Stripping away the myths around this most infamous of families, Sarah Dunant's majestic new novel breathes life into the Borgias and celebrates the raw power of history itself: compelling, complex and relentless.

We are offering 5 limited edition red-edged copies of Blood & Beauty to give away – all you have to do is correctly answer the following question (for full terms and conditions see here):

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2. Win Sarah Waters reissues!
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London will have its own St Jordi's Day celebrations this Sunday, 21st April, at Borough Market – there will be Catalonian books on sale from Riverside Books, who will have a stall there, as well as Catalonian food, music, and even an acrobatics display – human towers are a must on St Jordi's Day, so I'm informed! Here's more information. I'll definitely be there.

This year, Virago publishes a new translation of the jewel of Catalan literature: In Diamond Square by Mercé Rodoreda. The novel has been translated into 28 languages, and is seen as the most important Catalan novel of the twentieth century, with admirers including Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Ruiz Zafón.

In Diamond Square begins in the last years of the Spanish Republic and takes us through the Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship to the mid-1950s. As monumental, devastating events unfold, we see the effects they have on Natalia, a young working-class woman, and her family. The novel is beautifully and vividly written, its deceptively simple style rendering it all the more powerful and heartbreaking. Natalia – naïve, tempestuous, loving, and resilient – is a character who will stay with you long after you close the final page of the book.

‘In Diamond Square is the most beautiful novel published in Spain since the Civil War’  Gabriel García Márquez

'An extremely moving love story, which reveals much about the Spanish Civil War as ordinary people had to live it. Mercé Rodoreda's artistry is of the highest order' Diana Athill

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Jamaica Inn follows young Mary Yellan as she becomes entangled in a dangerous criminal world ridden with smuggling and murder, testing her resolve and morality to the very core.

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I was delighted to hear towards the end of last year that Virago will start re-publishing in 2013 Rumer Godden, whose passionate and compelling novels, with their searingly credible characters, unputdownable stories and glorious sense of place, were amongst the first to show me that good writing and bestsellerdom are as compatible in our time as in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Rumer started publishing well before I was born and her most famous bestseller (and later successful film) Black Narcissus, was published in 1939.  I first read her was I was 16, staying with my extended family at my grandparents’ house in Ireland.  All the readers in the house were glued to a great bestsellerIn This House of Brede, Rumer’s last grand scale novel, set in the Benedictine Abbey of Brede in Sussex and later made into a television film starring Diana Rigg.  For years afterwards, we longed for a new novel by her.

The Peacock Spring, a novel about an illicit love affair lushly and sexily set in India, did not come until 1975, exactly as I was joining its publisher, Macmillan.  The mess they made (out of complacency) of publishing this wonderful book still features in a homily I give on the theme of ‘don’t take your bestsellers for granted’; but I was then a trainee about to be posted to Australia, and I didn’t meet Rumer until 1981, for the publication of her young adult or crossover short novel The Dark Horse. This is her only horseracing book, a story about the quixotic Dark Invader ('Darkie') whose right side you had to get onto if you wanted him to win.

You had to get onto Rumer’s right side too, if you wanted her to cooperate, which I did as I was burning to make a bestseller out of The Dark Horse.  By then sales manager for Macmillan, I took her on a small multi-author tour, despite having been warned that the authors would not get on with each other and that Rumer was especially hard to please.  I thought she would be fine with me as I had read and liked her books.  It turned out that flattery was not the way to her heart but whisky was.  A good tot was required at midday, at six o’clock and at any moment of stress.  I tried to set this up in advance with all the booksellers and radio stations but many of them interpreted the whisky request as a call to have simply some alcohol to hand.  The first time Rumer was offered a choice of gin or white wine, I did not have to look at her beady eyes to know that they were transmitting the word ‘hemlock’.  I have never made a quicker dash to the off-licence.

Soon, she was taking the whisky efficiency for granted and I had to find other ways to bond.  Eventually, she began to relax and discussion of dogs, her Pekinese and my labradors, moved on to talk of another of her great loves – cooking.  I finally passed a crucial test after she leant conspiratorially towards me and asked me to assure her that I did not put carrots in my Irish stew; I truthfully told her that I could neither be nor love such a person.

To appreciate the delight and significance of Rumer Godden’s life and work much better than I can convey, please read the superbly perceptive and eloquent introductions Rosie Thomas has written for the Virago editions. The one personal thing I would like to say about the novels is that the characters of each one have stayed in my mind, decades after I first read them.  I am still cheering on Darkie and now, once again, Rumer herself.

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3. WIN a set of Rumer Godden books CLOSED

A rebel by choice.

