Ourshelves

Fill your August with books with this list of reading recommendations from members of the Virago team.

Books discussed in this episode:

Crimson by Niviaq Korneliussen

Three Women by Lisa Taddeo

Less by Andrew Sean Greer

Heartburn by Nora Ephron

House of Glass by Susan Fletcher

Girl by Edna O'Brien

A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor

The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read by Philippa Perry

Let us know what you are reading this summer on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

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Enter A Stranger City with Linda Grant.

In this episode of the Virago podcast Lennie Goodings is in conversation with author Linda Grant, discussing her new novel A Stranger City.

Linda Grant is author of five non-fiction books and seven novels. She won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2000 and the Lettre Ulysses Prize for Literary Reportage in 2006. The Clothes on Their Backs was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008 and went on to win the South Bank Show Award. The Dark Circle was shortlisted for the 2017 Women's Prize for Fiction.

About A Stranger City:

When a dead body is found in the Thames, caught in the chains of HMS Belfast, it begins a search for a missing woman and confirms a sense that in London a person can become invisible once outside their community - and that assumes they even have a community. A policeman, a documentary film-maker and an Irish nurse named Chrissie all respond to the death of the unknown woman in their own ways. London is a place of random meetings, shifting relationships - and some, like Chrissie intersect with many. The film-maker and the policeman meanwhile have safe homes with wives - or do they? An immigrant family speaks their own language only privately; they have managed to integrate - or have they? The wonderful Linda Grant weaves a tale around ideas of home; how London can be a place of exile or expulsion, how home can be a physical place or an idea. How all our lives intersect and how coincidence or the randomness of birth place can decide how we live and with whom.

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This month Chair of Virago Press, Lennie Goodings, chatted to Katie Hickman about her new book: She-Merchants, Buccaneers and Gentlewomen: British Women in India 1600 – 1900.  

She-Merchants, Buccaneers and Gentlewomen is an extraordinary and illuminating book that tells the incredible stories of the first British women to set foot in India - 250 years before the Raj.

In this landmark book, celebrated chronicler, Katie Hickman, uncovers stories, until now hidden from history: here is Charlotte Barry, who in 1783 left London a high-class courtesan and arrived in India as Mrs William Hickey, a married 'lady'; Poll Puff who sold her apple puffs for 'upwards of thirty years, growing grey in the service'; Mrs Hudson who in 1617 was refused as a trader in indigo by the East Indian Company, and instead turned a fine penny in cloth; Julia Inglis, a survivor of the siege of Lucknow; Amelia Horne, who witnessed the death of her entire family during the Cawnpore massacres of 1857; and Flora Annie Steel, novelist and a pioneer in the struggle to bring education to purdah women. 

For some it was painful exile, but for many it was exhilarating. Through diaries, letters and memoirs (many still in manuscript form), this exciting book reveals the extraordinary life and times of hundreds of women who made their way across the sea and changed history.

Find out more: https://www.littlebrown.co.uk/titles/katie-hickman/she-merchants-buccaneers-and-gentlewomen/9780349008264/

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This Virago podcast features Virago Publisher Sarah Savitt in conversation with biographer and journalist Sonia Purnell, discussing Sonia's latest book, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of WWII's Most Dangerous Spy, Virginia Hall.

A Woman of No Importance tells the incredible untold story of Virginia Hall, an American woman with a wooden leg who infiltrated Occupied France for the SOE and became the Gestapo's most wanted Allied spy.

Discover five additional unsung heroines on the Virago blog: https://www.virago.co.uk/five-unsung-heroines-by-sonia-purnell/

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A few members of the Virago team gathered together earlier this year to discuss 2019 reading resolutions and books we are looking forward to reading this year.

In this episode you will hear from Sarah Savitt, Zoe Hood, Hayley Camis, Susan de Soissons, Grace Vincent and Madeleine Hall.

Do you have any reading resolutions? Let us know on Twitter using #ViragoPodcast.

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This month we spoke to Clare Clark, author of In the Full Light of the Sun, a gripping tale is about beauty and justice, and the truth that may be found when our most treasured beliefs are revealed as illusions.

Clare Clark is the author of five highly acclaimed historical novels, including The Great Stink, Savage Lands (both longlisted for the Orange Prize) and The Nature of Monsters. Born in 1967, she graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge with a double first in History, and now lives in London with her husband and two children.

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Can We All Be Feminists? is "the intersectional feminist anthology we all need to read" (Bustle), edited by June Eric-Udorie, a remarkable and inspiring twenty-year-old activist who the BBC named one of 100 "inspirational and influential women" of 2016.

At this year's Durham Book Festival 2018, Hayley Camis (Virago Publicity Manager) spoke to contributor Soofiya Andry about their essay 'Deviant Bodies'. Soofiya is a visual artist, illustrator and designer and has an essay in the collection about gender, non-conforming, bodies and feminism.

This episode was recorded live and includes an audience Q&A at the end.

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Virago's Lennie Goodings spoke to Susan Fletcher about her beautiful new novel, House of Glass and we hear Susan read a passage from the novel.

As Tracy Chevalier has said, House of Glass starts 'as a ghost story but turns into something much more profound: a lyrical examination of how women carve lives out of a male-dominated society, even with a war looming that will change everyone.'

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Deborah Frances-White is the creator and host of the hit podcast The Guilty Feminist. She is a stand-up comedian best known for her BBC Radio 4 show Deborah Frances-White Rolls the Dice which won the Writers' Guild Award for Best Radio Comedy. Her book, The Guilty Feminist, was a Sunday Times bestseller and described by Emma Thompson as 'essential reading for the planet'.

We spoke with Deborah just after the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court, about traversing the boundaries of comedy and politics, and why comedy is so important to feminism.

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Lara Thompson won the first Virago/The Pool New Crime Writer Award for her novel One Night, New York in 2017.

This is the first episode of a series following Lara through the process of publication - from her writing life before winning the prize (featuring jealousy-inducing stories of a "Writing Shed"), to discovering she won the prize whilst eating in a Vietnamese restaurant and her experience and journey towards becoming a published author.

[Please note there is some background noise at one point in the episode due to building work happening outside!]

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