BOOKS OF THE YEAR part 2 - chosen by our contributors

Here's our second batch of lovely recommendations. Thank you to our reviewers, all authors and booksellers, for your support - we couldn't do this without you - and also to all our followers. Come back next week for the final selection of great suggestions to kick off your reading for 2026!

Jaffé and Neale Bookshop: Patrick Neale's Book of the Year is The Winter Warriors by Olivier Norek: A literary gem describing Russia's invasion of Finland in 1939. It's a thriller about the world's greatest sniper, capturing a forgotten piece of history that resonates strongly today. Rachel White's choice is Ian McEwan's What we can Know: McEwan is back on form with this time-spanning quest that expertly threads a literary mystery of a lost poem through a post-catastrophe future. Can hope be rescued from looming gloom? It's his best work since Atonement and Enduring Love. 

Jaffé and Neale is an independent bookshop in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire.

Lissa Evans: I loved Ghosts of the Farm, by Nicola Chester.  This is a non-fiction book, but it has as much heart and plot as any good novel, interweaving the fascinating diaries of a simply splendid woman farmer in World War 2, with the author’s own passionate relationship with the land, as she attempts to advocate for a nature-depleted countryside.  Within it, there’s a marvellous account of Chester’s teenage years when she worked in stables at the weekends and early mornings, her reward being the opportunity to learn to ride;  I was always envious of those tough, responsible little girls that I glimpsed on the rare occasions I bumped into that world, but I'm not aware that they’ve ever been written about in non-fiction before.  It’s all part of the rich and riveting texture of a book that I’m already looking forward to reading again. 

Lissa Evans' latest novel is Small Bomb at Dimperley, reviewed on the blog by Penny Dolan.

Judith Allnatt recommends The Book of Fire by Christi Lefteri. In Greece, a family is left physically and emotionally scarred by a fire that destroys their home and a vast tract of beautiful forest. They are Irini, a bazouka player, Tasso, an artist, and Chara, a sweet child. The story switches between the present with the family struggling to recover and the past – their terrifying jump from a cliff into the sea to escape and the fire’s aftermath.

Alongside the family’s journey from despair to hope there are questions to answer about who is responsible for the disaster. Is it Mr Monk, the man who illegally started to clear land for his hotel development, the emergency services that were slow to respond, the government, or is climate change and therefore all of us? To what extent are each to blame?

This is a moving book and, as with Lefteri’s other novels The Beekeeper of Aleppo and Songbirds, it brought me near to tears. The author has a clear-sighted view of human destructiveness but also has great compassion.

Judith Allnatt's latest publication is The Poet's Wife

Mary Hoffman: My Book of the Year is Helen Castor’s magnificent The Eagle and the Hart, an imaginative historical comparison of the two first cousins Richard II and Henry IV. Richard, with his effeminacy, love of luxury, preference for male “favourites” and refusal to name an heir, was unsuited to kingship in every way but he was the legitimate next in line to the throne, the remaining son of Edward (later known as the Black Prince). His grandfather, Edward III, and his older brother, another Edward, predeceased him, so Richard became king at the age of ten. 

Henry, on the other hand, had every quality needed in a king. He was intelligent, brave, a champion jouster, happily wedded to his childhood sweetheart and the father of four lusty sons and two daughters before tragedy struck and his wife Mary died in her last childbed. But Henry was not the heir. The two men were born within months of each other, married close together and lost their wives only weeks apart. 

Henry’s father was the great magnate John of Gaunt, the richest man in England after the king, Edward III’s third son. They were both mistrusted and overlooked by King Richard. Things came to a head when Richard sent Henry, who had not been tried or convicted for any crime, into exile in France. Gaunt died months later and Richard stole Henry’s great inheritance – all titles and lands. It was a disaster waiting to happen.

Historical storytelling at its best.

Mary Hoffman's latest publication is David: the Unauthorised Autobiography.

