A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again
Joanna Biggs
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £18.99, pp272
Feminist critic Joanna Biggs was 34 when her marriage fell apart. It granted her the freedom she’d sought and yet, untethered from conformity, she felt increasingly perplexed as she tried to envisage how the rest of her life might look. Edging onwards through the loss of her mother to Alzheimer’s, depression and a move from London to New York, she turned for guidance to nine unconventional authors whom she loved in her youth, among them George Eliot, Sylvia Plath and Toni Morrison. The resulting biblio-memoir is acute and tender, its pages alive with debate, discovery and desire.
Blue Skies
TC Boyle
Bloomsbury, £14.99, pp384
TC Boyle, who lives in California, has drawn zany satire from looming environmental catastrophe in previous works, but there’s no denying that enhanced plausibility adds fresh layers of absurdism and melancholy to his latest novel. A mordant eco-thriller, it centres on the members of one extended family, including a would-be influencer and a climate doomer. None emerge unscathed from impending natural disasters: wildfires nix a wedding, flooding means a mother-to-be must go into labour alone, and record-smashing temperatures kill off an entomologist’s subjects.
Memphis
Tara Stringfellow
John Murray, £9.99, pp272 (paperback)
Secrets and trauma ripple down the generations in one African American family whose women are united by resilience. Covering seven decades, Tara Stringfellow’s vivid debut novel, which was longlisted for this year’s Women’s prize, switches between viewpoints and eras, opening in 1995 as Miriam flees an abusive husband and returns to Memphis with her two young daughters. History lies in wait for her, while the city itself is revealed to be a place of racism and violence as well as music and magnolias.
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