A fun and fearless anthology of feminist tales, by fifteen bestselling, award-winning writers:

Margaret Atwood, Susie Boyt, Eleanor Crewes, Emma Donoghue, Stella Duffy, Linda Grant, Claire Kohda, CN Lester, Kirsty Logan, Caroline O'Donoghue, Chibundu Onuzo, Helen Oyeymi, Rachel Seiffert, Kamila Shamsie and Ali Smith - introduced by Sandi Toksvig.

DRAGON. TYGRESS. SHE-DEVIL. HUSSY. SIREN. WENCH. HARRIDAN. MUCKRAKER. SPITFIRE. VITUPERATOR. CHURAIL. TERMAGANT. FURY. WARRIOR. VIRAGO.

For centuries past, and all across the world, there are words that have defined and decried us. Words that raise our hackles, fire up our blood; words that tell a story.

In this blazing cauldron of a book, fifteen bestselling, award-winning writers have taken up their pens and reclaimed these words, creating an entertaining and irresistible collection of feminist tales for our time.

When Peggy McAllister learns about the Rattletop Award for "excellence in eighth grade social studies," she is determined to win it with a research paper on a Great American Hero. But when she chooses Molly Pitcher, the famous Revolutionary War heroine of the Battle of Monmouth, as her subject, she runs into difficulties. With the help of her Greatgramps, a retired private investigator, his lady friend Mrs. Spinner, a local historian and secret author of historical romance novels, and Ms. Guelphstein, a dedicated reference librarian, Peggy sorts through a maze of confusing and contradictory evidence to identify the "real" Molly Pitcher.

DRAGON. TIGRESS. SHE-DEVIL. For centuries past, and all across the world. HUSSY. SIREN. WENCH. There are words that have defined and decried us. HARRIDAN. MUCKRAKER. SPITFIRE. Words that raise our hackles, fire up our blood. FURY. WARRIOR. VIRAGO. Words that tell a story. In this blazing cauldron of a book, the boldest writers of our day take up these words and take up their pen, celebrating fifty years of Virago.

'Wonderful ... all killer, no filler' Red Magazine 'Dazzling stories, as inventive as they are inspiring' Daily Mirror 'Where power and feminist rage meet' Stylist ______________________________ A fun and fearless anthology of feminist tales, by fifteen bestselling, award-winning writers: Margaret Atwood, Susie Boyt, Eleanor Crewes, Emma Donoghue, Stella Duffy, Linda Grant, Claire Kohda, CN Lester, Kirsty Logan, Caroline O'Donoghue, Chibundu Onuzo, Helen Oyeymi, Rachel Seiffert, Kamila Shamsie and Ali Smith - introduced by Sandi Toksvig. DRAGON. TYGRESS. SHE-DEVIL. HUSSY. SIREN. WENCH. HARRIDAN. MUCKRAKER. SPITFIRE. VITUPERATOR. CHURAIL. TERMAGANT. FURY. WARRIOR. VIRAGO. For centuries past, and all across the world, there are words that have defined and decried us. Words that raise our hackles, fire up our blood; words that tell a story. In this blazing cauldron of a book, fifteen bestselling, award-winning writers have taken up their pens and reclaimed these words, creating an entertaining and irresistible collection of feminist tales for our time. 'A slick collection of clever tales, with something for bluestockings and banshees alike' Guardian 'Delightful, thought-provoking' Louisa Young, Perspectives

From the award-winning Linda Grant, a vibrant imagining of the tumultuous world of early twentieth-century Europe through the eyes of Mina, a young girl whose adventures begin in a deep dark forest. 'Epic, magnificent, beautiful. A perfect work of art and craft and such a good story... I felt I was living it. I couldn't put it down' Philippa Perry 'Magnificent... flawless writing, wonderfully flawed characters, its epic sweep combined with a warm immediacy... I'm in awe, I'm charmed, and I want to press a copy on everyone I know' Nigella Lawson 'What an amazing novel... Vivid storytelling with complex and colourful characters... spectacular' David Morrissey It's 1913 and a young, carefree and recklessly innocent girl, Mina, goes out into the forest on the edge of the Baltic sea and meets a gang of rowdy young men with revolution on their minds. It sounds like a fairy tale but it's life. The adventure leads to flight, emigration and a new land, a new language and the pursuit of idealism or happiness - in Liverpool. But what of the stories from the old country; how do they shape and form the next generations who have heard the well-worn tales? From the flour mills of Latvia to Liverpool suburbia to post-war Soho, The Story of the Forest is about myths and memory and about how families adapt in order to survive. It is a story full of the humour and wisdom we have come to relish from this wonderful writer.