From Cathy Cassidy: This is Happiness by Niall Williams had me hooked from the first sentence. Fiction disguised as memoir, it's light on plot but brimful of heart, humanity, grief and love, a kind of time machine taking you back to 1950s rural Ireland. Both place and character are drawn perfectly, and the prose is clean, clever and beautiful in its simplicity. The novel charts the unlikely friendship between seventeen year old Noe, fresh from the seminary, and sixty-something Christy, who has been tasked with siting the poles that will connect the village of Faha to the National Grid. The novel unfolds slowly, but along with the details of village life come shards of pure beauty and insights into love, life and loss. I've read a LOT of books this year, but none have moved me as much as this one. I absolutely loved it.

Cathy Cassidy is the author of  the Chocolate Box Girls series and other children’s books.

Pippa Goodhart chooses The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley: this novel is a breath of fresh air. Far from perfect, but full of energy, ideas and beautiful writing, it’s rich and original, and I’ll certainly read it again.

Kaliane Bradley is a Penguin book editor who found herself shut-in alone and bored during Covid lockdowns. She watched a television programme about the HMS Erebus polar expedition, and semi fell in love with naval officer Graham Gore (look online for his photo!) who died, but it isn’t known quite how. She found other enthusiasts online, and began writing a bit of time travel fantasy for their entertainment. To her surprise, that then grew into this, her first novel, The Ministry of Time.

It's written in the first person by disaffected female civil servant, brought into The Ministry of Time to become a ‘handler’ for an ‘expat’ brought from the past to be studied. Thus, gorgeous but of his time Graham Gore comes to live in her flat, bemused by washing machines, Spotify, doing your own cooking, feminism, computers, but gallantly trying to assimilate. Also brought from the past at moments when they died alone, and therefore history won’t be disturbed by their removal from it, come characters from 1645, 1665, 1793, and 1916, from whores to soldiers. Friendships and tensions arise, sometimes very funny, often poignant.

What to do with this situation she has created? The story becomes a tangle of sci-fi, rom-com, study of race and empire, and it doesn’t all convincingly resolve. But, no matter. The ride has been thought-provoking and fun!

Pippa Goodhart's latest publication is You Choose Bedtime, illustrated by Nick Sharratt.

Linda Newbery chooses Etta Lemon - the Woman who Saved the Birds by Tessa Boase, and will post a full review soon. Its wide sweep covers not only Etta Lemon's outrage at the mass killing of birds - almost driving some species to extinction - to provide feathers for fashionable hats, but also the suffragettes/suffragists, whose campaign began shortly after Etta Lemon's and who were of course far more prominent. There's much about social history, conditions of workers and the rise of feminism alongside the origins of the RSPB - now one of the UK's largest conservation organisations. Yet until now, and the publication of this book, Etta Lemon and her colleagues were barely acknowledged. There's much to learn and enjoy in this fascinating account.

Linda Newbery's latest publication is The One True Thing.

Sarah LeFanu chooses Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories by Edith Pearlman: My friend Hannah sent me this wonderful short story collection for my birthday in the summer. I had never heard of Edith Pearlman, although she has been writing short stories for 40 years and has won numerous awards in the USA. She’s nowhere near as famous as the writers to whom she is most often compared, Alice Munro and John Updike. Each of Pearlman’s sentences provides pleasure. She has a broader scope than Munro, and is more subtle and compassionate than Updike. The stories range widely in place (New England, old Russia, Central America, the remote mountains of Hungary), in character and voice, and in subject-matter. They are utterly serious, shot through with humour, and quietly surprising. Now I am slowly re-reading them, savouring their rich complexity. When I looked her up, I found she had died in early 2023. I shall track down her earlier collections.

Sarah LeFanu's latest publication is Talking to the Dead: Travels of a Biographer

Nick Hodges: My book of the year? Sean Dooley's The Big Twitch: One Man, One Continent, A Race Against Time - a True Story about Birdwatching, wherein the writer spends his inheritance attempting to see and tick off 700 species of Australian birds. Dooley gives himself a year and when the book starts - dead on midnight - so does he: positioned with spotlight in a dark forest. A nocturnal sooty owl is the first target. And it's raining.

