Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868) When I first read Little Women, it was my mother’s copy from when she was a girl. It contained both Little Women and Good Wives, though I didn't understand that until this summer. Here’s a picture of the copy I spent time with this
S.J. Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep HarperCollins, 2011 Don’t start reading S.J. Watson’s debut novel before you go to sleep, unless you don’t mind postponing that good night’s sleep you were anticipating. It is, as the blurbs suggest, a page-turner, and you will find it difficult – if not
Leila Aboulela’s Lyrics Alley Harper Collins, 2010 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) Lyrics Alley is set in 1950s Sudan, a few years before it gains independence. It’s a time of intense upheaval politically, but the focus of Leila Aboulela's third novel is personal
Louise Doughty’s Whatever You Love London: Faber & Faber, 2010 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) Readers fall hard into Louise Doughty’s sixth novel. The emotional intensity in Whatever You Love is pervasive: even when the root of that intensity is character rather than
Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives Harper Collins, 2010 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) Countless contemporary novels have taken the landscape of the monogamous marriage and its secrets as their subject, so it’s hardly surprising that a polygamous marriage, like