It is April 1946. Evelyn Sert, twenty years old, a hairdresser from Soho, sails for Palestine, where Jewish refugees and idealists are gathering from across Europe to start a new life in a brand-new country. In the glittering, cosmopolitan, Bauhaus city of Tel Aviv, anything seems possible - the new self, new Jew, new woman are all feasible. Evelyn, adept at disguises, reinvents herself as the bleached-blonde Priscilla Jones. Immersed in a world of passionate idealism, she finds love, and with Johnny, her lover, finds herself at the heart of a very dangerous game.

An Orange Prize winner and Booker prize nominee tells the story of her mother's memory loss to Alzheimer's, and her own quest to not let her family history vanish along with it Here, prizewinning author Linda Grant tells the story of her mother's gradual but devastating mental deterioration, her diagnosis as a victim of Alzheimer's disease, and her family's struggle to come to terms with the catastrophic impact of the disease. Immensely moving, at times darkly comic, and searingly honest, it combines biography and memoir in a unique examination of the profound questions of identity, memory, and autonomy that dementia raises.

How did Latin erotic elegy influence and shape sixteenth-century English love poetry? Using an interdisciplinary approach, this book offers detailed readings of poetry with close attention to the erotic, sometimes problematically 'pornographic', 'wanton' and 'lascivious' verse that exists in both periods. Moving beyond arguments that relate Renaissance eroticism more or less solely back to Ovid and Petrarch, Linda Grant breaks new ground by demonstrating the extent to which a broader sense of classical, specifically Latin, erotics underpins conceptions of sexual love, gender and desire in Renaissance literature. Methodologically sophisticated and moving away from static source study to the dynamism of intertextuality and reception, Grant shows the value of dialogic readings, exploring how elegy speaks to Renaissance poetry and how reading poems from both periods together illuminates both sets of verse.

The Well Said series is designed to improve the pronunciation and communication skills of beginner to advanced students from all language backgrounds. It offers a clear course plan covering the essential areas of pronunciation, including stress, rhythm, and intonation--features that research shows help students the most. Additionally, there are over fifty pages of supplemental activities focusing on consonant and vowel sounds. This level of Well Said introduces the most important pronunciation features at an intermediate to advanced level. A free Website for teachers and students includes the full audio program.

The Well Said series is designed to improve the pronunciation and communication skills of beginner to advanced students from all language backgrounds. It offers a clear course plan covering the essential areas of pronunciation, including stress, rhythm, and intonation--features that research shows help students the most. Additionally, there are over fifty pages of supplemental activities focusing on consonant and vowel sounds. The Intro level of Well Said is a slower-paced course that introduces the most important pronunciation features at the beginning to low-intermediate level. A free Website for teachers and students includes the full audio program.

From the award-winning Linda Grant, a vibrant imagining of the tumultuous world of early twentieth-century Europe through the eyes of Mina, a young girl whose adventures begin in a deep dark forest. 'Epic, magnificent, beautiful. A perfect work of art and craft and such a good story... I felt I was living it. I couldn't put it down' Philippa Perry 'Magnificent... flawless writing, wonderfully flawed characters, its epic sweep combined with a warm immediacy... I'm in awe, I'm charmed, and I want to press a copy on everyone I know' Nigella Lawson 'What an amazing novel... Vivid storytelling with complex and colourful characters... spectacular' David Morrissey It's 1913 and a young, carefree and recklessly innocent girl, Mina, goes out into the forest on the edge of the Baltic sea and meets a gang of rowdy young men with revolution on their minds. It sounds like a fairy tale but it's life. The adventure leads to flight, emigration and a new land, a new language and the pursuit of idealism or happiness - in Liverpool. But what of the stories from the old country; how do they shape and form the next generations who have heard the well-worn tales? From the flour mills of Latvia to Liverpool suburbia to post-war Soho, The Story of the Forest is about myths and memory and about how families adapt in order to survive. It is a story full of the humour and wisdom we have come to relish from this wonderful writer.

"You can't have depths without surfaces," says Linda Grant in her lively and provocative new book, "The thoughtful Dresser, "a thinking woman's guide to what we wear." "For centuries, an interest in clothes has been dismissed as the trivial pursuit of vain, empty-headed women. Yet, clothes matter, whether you are interested in fashion or not, because how we choose to dress defines who we are. How we look and what we wear tells a story. Some stories are simple, like the teenager trying to fit in, or the woman turning fifty renouncing invisibility. Some are profound, like that of the immigrant who arrives in a new country and works to blend in by changing the way she dresses, or of the woman whose hat saved her life in Nazi Germany.
"
The Thoughtful Dresser "celebrates the pleasure of adornment and is an elegant meditation on our relationship with what we wear and the significance of clothes as the most intimate but also public expressions of our identity.

