10 Classics to Discover this International Women’s Day
To celebrate International Women’s Day, the Virago team are sharing their starter for ten. From Angelou to Atwood and from Hurston to Waters, here are ten classic reads by ten incomparable Viragos for you to discover and re-discover again and again . . .
Maya Angelou's seven volumes of autobiography are a testament to the talents and resilience of this extraordinary writer. Loving the world, she also knows its cruelty. As a Black woman she has known discrimination and extreme poverty, but also hope, joy,achievement and celebration. In this first volume of her six books of autobiography, Maya Angelou beautifully evokes her childhood with her grandmother in the American south of the 1930s. She learns the power of the white folks at the other end of town and suffers the terrible trauma of rape by her mother's lover.
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION and THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
AN OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK
In 1956, towards the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son: 'I told you last night that I might be gone sometime... You reached up and put your fingers on my lips and gave me that look I never in my life saw on any other face besides your mother's. It's a kind of furious pride, very passionate and stern. I'm always a little surprised to find my eyebrows unsinged after I've suffered one of those looks. I will miss them.'
'A visionary work of dazzling originality' ROBERT MCCRUM, OBSERVER
'Writing of this quality, with an authority as unforced as the perfect pitch in music, is rare and carries with it a sense almost of danger' JANE SHILLING, DAILY TELEGRAPH
'A beautiful novel: wise, tender and perfectly measured' SARAH WATERS
'A masterpiece' SUNDAY TIMES
Winner of the Man Booker Prize
By the author of The Handmaid's Tale and Alias Grace
Laura Chase's older sister Iris, married at eighteen to a politically prominent industrialist but now poor and eighty-two, is living in Port Ticonderoga, a town dominated by their once-prosperous family before the First War. While coping with her unreliable body, Iris reflects on her far from exemplary life, in particular the events surrounding her sister's tragic death. Chief among these was the publication of The Blind Assassin, a novel which earned the dead Laura Chase not only notoriety but also a devoted cult following.
Sexually explicit for its time, The Blind Assassin describes a risky affair in the turbulent thirties between a wealthy young woman and a man on the run. During their secret meetings in rented rooms, the lovers concoct a pulp fantasy set on Planet Zycron. As the invented story twists through love and sacrifice and betrayal, so does the real one; while events in both move closer to war and catastrophe. By turns lyrical, outrageous, formidable, compelling and funny, this is a novel filled with deep humour and dark drama.
A BESTSELLING NOVEL AND MAJOR FILM STARRING MERYL STREEP AND JACK NICHOLSON
'I have bought more copies of this book to give to people, in a frenzy of enthusiasm, than any other . . . Heartburn is the perfect, bittersweet, sobbingly funny, all-too-true confessional novel' NIGELLA LAWSON
'A perfect example of Ephron's gift for turning tragedy into comedy' PAULA HAWKINS, THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN
'She is wit without cynicism, the ultimate romantic' GAIL COLLINS, NEW YORK TIMES
Seven months into her pregnancy, Rachel discovers that her husband is in love with another woman. The fact that this woman has a 'neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb' is no consolation. Food sometimes is, though, since Rachel is a cookery writer, and between trying to win Mark back and wishing him dead, she offers us some of her favourite recipes. Heartburn is a roller coaster of love, betrayal, loss and most satisfyingly revenge.
This is Nora Ephron's (screenwriter of When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle) roman à clef: 'I always thought during the pain of the marriage that one day it would make a funny book,' she once said - And it is!
Books included in the VMC fortieth anniversary series include: Frost in May by Antonia White; The Collected Stories of Grace Paley; Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault; The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter; The Weather in the Streets by Rosamond Lehmann; Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith; The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West; Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston; Heartburn by Nora Ephron; The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy; Memento Mori by Muriel Spark; A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor; and Faces in the Water by Janet Frame
ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL NOVELS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
'This novel is a packet of surprises as we have no idea what's going to happen next' GUARDIAN
'One of the greatest writers of our time' TONI MORRISON
'Devilishly funny and academically solid: delicious mixture' MAYA ANGELOU
'There is no novel I love more' ZADIE SMITH
When, at sixteen, Janie is caught kissing shiftless Johnny Taylor, her grandmother swiftly marries her off to an old man with sixty acres. Janie endures two stifling marriages before meeting the man of her dreams - who offers not diamonds, but a packet of flowering seeds.