He could of course be partying; celebrating the arrival of the new year; doing what ordinary people do. But no: he's a twitcher. And so we follow Dooley's adventures as he travels and ticks his way through the country: its swamps and sewage works (yes, you read that right); its heat and dust. Seasickness plays its part as well as flat tyres in the desert. A book written by a man aware of his own eccentricities. And no girlfriend. 

Nick Hodges is a wildlife journalist living in Sydney.

Sam Barnes of Books & Ink Bookshop recommends Craftland by James Fox: This is the most beautifully written book documenting the lives and careers of master craftspeople whose trades are critically endangered. James Fox demonstrates a vast breadth of research and a true, authentic passion for his subject, giving voice to craft trades spanning the length and breadth of the British Isles, incorporating not just rural crafts but those found in our towns and cities too. The author explores trades from the Scottish Islands in the north down to the Scilly Isles in the south. From watchmakers, coopers and bell founders, to bodgers, rush cutters and letter cutters. This isn’t a travelogue, though the author visits all these places and people; it is a love letter to crafts and trades, a living history and a reminder to us all to look around at all the crafted objects we use every day and consider their story. Britain is a nature of crafters and hopefully this book will also inspire a new generation to take up some of these threatened trades. A delight to read but also a delight to listen to as James Fox narrates his own audiobook, interjecting his passion for the trades he talks about into his audio delivery (available on Librofm and presumably on other audio platforms too).

Books & Ink is in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire. Proprietor Sam Barnes, back in the days when her shop was in Banbury, was our very first independent bookshop contributor.

Graeme Fife chooses Facing Down the Furies by Edith Hall. I’ve known five men who committed suicide, two of them close to me, and nurse my own feelings as to their loss. In this remarkable book, Hall, with great candour, insight and courage explores her own emotional reaction to the suicide of past members of her family and the ‘miasma of corruption’ as she puts it, which clung to the survivors and lingers, yet, near irresistibly, in her. Into this investigation of her own emotional responses she weaves the result of deep study of many Greek tragedies which delve undaunted into the unkindly matter of self-destruction.

The Greek idea of three Furies, known, euphemistically, as Eumenides ‘kindly ones’ (an interesting paradox in itself) underpins this vital study of a dark corner of the human psyche. Greek myth emerged from an extraordinarily acute sensibility which, in its turn gave birth to the tragedies of Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles, the work that forms the very foundation of our own drama. Full review coming in 2026.

Graeme Fife's latest novel is Memory's Ransom.

From Caroline Pitcher: As Christmas hurtles near, I’m re-reading eight of Claire Keegan’s short stories in the collection Walk the Blue Fields.

The title story begins: the women came with flowers, each one a different shade of red. Later, the priest stares at the line of her scalp where the shining red hair is parted.

At the wedding feast there is humour, and threat. After the best man urinates, he turns before his cock is put away. It is a huge cock and he has difficulty getting it back into the rented trousers.

Walk the Blue Fields is the bittersweet story of a man whose love got away. The spare writing is full of sadness, yet after the visit to the mysterious Chinaman, the priest thinks after all that, The spring has come, dry and promising.

In Claire Keegan’s writing, there is so much more than meets the eye. Ireland struggles with its dark past. (Here I want to mention So Late in the Day, a shattering novella about Cathal’s inherited misogyny, which destroys his own happiness.

Hilary Mantel said that Keegan writes with a certain stony-eyed realism about human experience. Yes. And she doesn’t write enough stories for me.

Caroline Pitcher's latest book is Mariana and the Merchild, illustrated by Jackie Morris.