When Peggy McAllister learns about the Rattletop Award for "excellence in eighth grade social studies," she is determined to win it with a research paper on a Great American Hero. But when she chooses Molly Pitcher, the famous Revolutionary War heroine of the Battle of Monmouth, as her subject, she runs into difficulties. With the help of her Greatgramps, a retired private investigator, his lady friend Mrs. Spinner, a local historian and secret author of historical romance novels, and Ms. Guelphstein, a dedicated reference librarian, Peggy sorts through a maze of confusing and contradictory evidence to identify the "real" Molly Pitcher.

WINNER OF THE WINGATE LITERARY PRIZE 2020 `A superb piece of writing about London life. Past Wingate winners include Zadie Smith, Amos Oz and David Grossman' '[A] shimmering new novel . . . Grant's book is as much a love letter to London as a lament, an ode to pink skin after sunny days and lost gloves waving from railings' The Economist 'A compelling portrait of contemporary London, it's a novel fit for shifting, uncertain times' Suzi Feay, Financial Times 'A Stranger City feels like a very important novel for right now: no politically ponderous diatribe but a witty, sunlounger-accessible and deeply humanising story about people - about us - and the societal shipwreck we're stuck in' Evening Standard When a dead body is found in the Thames, caught in the chains of HMS Belfast, it begins a search for a missing woman and confirms a sense that in London a person can become invisible once outside their community - and that assumes they even have a community. A policeman, a documentary film-maker and an Irish nurse named Chrissie all respond to the death of the unknown woman in their own ways. London is a place of random meetings, shifting relationships - and some, like Chrissie intersect with many. The film-maker and the policeman meanwhile have safe homes with wives - or do they? An immigrant family speaks their own language only privately; they have managed to integrate - or have they? The wonderful Linda Grant weaves a tale around ideas of home; how London can be a place of exile or expulsion, how home can be a physical place or an idea. How all our lives intersect and how coincidence or the randomness of birth place can decide how we live and with whom.

How did Latin erotic elegy influence and shape sixteenth-century English love poetry? Using an interdisciplinary approach, this book offers detailed readings of poetry with close attention to the erotic, sometimes problematically 'pornographic', 'wanton' and 'lascivious' verse that exists in both periods. Moving beyond arguments that relate Renaissance eroticism more or less solely back to Ovid and Petrarch, Linda Grant breaks new ground by demonstrating the extent to which a broader sense of classical, specifically Latin, erotics underpins conceptions of sexual love, gender and desire in Renaissance literature. Methodologically sophisticated and moving away from static source study to the dynamism of intertextuality and reception, Grant shows the value of dialogic readings, exploring how elegy speaks to Renaissance poetry and how reading poems from both periods together illuminates both sets of verse.

'If you go back and look at your life there are certain scenes, acts, or maybe just incidents on which everything that follows seems to depend. If only you could narrate them, then you might be understood. I mean the part of yourself that you don't know how to explain.' In the early seventies, a glamorous and androgynous couple known as Evie/Stevie appear out of nowhere on the isolated concrete campus of a new university. To a group of teenagers experimenting with radical ideas, they seem blown back from the future, unsettling everything and uncovering covert desires. But their mesmerising flamboyant self-expression hides deep anxieties and hidden histories. For Adele, who also has something to conceal, Evie becomes an obsession - an obsession which becomes lifelong after the night of Adele's twentieth birthday party. What happened that evening and who was complicit are questions that have haunted Adele ever since. A set of school exercise books might reveal everything, but they have been missing for the past forty years. From summers in 1970s Cornwall to London in the twenty-first century, long after she has disappeared, Evie will go on challenging everyone's ideas of how their lives should turn out. With her hallmark humour, intelligence and boldness Linda Grant has written a powerful and captivating novel about secrets and the moments that shape our lives.

An old snapshot shows a group of friends lounging in the sunshine, on a weekend in the country at the invitation of bearded, satyric Claude and his wife Julia. The girl in the centre is dreamy Lily, whose latest failed love affair forms the purpose of the weekend, as Lily's friends set out to help her ensnare an unwitting father for her unborn child. Next to her is Norman, a Marxist romantic hell-bent on seducing his milk-white hostess; behind them is old, persecuted Shebah; and, slightly apart, the young man on whom all hopes are pinned: quiet, pleasant Edward. Told through the fractured narratives of Claude, Lily, Shebah and Norman, in Beryl Bainbridge's first published novel a darkly comic weekend of friendship and failure unravels.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE In a red brick mansion block off the Marylebone Road, Vivien, a sensitive, bookish girl grows up sealed off from both past and present by her timid refugee parents. Then one morning a glamorous uncle appears, dressed in a mohair suit, with a diamond watch on his wrist and a girl in a leopard-skin hat on his arm. Why is Uncle Sandor so violently unwelcome in her parents' home? This is a novel about survival - both banal and heroic - and a young woman who discovers the complications, even betrayals, that inevitably accompany the fierce desire to live. Set against the backdrop of a London from the 1950s to the present day, The Clothes on Their Backs is a wise and tender novel about the clothes we choose to wear, the personalities we dress ourselves in, and about how they define us all.

