Virago News

    Virago Modern Classics Book Club December 2019 Little Women by Louisa May Alcott This December, our Book of the Month is Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. We decided it was high time to revisit this classic, ahead of the new film releasing this month! ‘I am not afraid of storms, for I […]

  Red River Girl   In 2016, the head of the homicide police unit in Winnipeg, Canada, assured me of one thing – I was working on an open and shut case.   Two years earlier, the body of a fifteen-year old Indigenous runaway, Tina Fontaine, had been found wrapped in a duvet cover and […]

  New gender pay gap data finds that women continue to earn less than men, on average, in Britain today. The most recent statistics from the ONS’ Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings – published today – show that the mean gap for full time workers is 13.1%. Equal pay may have been the law […]

  Read an extract from Sandi Toksvig’s memoir, Between the Stops: The View of My Life from the Top of the Number 12 Bus. Preface When I was about seven my father gave me my first watch. It was small, with a thin blue leather strap. ‘You wear it on your left wrist,’ he explained. […]

    Virago Modern Classics Book Club November 2019 Wave Me Goodbye Edited by Anna Boston This November, our Book of the Month is Wave Me Goodbye edited by Anna Boston. Published to mark the 80th anniversary of the start of the Second World War, these are powerful wartime stories written by the finest women […]

  How Much of These Hills is Gold is an epic debut novel about family and the search for both a home and a fortune. Set during the Gold Rush in a re-imagined American West, Lucy and Sam, twelve and eleven, are newly orphaned siblings. With their father’s body on their backs, they roam an […]

Preface The witch: resilient, edgy, awe-inspiring and potent. She never disappears from our culture for long. Iconic celebrities such as Björk and Ariana Grande have claimed an association with Wicca. Witches strut the catwalk with wide-brimmed hats, wearing sultry expressions and dark, strangely haunting tatters or dressed in startling ball-gowns heightening their shadowy mystery. Photographers […]

    Virago Modern Classics Book Club October 2019 Corregidora by Gayl Jones This October, our Book of the Month is Corregidora by Gayl Jones. Upon publication in 1975, Corregidora was hailed as a masterpiece, winning acclaim from writers including James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison and John Updike. Exploring themes such as race, sexuality and the long repercussions […]

  Ten books to add to your reading list this Black History Month   Beloved by Toni Morrison Beloved is a 1987 novel by the American writer Toni Morrison. Set after the American Civil War (1861–65), it is inspired by the story of an African-American slave, Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery in Kentucky late January 1856 by fleeing to Ohio, a free state. Morrison had come across […]

    English Heritage has commemorated the legacy of award winning novelist Angela Carter with a blue plaque at her former home in Clapham.   It was at this house, 107, The Chase, that Carter spent the last sixteen years of her life. She often tutored her then student, Kazuo Ishiguro, at the kitchen table […]

  High School is Tegan and Sara’s first memoir, chronicling their teenage years during the height of grunge and rave culture in the 1990s in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The memoir is a bravely honest account of twin sisters growing up down the hall from one another, struggling to figure out their identities, their sexuality, and […]

  Discover a lost masterpiece Gayl Jones was only 26 when Corregidora was published in 1975. Toni Morrison was her editor, before she began her own writing career, and this influential, searing novel was hailed as a masterpiece by writers such as James Baldwin, Maya Angelou and John Updike. Corregidora spurred a new wave in […]