And finally: Julia Jarman's choice is The Glory Cloak by Patricia O’Brien. The glory cloak of the title fixes this novel in my memory, sparking others of people, places and actions, some of which I’d rather forget. The novel is an alternative biography of Louisa M Alcott, written from the point of view of a fictitious character, Susan Gray, who gets closer to her than even her sisters did, joining her in the Union Hospital in Washington DC where, during the American Civil War, Louisa nursed soldiers and fell in love. It’s a story of passionate love and passionate self-denial – and it rings true, because of the writer’s skill and meticulous historical research.

The glory cloak itself was real. Luxurious, made of red and green silk, it was confined to the dressing-up box in the Quakerish Alcott household. But Louisa’s mother once placed it round her shoulders to inspire her ‘to do great things’.

Julia Jarman's latest novel is Widows Waive the Rules.

What are your own best reads of the year? Please tell us in the comments, and do come back next week for our final selection.

Guest review by Penny Dolan: SMALL BOMB AT DIMPERLEY by Lissa Evans

 

"A novel that cheers the heart. She writes with a wry sense of the comedy and tragedy of life ..."

Penny Dolan works as a children’s storyteller and writer. Her last novel for older children, A Boy Called Mouse, was nominated for the Young Quills Historical Fiction Award, and she is currently completing a companion book. She posts on The History Girls, on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure and can be found on Twitter @PennyDolan1.

Lissa Evans’ Small Bomb at Dimperley is a novel that cheers the heart. She writes with a wry sense of the comedy and tragedy of life, and with a sympathy for her characters, no matter how flawed they prove themselves to be.

I had loved her previous three novels, set between 1918 & 1945: Old Baggage, Crooked Heart and V for Victory. Written with a joyful sense of humour and an awareness of the absurd in life, it is clear that Evans is familiar with these decades. Her earlier historical novel, Their Finest Hour and a Half, is about a young female copy-writer drafted into the Ministry of Information to add a woman’s perspective, and was later made into a film.

This recent novel, Small Bomb at Dimperley, begins in 1945 and deals with a society used to war, to hardship and to bravely making the best (or the most) of it. Now that the Peace has been announced, people are faced by a different world. Do they look to the past, or the future?

The main focus, the fictional Dimperley House, is an almost symbolic place from the past: an Elizabethan manor house in the Buckinghamshire countryside. Past generations had adorned the exterior with architectural whims and stacked the inside with curiosities, including an unseen ghost in a passageway.

Dimperley withstood bombing by passing aircraft, the roughness of army requisitioning and practical neglect as a war-time mother-and-baby home. The house has survived the war, but how, under a new Labour government, will it survive the peace?

Evans fills her novel – and Dimperley - with a rich collection of characters. The imperious Dowager Lady Irene Vere-Thisset has remained in occupation, along with her brother Uncle Alaric, a reclusive archivist and Cedric, her brain-damaged middle son. Also resident is Lady Barbara, the Dowager’s bullied daughter-in-law, along with a few devoted and less devoted servants, an old horse in the stables and the Dowager’s yappy dogs. Adding to the air of irritation are Kitty and Priss, Barbara’s rebellious teenage daughters, appalled by Dimperly’s deprivations after the plenty of childhood years spent in California.

And then it happens: a telegram brings news from the Far East. Handsome Felix, the adored son and heir, was missing but is now definitely dead. Consequently, Valentine, the youngest son, who has served the war years as a lowly army Corporal, is summoned home to become, unwillingly, lord of the manor. He has to face what Felix’s death has brought: a large and long-avoided inheritance tax demand and a storm of financial troubles.

How will the awkward, injured Valentine, known at school as ‘Thicko’ Thisset, manage to deal with all the debts and responsibilities and paperwork? How can he make the money needed to deal with the crisis? Who should he marry for money – and should he? And of course, there are the complications of Felix’s personal legacy.