'One of the most impressive accounts of madness to be found in literature' ANITA BROOKNER
'Lyrical, touching and deeply entertaining' JOHN MORTIMER, OBSERVER
'Any one of her books could be published today and it would be ground-breaking' ELEANOR CATTON
'I was now an established citizen with little hope of returning across the frontier; I was in the crazy world, separated now by more than locked doors and barred windows from the people who called themselves sane.'
When Janet Frame's doctor suggested that she write about her traumatic experiences in mental institutions in order to free herself from them, the result was Faces in the Water, a powerful and poignant novel.
Istina Mavet descends through increasingly desolate wards, with the threat of leucotomy ever present. As she observes her fellow patients, long dismissed by hospital staff with humour and compassion, she reveals her original and questing mind. This riveting novel became an international classic, translated into nine languages, and has also been used as a medical school text.
Books included in the VMC 40th anniversary series include: Frost in May by Antonia White; The Collected Stories of Grace Paley; Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault; The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter; The Weather in the Streets by Rosamond Lehmann; Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith; The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West; Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston; Heartburn by Nora Ephron; The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy; Memento Mori by Muriel Spark; A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor; and Faces in the Water by Janet Frame
Piercing the shadows of the naked stage was a single shaft of rosy limelight, and in the centre of this was a girl: the most marvellous girl - I knew it at once! - that I had ever seen.
'Erotic and absorbing . . . Written with startling power' New York Times Book Review
Nan King, an oyster girl, is captivated by the music hall phenomenon Kitty Butler, a male impersonator extraordinaire treading the boards in Canterbury. Through a friend at the box office, Nan manages to visit all her shows and finally meet her heroine. Soon after, she becomes Kitty's dresser and the two head for the bright lights of Leicester Square where they begin a glittering career as music-hall stars in an all-singing and dancing double act. At the same time, behind closed doors, they admit their attraction to each other and their affair begins.
'One of the best novels about growing up fast' GUARDIAN
'One falls for Sally Jay Gorce from a great height from the first sentence' OBSERVER
'Scandalous and entertaining . . . Both funny and true' EVENING STANDARD
The Dud Avocado gained instant cult status on first publication and remains a timeless portrait of a woman hellbent on living.
Sally Jay Gorce is a woman with a mission. It's the 1950s, she's young and she's in Paris. Having dyed her hair pink, she wears evening dresses in the daytime and vows to go native in a way not even the natives can manage. Embarking on an educational programme that includes an affair with a married man (which fizzles out when she realises he's single and wants to marry her); nights in cabarets and jazz clubs in the company of assorted "citizens of the world"; an entanglement with a charming psychopath and a bit part in a film financed by a famous matador.
But an education like this doesn't come cheap. Will our heroine be forced back to the States to fulfill her destiny as a librarian, or can she keep up her whirlwind Parisian existence?
Books included in the VMC 40th anniversary series include: Frost in May by Antonia White; The Collected Stories of Grace Paley; Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault; The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter; The Weather in the Streets by Rosamond Lehmann; Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith; The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West; Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston; Heartburn by Nora Ephron; Memento Mori by Muriel Spark; A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor; and Faces in the Water by Janet Frame
If you enjoyed these and are after further reading inspiration, here are five brand newbooks written by our very best female writers coming from Virago Press later this year . . .
Jack
by Marilynne Robinson
‘Grace and intelligence . . . [her work] defines universal truths about what it means to be human’ Barack Obama
Marilynne Robinson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the American National Humanities Medal, returns to the world of Gilead with Jack, the final in one of the great works of contemporary American fiction.
Jack tells the story of John Ames Boughton, the loved and grieved-over prodigal son of a Presbyterian minister in Gilead, Iowa, a drunkard and a ne’er-do-well. In segregated St. Louis sometime after World War II, Jack falls in love with Della Miles, an African-American high school teacher, also a preacher’s child, with a discriminating mind, a generous spirit and an independent will. Their fraught, beautiful story is one of Robinson’s greatest achievements.
Coming September 2020.
Pre-order now
HAG
by Daisy Johnson, Kirsty Logan, Eimear McBride, Natasha Carthew, Mahsuda Snaith, Naomi Booth, Liv Little, Imogen Hermes Gowear, Irenosen Okojie and Carolyn Larrington
‘Engaging, modern fables with a feminist tang’ Sunday Times
DARK, POTENT AND UNCANNY, HAG BURSTS WITH THE UNTOLD STORIES OF OUR ISLES, CAPTURED IN VOICES AS VARIED AS THEY ARE VIVID.