The Baroness traces Nica Rothschild's extraordinary, thrilling journey – from England's stately homes to the battlefields of Africa, passing under the shadow of the Holocaust, and finally, to the creative ferment of New York's 1950s jazz scene.

We love it so much we want to share it with you. We’re giving YOU the chance to win one of five signed copies.

All you have to do to enter is tell us who did Nica care for until his death in 1982?

For full terms and conditions click here

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Tracey painted an entertaining portrait of the punk and post-punk music scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Gigs were played in dingy rooms while the audience drank beer, ate crisps and smoked everywhere; personal hygiene standards were lower, and bands were able to appear on Top of the Pops looking distinctly less groomed than they would today; Tracey ordered vinyl singles by snipping out postal forms from the back pages of NME. And her first foray into being a lead singer in a band was conducted from the inside of a wardrobe, while her Stern Bops bandmates listened outside. Tracey promptly got rid of the wardrobe and did perform lead singing duties with her next group, Marine Girls.

Tracey then described meeting Ben Watt – who was also signed as a solo artist to the same record label, Cherry Red – at Hull University, and getting to know him and, importantly, his record collection. The pair soon formed Everything But The Girl; although Tracey exclaimed: ‘If I had had any idea that Ben and I were going to be in a band for so long, we would’ve thought of a better name. Something like “The Smiths”!’

Speaking of their highs, lows and notable successes with singles such as ‘Missing’, Tracey said: ‘What I don’t have is that utter ambition to become a true star. I can’t understand being famous and saying “That’s not enough”.’

Tracey and Ben still collaborate musically, though whether there will be another Everything But The Girl album in the future, who can say? ‘Never say never’, Tracey remarked (but they wouldn’t do a ‘revival’ tour). However, after some thoroughly great questions from the audience, we can leave you with the knowledge  that Tracey Thorn’s karaoke song of choice is ‘Think I’d Better Leave Right Now’ by Will Young.

A big thank you to Foyles for hosting our first Virago Live Event, and watch this space for details of forthcoming events.

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'Almost anything which has been forgotten about for a few decades gets called a lost classic, but this trilogy deserves to be so described…If these three novels are anything to go by, Ursula Holden's work is due a renaissance’ Spectator

'The three books in this marvellous trilogy should be as acclaimed an account of the brutalities of childhood as Golding's Lord of the Flies…Unforgettable' Guardian

'Through the parade of disappointment and tragedy, somehow the sisters maintain a sense of innocent optimism, which, if anything, makes the trilogy's final body blow all the sharper' Observer

Tin Toys: Introduction by Lisa Allardice

Three sisters: the eldest beautiful and mild-mannered, the middle grave and thoughtful, the youngest innocent and watchful. Bonnie, ‘derived from the word “good” in Latin’; Tor, short for Hortense, ‘a Roman clan name’; and Ula, which means ‘owl’, we are told, though it can be no coincidence that it is more commonly short for Ursula. These are the unicorn sisters, the title of the middle novel in Ursula Holden’s trilogy, now collected together for the first time in this volume (the first novel in the trilogy, Tin Toys, was published in 1986; the third, A Bubble Garden, in 1989). Their mother ‘Babs’, an actress, is glamorous, flighty and cold-hearted. Their father is dead. It is the archetypal fairy-tale set-up – three sisters and a wicked mother – and as in all fairy tales there is much darkness, randomness and cruelty. But all three novels fall far short of straightforwardly happy endings, and the trilogy as a whole ends in tragedy.

Set just before, during and after World War II, each novel is told from the perspective of a different sister. Tin Toys belongs to little Ula: lonely and isolated from her older sisters, she relates the traumatic events that happen to her in Ireland, where she is sent with the family’s cook following her baby brother’s death. Unicorn Sisters, narrated by Bonnie, records the sisters’ time in a comically abysmal boarding school where their prim world is expanded by the arrival of a bunch of evacuees from east London. Tor brings the series to its conclusion in A Bubble Garden, in which the girls and their half-brother Bo (minus Ula, who is in England recovering from polio) now live in a derelict manor house in Ireland following their mother’s terrible second marriage. Each novel stands alone, but the ambiguous endings keep the reader wondering about the fate of these unlucky sisters.