Dimperley is, at heart, an almost traditionally romantic novel: by chance, dull Uncle Alaric has employed a capable young woman, Mrs Zena Baxter, to assist him in writing his history of the house. For Zena, and her determined two-year-old daughter Allison, Dimperley is a magical place. Zena, who grew up in grim circumstances, is determined to help the house and grounds survive. The novel is as much Zena’s story as it is of the Vere-Thisset family; gently reminding the reader that history belongs to us all. Eventually, when all the alarms and subterfuges are over, the expected ending comes as a satisfying pleasure.

The plot within Small Bomb at Dimperley stretches way beyond the manor gates, offering the reader a wide cast of characters: moneyed middle-classes, salesmen, shopkeepers and delivery drivers; women at home and church fetes, men in pubs and clubs, all the remains of the old class-bound society all struggling to seize a place in this new era.

I felt, as the story grew, that the author was gently honouring the many ordinary people who endured the war years on the home front: those who were ordered about, sometimes with ignorance, and forced to accept all manner of official regulations without being recognised in return. Now, in 1945, as the nation’s public life moves on, their quiet sufferings are ignored and invisible.

But not here, within Lissa Evan’s lovely book. I do recommend this novel: a perfect mix of nostalgia, poignancy, written with humour and for today’s audience. Although the ‘quiet’ might depend on how easily you laugh aloud.

Here is one of the many smaller moments, as Barbara takes the injured Valentine out in the car.

The whole road surface as far as the East Lodge was in a dreadful state and Valentine jammed his good hand against the roof to keep level, as they lurched between the potholes. His sister-in-law steered with immense concentration, her knuckles white, her gaze rigid.

‘When did you learn to drive?’

‘When the chauffeur left. It was just before Dunkirk, I think, and he told everyone he was joining the marines, and then it turned out he was driving a tea van around an airbase in Cheadle.’


Additional News. Doubleday have just published Lissa Evans’ ‘Picnic on Craggy Island: The Surreal Joys of Producing Father Ted’, a slim hardback based on her diary notes and memories as a producer on that famous comedy tv series. It would be interesting to read this alongside episodes of the Father Ted  TV series still available on Youtube or other platforms. Lissa Evans’s novels for children include Wed Wabbit and Wished.

Small Bomb at Dimperley is published by Doubleday

Lissa Evans' Old Baggage is reviewed here by Pippa Goodhart

More of Penny's choices:

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

The Secrets of Wishtide by Kate Saunders

Seven Miles of Steel Thistles by Katherine Langrish

Guest review by Lissa Evans: THE SHIPPING NEWS by Annie Proulx

"A nest of narratives – stories within stories, a structure dense enough to mean that, looking back from the end, it’s impossible to see the whole of the road that took you there."

Lissa Evans is the author of five novels for adults, including Their Finest Hour and a Half (filmed in 2017 as Their Finest, starring Bill Nighy and Gemma Arterton), and Old Baggage which tells the story of a former suffragette who is not yet willing to give up the fight. She has also written three books for children, two of which (Small Change for Stuart and Wed Wabbit) were shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal.

Before becoming a writer, Lissa initially studied medicine, but later worked in radio and television comedy, where she produced and directed numerous series, including Room 101 and Father Ted.  She lives in London with her dog and her family. Her hobby is reading. 

There’s a shelf in my bedroom where the re-reads sit: old friends, always ready for another visit, the pages freckled with the odd coffee-stain, the spines lacking in …well, backbone : most are books that I tend to dip into, each falling open at favourite passages, but a small number I re-read from start to finish, among them The Rings of Saturn, Sebald’s melancholy and fascinating ramble through Suffolk , Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, a near-perfect, mult-layered story about a boy growing up surrounded by ghosts, Sure of You, the sixth of Maupin’s Tales from the City series, a little darker, a little more real than the others and Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks, a book that combines a love-letter to chemistry with the story of a complex childhood. They’re a disparate bunch, these total re-reads; what they have in common, I realised recently, is that each possesses a nest of narratives – stories within stories, a structure dense enough to mean that, looking back from the end, it’s impossible to see the whole of the road that took you there. A second read still springs surprises ; the pleasures are still unworn after being encountered for a third or fourth time. 

