Kim Ji-Young is a girl born to a mother whose in-laws wanted a boy. Kim Ji-Young is a sister made to share a room while her brother gets one of his own. Kim Ji-Young is a daughter whose father blames her when she is harassed late at night. Kim Ji-Young is a model employee who gets overlooked for promotion. Kim Ji-Young is a wife who gives up her career for a life of domesticity. Kim Ji-Young has started acting strangely. Kim Ji-Young is depressed. Kim Ji-Young is mad. Kim Ji-Young is her own woman. Kim Ji-Young is every woman.
Cho Nam-Joo. Kim Ji-Young, born 1982, Great Britain, Scribner, 2020.
Piranesi's house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house.
There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.
Clarke, Susanna. Piranesi, London, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020.
The book opens with a discussion of early medieval Irish and British texts, allowing the Celts to speak in their own words and voices. It then traces their story back in time into prehistory to their deepest origins and their ancestors, before bringing the narrative forward to the present day. Each chapter also has a useful summary in bullet points to aid the reader and highlight the key facts in the story. Blood of the Celts brings together genetic, archaeological, and linguistic evidence to address the often-debated question: who were the Celts? What peoples or cultural identities should that term describe? And did they in fact inhabit the British Isles before the Romans arrived?
Manco, Jean. Blood of the Celts: The New Ancestral Story, London, Thames and Hudson Ltd, 2020.
Shevek is attempting to find a new theory of time, but there are those who are jealous of his work, and will do anything to block him. So he leaves his homeland, hoping to find a place of more liberty and tolerance. Initially feted, Shevek soon finds himself being used as a pawn in a deadly political game.
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Dispossessed, Great Britain, Gollancz, 1974 (this edition 2019).
From the birth of Islam in the seventh century to the voyages of European exploration in the fifteenth, Africa was at the centre of a vibrant exchange of goods and ideas. It was an African golden age in which places like Ghana, Nubia, and Zimbabwe became the crossroads of civilizations, and where African royals, thinkers, and artists played celebrated roles in the globalized world of the Middle Ages. The Golden Rhinoceros brings this unsung era marvellously to life, taking readers from the Sahara and the Nile River Valley to the Ethiopian highlands and southern Africa.
Drawing on fragmented written sources as well as his many years of experience as an archaeologist, François-Xavier Fauvelle reconstructs an African past that is too often denied its place in history―but no longer. He looks at ruined cities found in the mangrove, exquisite pieces of art, rare artefacts like the golden rhinoceros of Mapungubwe, ancient maps, and accounts left by geographers and travellers―remarkable discoveries that shed critical light on political and architectural achievements, trade, religious beliefs, diplomatic episodes, and individual lives.
Fauvelle, François-Xavier. Le rhinocéros d'or: histoires du Moyen Âge africain, Paris, Gallimard-Folio Histoire, 2013.
A semi-autobiographical novel of André Breton's ten-days relationship with a woman named Nadja.
Breton, André. Nadja, Paris, Gallimard-Folio, 1928.
In 1893, there's no such thing as witches. There used to be, in the wild, dark days before the burnings began, but now witching is nothing but tidy charms and nursery rhymes. If the modern woman wants any measure of power, she must find it at the ballot box.
But when the Eastwood sisters--James Juniper, Agnes Amaranth, and Beatrice Belladonna--join the suffragists of New Salem, they begin to pursue the forgotten words and ways that might turn the women's movement into the witch's movement. Stalked by shadows and sickness, hunted by forces who will not suffer a witch to vote-and perhaps not even to live-the sisters will need to delve into the oldest magics, draw new alliances, and heal the bond between them if they want to survive.
There's no such thing as witches. But there will be.
Harrow, Alix E. The Once and Future Witches, Great Britain, Orbit, 2020.
Bored and restless in London's Restoration Court, Lady Dona escapes into the British countryside with her restlessness and thirst for adventure as her only guides.
Eventually Dona lands in remote Navron, looking for peace of mind in its solitary woods and hidden creeks. She finds the passion her spirit craves in the love of a daring French pirate who is being hunted by all of Cornwall.
Together, they embark upon a quest rife with danger and glory, one which bestows upon Dona the ultimate choice: sacrifice her lover to certain death or risk her own life to save him.
Du Maurier, Daphne. Frenchman's Creek, Great Britain, Virago, 1941 (this edition 2015)
Set at the beginning of the nineteenth century, amidst the golden landscapes of northern Italy, it traces the joyous but ill-starred amorous exploits of a handsome young aristocrat called Fabrice del Dongo, and of his incomparable aunt Gina, her suitor Prime Minister Mosca, and Clelia, a heroine
of ethereal beauty and earthly passion.
Stendhal. The Charterhouse of Parma, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1839 (this edition 2009).