Now in her nineties, Ursula Holden lives in a convent nursing home in west London, where she still writes every day on her tiny Adler Tippa portable typewriter. Although religion was ‘spread on my bread as a child’, she has little time for it now. One of the frustrations of the nursing home, apart from rarely being left alone, she confides shortly after we meet to discuss the reissue of her novels (about which she is thrilled), is that they don’t have her ‘sort of books in the library. They read Jean Plaidy – no sex at all, no violence or anything.’ Sex and violence aren’t in short supply in her novels, I suggest. ‘Is there a lot? I suppose there is,’ she replies. ‘I didn’t think so at the time.’ Holden was the fourth daughter of five, and grew up in a strict Church of England family just outside of Guildford in a similarly affluent world of nurses and governesses to that of the unicorn sisters. There is a striking photograph of her eldest sister, ‘the beauty’, on the wall; her middle sister ‘was good and sweet’, like Tor. ‘I felt overshadowed by my three sisters, who were all clever and bright and beautiful, and I always felt like the runt,’ she says. ‘And then my brilliant brother came along. It was “What shall we do with Ursula?”’ Unlike her sisters, she never went to university and struggled to pass her school certificate, but ‘in a funny sort of way it has worked well for me,’ she says now. ‘Because I could work on paper, and not be seen and not have to be clever, just use my imagination.’

As for so many women of her generation, her escape came with the war. After joining the Wrens, she ‘revolted’ against the stuffiness of her middle-class upbringing and went to Ireland to stay with her eccentric grandmother, who lived ‘in an old house full of rats’ not dissimilar to the one the unicorn sisters find themselves in. Then, she ‘led a rather rickety life’ as an artists’ model in Dublin – much to her family’s outrage. Just like a plotline from one of her novels, she married ‘rather disastrously’, to an Irishman, and had three daughters of her own. Although she had started writing during her marriage, it was really only after her divorce, when she returned to London and attended creative writing classes, that she started to write seriously, going early every day, when bus tickets were cheaper, to work in the reading room at the British Library. She credits the ‘huge contrast’ of ‘the luxury’ of her childhood with the financial difficulties of her marriage ‘when there was sometimes no food in the larder’ and the years trying to make ends meet in her development as a writer. ‘To write I do think you have to go through terrible times,’ she says.

It took her many years to find a publisher, and she was fifty-four when her first novel Endless Race was taken on by Alan Ross, a great supporter of her early work, for his small publishing imprint of the London Magazine. It got ‘very good reviews but no sales’. But the publication of her second novel, String Horses, brought real attention, with critics comparing her to Muriel Spark and Beryl Bainbridge. The shock of this success made her ‘quite ill, and very thin’. In all, twelve novels, each very slim (‘It’s so difficult to write, I respect words, I hate to sprinkle them on the page,’ she says), were published – though she wrote more. The Tin Toys trilogy was the culmination of this late creative blossoming.

At the heart of these three novels, as with so many of Holden’s books, in particular String Horses, is the complex and contradictory nature of sibling relationships: one minute passionately devoted to each other, the next murderously resentful. Now all her sisters are dead, she concedes that her feelings towards them must have affected her writing. ‘We were brought up very religiously so you were never allowed to show your real feelings. It was all “turn the other cheek”. So, underneath, there was dislike and rage at these clever sisters of mine. I didn’t allow myself to feel it at the time, but it must have been there. Your past influences what you write even if you try to keep away from it.’ And poor baby Bruno, stripped naked by his elder sisters so he catches cold, and dead in the opening pages of the first book? He must have been her brother, she says. Like Ula, she confesses that she ‘must have loathed him and wanted to kill him when he was born. He wasn’t lovely, he was nasty. Children don’t like their younger siblings coming along, at least I didn’t.’

And it isn’t just siblings: childhood friendships are also depicted in all their intensity, rivalry and casual cruelties. String Horses and Unicorn Sisters both examine the inevitable hierarchies of girls’ schools. ‘There are always glamorous girls in all schools. Everybody looks at them, longs to be like them, envies them and also criticises them,’ Holden reflects now. ‘I’ve never been the glamorous one, rather the one who watches and listens.’

This observation can be seen in her astute chronicling of the betrayals, big and small, suffered by children – at the hands of each other, but most damagingly of all by the adults who are supposed to protect them. If characteristics of her sisters can be found in Bonnie and Tor, then the vain, neglectful mother portrayed in the trilogy is quite the opposite of Holden’s own mother, who was ‘bossy and very religious’. But there was the same sense of a domineeringly matriarchal family, as her father – ‘a very good, lovely man’ – spent most of the year working for the civil service in Egypt, where their mother would join him for long periods. Her parents’ extended absences account, she believes, for the darkness throughout her work. As Ula says: ‘How I wished we could be ordinary, like the children at the dancing class with ordinary parents who lived with us, instead of a beautiful mother who was never there.’

Although working-class family life, especially the relationship between ‘mums’ and their daughters, is romanticised – ‘being together, eating cramped up from the draining board near the sink. No more Nurse and I on the top floor, with my sisters down below and Maggie [the cook] in the basement’ – as Ula discovers on her ill-fated trip to Ireland, shameful secrets and misery are indiscriminate of class. Ireland is similarly sentimentalised: ‘God’s green island’, where all children are loved. And it is true that the girls enjoy rare periods of happiness there, unregulated by adults, carefree in the woods and gardens. But, as with their riotous time at the boarding school, this freedom teeters too close to chaos and real danger is never far away. For Holden, Ireland is ‘a magical land’ – but also one of contradictions: both the country of her liberation, and of great unhappiness.