The Shipping News by Annie Proulx is also on that shelf, an edition with a cover showing a pounding green sea under a louring sky. I must have first read it not too long after it came out in 1993.

Chapter 1. Quoyle.

Quoyle: a coil of rope

Here is an account of a few years in the life of Quoyle, born in Brooklyn and raised in a shuffle of dreary upstate towns.

The opening chapter is a jolting read for a first-timer – a rapid run through Quoyle’s early life, short sentences like slaps in the face, half-phrases and broken clauses like missing steps, together building a vivid picture of a man who cannot find a place in life, who is forever standing awkwardly on the margins.

Quoyle has a ‘great damp loaf of a body. Head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair ruched back. Features as bunched as kissed fingertips.’ He’s awkward and unhappy and exploited by everyone he meets, culminating in a terrible marriage to Petal, who despises him while he worships her. When she dies, leaving him with two small children, he takes the initiative for the first time in his life, and moves his family a thousand miles to Newfoundland, the home of his forebears - a lump of rock in a hissing sea, the harshest of environments, but a place where, to his surprise, he seems to fit. He is accompanied by one of the most magnificent female characters in twentieth century fiction: The Aunt – dry, fierce and practical, a woman who has fought back against an unspeakable childhood to find life and love, and is now returning to exorcise old memories. But besides this central hinge, there’s so much else in the book - it’s stuffed with characters and interlinking stories, with the problems and practicalities of Quoyle’s domestic life, with the office politics of the terrible local newspaper that employs him, with sea-lore and history, crime and intrigue, with the crash and roar of waves, and a vocabulary that leaves a salt-lick on the tongue. It’s also, often, very funny.

And there’s an extra reason for my affinity with this book. My mother was a voracious reader, largely of history and fiction (she loved detective stories so much that she used to give them up for Lent). She adored The Shipping News and read it once a year and now, when it’s my turn for a re-read, it's like having a conversation with her:

Me: Oh, I love those ponderous fast-food restaurant reviews in Quoyle's newspaper.

Mum: Oh yes, they make me howl. And the part where Quoyle buys a terrible boat and refuses to admit that it's no good, and nearly drowns. That's exactly what your father would have done.

Me: I know.

Mum: There are always bits I forget. I think I’m going to read it again before Christmas.

Me: Me too, Mum.

The Shipping News is published by Fourth Estate.

Lissa Evans' Old Baggage is reviewed here by Pippa Goodhart.

Guest review by Pippa Goodhart: OLD BAGGAGE by Lissa Evans

"An absorbing story of faulty, empathetic, endearing, infuriating characters one truly cares about."

Pippa Goodhart has written over a hundred books for children. Best known is her picture book You Choose, illustrated by Nick Sharratt. Her most recent children’s novel, The Great Sea Dragon Discovery, set in her home village of Grantchester, has just won this year’s Young Quills Award for best historical children’s novel for 10-13 year olds. More on Pippa's website. 

This is an absolute joy of a book. I loved it so much on first reading that I deliberately slowed my pace in order to savour it. I then set it as my book group read choice, and every one of that opinionated and interesting group also loved it, which is a rarity! Everybody liking a book can sometimes kill off debate about it. But this book gave us much to discuss, especially since we are of a generation who remember from childhood the elderly spinster characters created by the First World War’s cull of young men, some of whom had notable political and social opinions.