A good handbag makes the outfit. Only the rich can afford cheap shoes. The only thing worse than being skint is looking as if you're skint.' For centuries, an interest in clothes has been dismissed as the trivial pursuit of vain empty-headed women. Yet, clothes matter, whether you are interested in fashion or not because what we choose to dress ourselves in defines our identity. For the immigrant arriving in a new country to the teenager who needs to be part of the fashion pack or the woman turning forty who must reassess her wardrobe, the truth is that how we look and what we wear, tells a story. And what a story. THE THOUGHTFUL DRESSER tells us how a woman's hat saved her life in Nazi Germany, looks at the role of department stores in giving women a public place outside the home, savours the sheer joy of finding the right dress. Here is the thinking woman's guide to our relationship with what we wear: why we want to look our best and why it matters. THE THOUGHTFUL DRESSER celebrates the pleasure of adornment

"Stephen Newman's children find it hard to believe that their father "once dressed up in Marilyn Monroe's furs, cooked acid at Oxford and lived with their mother, Andrea, in an anarchist collective. Quite often, Stephen finds it hard to believe himself. Born to immigrant parents in sunny Los Angeles, Stephen never imagined that he would spend his adult life under the gray skies of London, would marry and stay married and would watch his children grow into people he cannot fathom. Over forty years he and his friends have built lives of comfort and success, until the events of late middle age and the new century force them to realize that they have always existed in a fool's paradise. Linda Grant's utterly absorbing novel about the generation that came of age during the 1970s reveals the truth about growing up and growing older and once again displays her uncanny ability to illuminate our times.

Orange Prize winner and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2008, Linda Grant has created an enchanting portrait of a woman who, having endured unbearable loss, finds solace in the family secrets her estranged uncle reveals. In vivid and supple prose, Grant subtly constructs a powerful story of family, love, and the hold the past has on the present.

Vivien Kovacs, a sensitive, bookish girl grows up sealed off from the world by her timid Hungarian refugee parents, who conceal the details of their history and shy away from any encounter with the outside world. She learns how to navigate British society from an eccentric cast of neighbors -- including a fading ballerina, a cartoonist, and a sad woman who wanders the city and teaches Vivien to be beautiful. She loses herself in books and reinvents herself according to her favorite characters, but it is through clothes that she ultimately defines herself.

Against her father's wishes, she forges a relationship with her uncle, a notorious criminal and slum landlord, who, in his old age, wants to share his life story. As he exposes the truth about her family's past Vivien learns how to be comfortable in her own skin and how to be alive in the world.

Grant is a spectacularly humanizing writer whose morally complex characters explore the line between selfishness and self-preservation.

In this groundbreaking work, which covers thousands of years and spans the globe, Linda Grant De Pauw depicts women as victims and as warriors; as nurses, spies, sex workers, and wives and mothers of soldiers; as warrior queens leading armies into battle, and as baggage carriers marching in the rear.

Beginning with the earliest archaeological evidence of warfare and ending with the dozens of wars in progress today, Battle Cries and Lullabies demonstrates that warfare has always and everywhere involved women. Following an introductory chapter on the questions raised about women's participation in warfare, the book presents a documented, chronological survey linked to familiar models of military history.

De Pauw provides historical context for current public policy debates over the role of women in the military. "Whether one applauds or deplores their presence and their actions, women have always been part of war. To ignore this fact grossly distorts our understanding of human history."

Shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 'Extraordinarily affecting' Alex Preston, Observer 'This is a novel whose engine is flesh and blood, not cold ideas . . . Grant brings the 1950s - that odd, downbeat, fertile decade between war and sexual liberation - into sharp, bright, heartbreaking focus' - Christobel Kent Guardian All over Britain life is beginning again now the war is over but for Lenny and Miriam, East End London teenage twins who have been living on the edge of the law, life is suspended - they've contacted tuberculosis. It's away to the sanatorium - newly opened by the NHS - in deepest Kent for them where they will meet a very different world: among other patients, an aristocract, a young university grad, a mysterious German woman and an American merchant seaman with big ideas about love and rebellion. They are not the only ones whose lives will be changed forever. 'Grant is so good at conjuring up atmosphere and writes with earthy vivacity'- Anthony Gardner Mail on Sunday 'Read this fine, persuasive, moving novel and contemplate' John Sutherland, The Times