International Women's Day 2018 Books of the Week: Part 1

As part of the SPS International Women's Day 2018 season of events, the book blog will be dedicating its two posts this week to books by women writers, as selected and recommended by the English Dept.

The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride
Recommended by Mr Kemp

A wonderful story about a young female drama student falling into a passionate relationship with an older, troubled actor. This is a story seen many many times from a male perspective, where an older artist is revivified by a younger (usually early twenties) female muse. Often times the male novelist ends up writing an obnoxious wish-fulfilment fantasy – the worst example I’ve ever read being Milan Kundera’s ghastly Immortality. Yet McBride turns this story on its head, giving us something that is tender, lively, erotic, vivacious, and written with great joy and passion.

I can’t think of a better novel to read in Spring or early Summer, it’s such a beautifully evocative exploration of youth, young love, and awakening identity. It falls into an often overlooked category of modern fiction: a big-hearted book about characters we care about, and more importantly, we like. It’s also very romantic, in a tender and touching way.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson 
Recommended by Mr Anthony

When Shirley Jackson’s short story ‘The Lottery’ was first published in The New Yorker in 1948, readers were so horrified by its depiction of a ritual stoning in a contemporary American village that they sent her hate mail. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a masterpiece of Gothic suspense; a deliciously dark and funny story of Merricat, tomboy teenager, beloved sister – and possible lunatic.

Living in the Blackwood family home with only her sister Constance and her Uncle Julian for company, Merricat just wants to preserve their delicate way of life. But ever since Constance was acquitted of murdering the rest of the family, the world isn't leaving the Blackwoods alone. And when Cousin Charles arrives, armed with overtures of friendship and a desperate need to get into the safe, Merricat must do everything in her power to protect the remaining family…

Viper Wine by Hermione Eyre
Recommended by Mr Hager

A novel that seeks to freshen up the historical novel by injecting it with a postmodern sensibility, it asks us to view the characters of 1632 through the lens of contemporary history and culture.

Venetia Stanley is obsessed with the fading of her beauty and sees the dangerous concoction, ‘viper wine’ as her chance to cheat the ravages of time, so she signs a Faustian pact with the apothecary Launcelot Choice. Sir Kenelm Digby, in 1632, has a mind that is ‘double-hinged’: he can go forwards as well as back, allowing him to see into the future, quote David Bowie and dream of supermodels. The novel is ambitious, and a remarkable effort for a first novel by someone relatively fresh out of university. Hermione Eyre has a bright future.

Everland by Rebecca Hunt
Recommended by Miss McLaren

Everland jumps between the past and the present to tell the story of two Antarctic expeditions. The first, in 1913, is a struggle for survival, as three men - an officer, a sailor and a scientist - are stranded on the tiny island of Everland as the ice closes in. Their story, stiff with doomed heroism and implicit treachery, is mythologised by a 1950s film that turns their grim fates into the stuff of legend. 100 years later, a second expedition follows in their footsteps: will it suffer the same fate as the first? What really happened to the island's original explorers? And what ghosts have they left behind?

This is a cleverly plotted and twist-y adventure, which brings out the beauty and terror of the Antarctic, as well as the claustrophobia and rivalries endemic in each expedition (hell is other people), narrated with Hunt's characteristic tone of mordant irony. Everland is her second novel: her first, Mr Chartwell, took as its starting point Churchill's description of his regular struggles with depression as 'visits from the black dog', and imagined the dog as a real, human-sized creature, who comes to call on the elder statesman at his country home, and puts up in lodgings nearby for the duration, much to the bemusement of the other tenants. Both novels are excellent - original, sardonically funny, surprisingly moving and highly enjoyable.