Mattie, in her fifties, was a Suffragette, as was her lodger Florrie, ‘the Flea’, Lee and various other wonderfully individual characters in the book. But they are living in a Britain that feels it has moved on from that particular fight. Living on the edge of Hampstead Heath, Mattie decides to set up a club for girls, promoting political and social debate, good healthy exercise, games and competitions … and javelin throwing, which doesn’t go down well with her stuffy retired Major neighbour. Set in 1928, this is a story with heart, much historical interest, great wit and humour, and utterly brilliant writing. I’m not going to give away more of the plot because it’s a delight to discover for yourself, but there are certainly uncomfortable parallels between the time it depicts and our present time. Mattie has never had to work for her income, giving an uncomfortable edge to her strong ideas about how working class girls and women should behave. There is hypocrisy, but isn’t she still mostly right in what she thinks? Some in our reading group had fresh experience from the Extinction Rebellion protests in London, demanding government action to heal the climate, and yet these are people who frequently fly off on holiday, some have more than one home, and so on. Similarly, hypocrites, but right? On a different tack, there is talk of ‘laws upheld by those who were apparently beyond the reach of it themselves’. Much food for thought and discussion, but, first and foremost, an absorbing story of faulty, empathetic, endearing, infuriating characters one truly cares about.

Let me give you some small tasters of that brilliant writing. We get an instant feel for Mattie when, early on, she ‘swished past like a Daimler.’ How many of us recognise her problem of middle-aged eyesight when she tells her optician, ‘I find I am living in a perpetual Pissarro.’ The Major next door ‘looks like a classical statue carved out of brisket.’ Florrie, in a sulk, ‘draped the oblong of pastry across the pie dish with the visage of someone easing a flag over a coffin.’ Teenage Inez, part of Mattie’s club, was ‘participating, though only in the way a stick participates when borne along by a stream.’ … And so much more. The period language is a delight too. ‘You don’t look quite the thing.’ ‘She is an absolute pill.’ Do read the book and find your own favourites!

For those who may have read other books by Lissa Evans (do try her children’s books as well as her adult ones), let me just place Old Baggage in book context. Evans’ The Crooked Heart was written and published before Old Baggage, but Old Baggage is a prequel to Crooked Heart, explaining the odd pairing of a couple of characters who nagged for further attention.

Old Baggage is published by Black Swan.

See also: Suffragettes in Fiction, a round-up by Linda Newbery

SUFFRAGETTES IN FICTION: a round-up by Linda Newbery

A round-up of recent titles and reissues - adult and young adult fiction

Linda Newbery's own contributions to suffragette fiction for young readers are  GIRLS FOR THE VOTE, published by Usborne, and UNTIL WE WIN, Barrington Stoke.  

Perhaps it's surprising that there hasn't been more fiction set during the women's suffrage campaign - offering, as it does, strong roles for women with ample opportunity to show determination and physical courage and to defy expectations. The current centenary - 100 years since the Representation of the People Act granted the vote to women of property-owning women of 30 and over - has seen new publications, but my first choice, Half of the Human Race by Anthony Quinn, first appeared in 2011. I've shown the original hardback jacket here, as the paperback goes for romantic appeal, not even showing the suffragette colours or drawing attention to the theme.

I found this a really absorbing read, excellent on period detail and attitudes to women's roles, especially for ambitious women like main character Constance who wants to be a surgeon but whose family's limited finances are directed to her brother. She's poised to marry professional cricketer Will, but they fundamentally disagree over her campaigning activities and her refusal to promise to obey as part of her marriage vows. Constance goes to Holloway Prison and endures force-feeding but withdraws from the suffragette movement in horror when some of its more extreme supporters begin to use bombs, endangering life. Later, working as a wartime nurse, she goes beyond her role when she intervenes to save a life, at the risk of jeopardising her own career. Characters are strongly and sympathetically drawn, especially Andrew Tamberlain, a famed cricketer at the end of his career. A friend of Will's, he's introduced as a minor character but later becomes a significant ally to Constance, his fate interweaving with theirs in quite unexpected ways. By the end, accompanying them, you'll feel as if you've been on an epic journey.

