and incisive, visionary engagement with our present times. We fell hopelessly for the formidable, tender, passionate and ambitious exile, Marie de France (a nod to a ‘real’ 12th century woman that history never bothered to record much about). We’d follow her anywhere, even to a cold and dysfunctional convent in a stinking, muddy and potentially dangerous corner of England.
Lauren Groff breathes life into the bones of this reluctant prioress with lush and luxurious literary skill. History tells us Marie wrote poetry, and the lyricism of the book nods to that – in the power of Groff’s short, sparkling sentences, and in the depths of emotion and connection expressed in few words.
The complex, ambitious community of multi-layered women, existing together in all stages of life, driving forward together for messy but mutual progress is irresistible, and like nothing we have ever read before. And as we follow the queer, sensuous rebellious woman at the helm – sometimes reluctant, sometimes relishing her own power to the extreme – light is shone upon a model of leadership and an ideal of a community sorely needed today.
On closing the book, Lauren Groff’s playful vision of a matriarchal powerhouse leaves you feeling like you’ve experienced a spiritual revelation of your own.
Dawn by Octavia E. Butler
Science fiction was the domain of men for so long that when we came across this 1987 novel, it showed us that women can truly write whatever they want. Octavia E. Butler is best known by many for the brilliant Kindred, but Dawn was our first encounter of her spiralling, imaginative sci-fi (and we haven’t looked back).
The first in her Lilith’s Brood trilogy, this novel follows the amnesiac Lilith Iyapo as she uncovers the truth of a post-nuclear human race, 250 years in the future, with the taut reveal of a thriller. We’re talking interspecies mating, sensory tentacles, evolutionary biology, gender politics, grief, imprisonment, and notions of humanity. This may be a very different novel to what you’re used to, but we urge you to give it a go.
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