Here are sisters fighting for the love of the same woman, a pregnant archaeologist unearthing impossible bones and lost children following you home. A panther runs through the forests of England and pixies prey upon violent men.
From the islands of Scotland to the coast of Cornwall, the mountains of Galway to the depths of the Fens, these forgotten folktales howl, cackle and sing their way into the 21st century, wildly reimagined by some of the most exciting women writing in Britain and Ireland today.
‘A thoroughly original package that has a hint of Angela Carter’ The Times
‘Sharp writing and cleverly done’ Spectator
Pre-order now
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2020
LONGLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2021
A BARACK OBAMA BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020
'The boldest debut of the year . . . It is refreshing to discover a new author of such grand scale, singular focus and blistering vision' Observer
America. In the twilight of the Gold Rush, two siblings cross a landscape with a gun in their hands and the body of their father on their backs . . .
Ba dies in the night, Ma is already gone. Lucy and Sam, twelve and eleven, are suddenly alone and on the run. With their father's body on their backs, they roam an unforgiving landscape dotted with giant buffalo bones and tiger paw prints, searching for a place to give him a proper burial.
How Much of These Hills is Gold is a sweeping adventure tale, an unforgettable sibling story and a remarkable novel about a family bound and divided by its memories.
'The 19th-century American West is the setting for C Pam Zhang's impressive debut. Rickety wagons, gambling dens, dusty towns and dodgy outlaws stalk its pages . . . How Much of These Hills is Gold breaks the mould [as a] revisionist immigrant fable of the making of the West . . . a daring and haunting epic' Sunday Times
'A truly gifted writer' Sebastian Barry, two-time Costa Book of the Year winner
'Pure gold' Emma Donoghue, Booker-shortlisted author of Room
'Dazzling' Daisy Johnson, Booker-shortlisted author of Everything Under
A GWYNETH PALTROW BOOK CLUB PICK
CHARLIE REGAN'S LIFE ISN'T GOING FORWARD, SO SHE'S DECIDED TO GO BACK.
* 'A perfect page-turner. I loved it' DOLLY ALDERTON * 'Wonderful' MARIAN KEYES *
'A gorgeous exploration of the messy and fragile nature of friendship and all the many forms of love, as well as of the primal need we all have to belong' IRISH TIMES
After a tough few years floundering around the British film industry, experimenting with amateur pornography and watching her father's health rapidly decline, Charlie and her best friend Laura journey to her ancestral home of Clipim, an island off the west coast of Ireland. She knows this could be the last chance to connect with her dad's history before she loses him.
But when the girls arrive, Charlie begins to question both her difficult relationship with Laura and her father's childhood stories. Before long, she's embroiled in a devastating conspiracy that's been sixty years in the making . . . and it's up to her to reveal the truth.
***Longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize***
'One of the most intelligent, well observed depictions of lust, loss, envy, betrayal, friendship and love that I've ever read' DAISY BUCHANAN
'A moving and extremely funny look at family, roots and the myth of Irishness' THE i, ESSENTIAL SUMMER READS
'Witty, tender and insightful . . . O'Donoghue is a perceptive, clever writer' GUARDIAN
'A darkly humorous, keenly observed blend of millennial drift and murder mystery from a razor-sharp writer' RED
'Bright, funny, satirical and relevant. . . . A new talent to watch!' MARGARET ATWOOD (via Twitter)
'Bang-on brilliant' MIRIAM TOEWS
This brilliant and bitingly funny novel-in-stories, set in and around a single crumbling apartment building in Soviet-era Ukraine, heralds the arrival of a major new talent.
'A comic triumph' GLOBE AND MAIL
A cast of unforgettable characters--citizens of the small industrial town of Kirovka--populate Maria Reva's ingeniously entwined tales that span the chaotic years leading up to and immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. Weaving the strands of the narrative together is an unforgettable, chameleon-like young woman named Zaya: an orphan turned beauty-pageant crasher who survives the extraordinary circumstances of her childhood through a compelling combination of ferocity, intelligence, stubbornness and wit.
Inspired by her own family's history, Reva's Good Citizens Need Not Fear takes us from paranoia to tenderness and back again, exploring what it is to be an individual amid the roiling forces of history.
'Luminous' YANN MARTEL
'Outstanding' ANTHONY DOERR
'Maria Reva's enthralling debut of interlinked short stories achieves the double effect of timelessness and timeliness' KAPKA KASSABOVA, GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE DAY