All three of these novels take us to prison and through the ordeal of force-feeding. In Ajay Close's A Petrol Scented Spring I almost felt I'd been through it myself, so graphic are her descriptions. In a Perth prison, Dr Edward Watson is one of the few doctors willing to force-feed hunger strikers. Such invasive brutality may seem the unlikeliest start to a seduction, but Dr Watson finds himself increasingly drawn to Arabella, the defiant woman he tortures daily; he engages her in conversation, fascinated by her implacable will. The narrative, moving back and forth in time, is shared between Arabella and Donella, Dr Watson's wife, who marries him in 1916 in ignorance of his prison activities. Ajay Close's writing is animated and assured, with occasional humour alongside the grittier details.

In Jon Walters' Nevertheless She Persisted, Nancy doesn't shrink from detonating bombs. One of a pair of sisters, both sexually abused by their father, she takes up work at Holloway as a warden. But, fascinated by glamorous detainee Daisy Divine, an actress known as 'The Duchess', she's soon passing notes between prisoners and eventually finds herself on the wrong side of the cell door after adventures involving subterfuge, disguise, safe houses and the procurement of explosives. Sister Clara, meanwhile, ponders marriage to the too-conventional Ted at the cost of giving up a career in which her ability has been recognised. This novel stops short of the outbreak of war but leaves Nancy relishing the new freedom she's found in her activism and by dressing in men's clothes.

Young adult fiction has seen some excellent new publications this year and last, plus a welcome reissue. Sally Nicholls' Things a Bright Girl Can Do  is a substantial novel interweaving the stories of three young women - Evelyn, May and Nell - and introducing a range of attitudes and class backgrounds. Most suffragette fiction centres on the WSPU, but here's a wider view that identifies the differences between the various organisations. Evelyn joins the WSPU while May, a Quaker and staunch pacifist, favours the East London Federation of suffragettes, Sylvia Pankhurst's campaign against sweatshops and for fair conditions for working women as well as for the vote. Her new friend / lover Nell, from a poorer background, takes up work in a munitions factory for reasons May fails to understand: Nell is trying to support her large family. We follow all three characters through the war and beyond, to the point where new opportunities open up for them.

Sheena Wilkinson's Star by Star is set in Ireland in 1918, but sweeps both back to the war and forward to the new opportunities opening up for capable young women like Stella. Daughter of a campaigner who died in the flu epidemic that follows the war, she's excited by the forthcoming election and determined that no one eligible should miss their chance to vote. Sent to Ulster to live and work at her aunt's boarding house, she befriends a stricken army Captain - thus Wilkinson deftly takes the  reader back to the war years - and makes a discovery about the father she's never known. Readers will strongly identify with the resourceful, well-intentioned Stella and with the practical and moral dilemmas she faces, and will hope that she finds a role to suit her talents.

Julie Hearn writes with freshness and vivacity in Hazel, one of three novels that form an attractive family saga over three generations (though each can be read alone). The dashingly-named Hazel Mull-Dare is the daughter of Ivy, the pre-Raphaelite beauty and painter's model who was titular heroine of the previous book. Here we start with the dramatic death of Emily Wilding Davison in a novel that looks at various manifestations of power, privilege and emancipation.

Teenage fiction as involving and immediate as these three captivating novels will leave young readers in no doubt of the importance of voting as soon as they're of age - even if current political upheavals haven't already convinced them of that.

Finally, here's one for my ever-increasing reading pile: Old Baggage, set in 1928 when the vote was extended to all women but looking back to the suffragette years. It's by the versatile Lissa Evans, who was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal this year with her children's book Wed Wabbit. If anyone's read it, do please leave comments below - also on any other suffragette fiction you'd like to recommend.

Adult fiction:
A Petrol Scented Spring is published by Sandstone Press.
Half of the Human Race is published by Vintage.
Nevertheless She Persisted is published by David Fickling Books.
Old Baggage is published by Doubleday.

Young adult fiction:
Hazel is published by Oxford University Press.
Star by Star is published by Little Island.
Things a Bright Girl Can Do is published by Andersen.

Since this post appeared, Lissa Evans' Old Baggage has been reviewed by Pippa Goodhart.