It is no surprise that she is an admirer of her near contemporary, the Irish novelist Edna O’Brien, identifying strongly with her early work. But the writer who made the most lasting impression on her was Jean Rhys, ‘a goddess’, and there are clear influences to be found in the style, as well as in the rather bleak outlook. Sparely and fluidly told, with shifting tenses and much free indirect speech, and veering between moments of unexpected tenderness or violence, the novels have a strange dream-like or nightmarish quality. And a dark sense of the absurd prevails. ‘Awful things happen,’ she says. ‘But you have to retain your individuality and your sense of humour. And above all understand why people do terrible things. That to me is essential. Then you don’t hate them.’

Despite the disquieting naivety of tone, these are emphatically not novels for children: ‘Goodness, no’, Holden says, ‘there’s too much sex and violence and dreadful behaviour.’ However, as stories about the interior lives of girls on the brink of adulthood, though set half a century ago, they will have a timeless appeal to readers around the same ages as the older sisters. But these are by no means comforting novels. Witnessed each time by one of the girls, sex is seen as brutish and disturbing, the adult world as unpredictable and frightening. ‘I wanted to stay being a child. Though childhood was miserable and terrible, being grown-up might be worse,’ Ula thinks at the end of Tin Toys. And there are an awful lot of sudden deaths – often taking unexpectedly bizarre or banal forms. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ Holden says dryly. ‘But it does happen in life, unfortunately. It will happen to me too, but hopefully not for a bit now because I’ve got these books coming out again.’ She looks down at the little pile of hardbacks, which she’d stored away modestly in a bottom drawer, now on the bed beside her. ‘It really is wonderful.’

 

Lisa Allardice

2013

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The event takes place in the gallery space at Foyles on Charing Cross Road. It is sold-out but we have two tickets to give away – just answer the question below correctly and enter your details, and we'll select a winner by 5pm TODAY:

What was the name of Tracey Thorn's first band?

We'll notify the winner by email and announce them here. If you are entering, please do make sure you can get to Foyles for 6pm to collect your tickets.

The competition is only open to UK residents. Please see terms and conditions for details.

ENTRY FORM

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– Caitlin Moran

Here at Virago we are so excited about Tracey Thorn's memoir that we are giving away a signed copy of the book to 5 lucky winners.

Spanning her 30-year pop career, Bedsit Disco Queen has been receiving terrific praise from peers and critics alike and is a Sunday Times hardback non-fiction top ten bestseller.

To read a selection of the best reviews click here

For the chance to win your very own signed copy enter your details into the form below.

For full terms and conditions click here

Enter

Name:
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1. WIN a set of Rumer Godden books CLOSED
2. WIN a beautiful copy of Tipping the Velvet and DVD
3. Win a copy of An Honourable Man, the exhilarating new novel from Gillian Slovo

It is a bizarre feeling when, having been locked inside history writing a novel, you come up for air and find everyone talking about the place you have just been.

I was boarding a plane back from Morocco last Monday when someone in the queue ahead of me said, “Have you heard? The Pope’s resigned!”

The Pope? Resigned!  How can that be, I thought.  This is not a post that comes with a pension: this is a job for life that ends in death. And believe me, I should know. After four years of researching Blood and Beauty, a novel on the Borgias, I have hovered, imaginatively speaking, over a number of papal deathbeds.  Indeed the novel begins with one of them in August 1492 when Innocent X11, old and decrepit is taking his last breaths. Rumours are flying round Rome that his doctor has been feeding him blood drained from young Roman boys to keep him alive, while a wet nurse in an outer chamber has provided breast milk for desert.  In the end none of it works.  The minute he is pronounced dead, their world’s media – dozens of ambassadors and chroniclers – send out the headlines via messengers on fast horses, with the tastiest gossip tagged at the end of the dispatch.

If the ways of communication may have changed, our appetite for a colourful story certainly hasn’t and back in February 2013  the news is even stranger. The Pope is resigning. We are looking at a moment with no real historical precedent.  And why? Why is he going? Because he’s weak and ill? What does one expect when a man is eighty-five?  But throughout history popes have been old men, many of them old or older than this one.  Calixtus 111 (the first Spanish Pope and Rodrigo Borgia’s uncle) was the same age as Benedict when he was elected. He was also chronically ill. Nevertheless, for three years he managed to rule Christendom from his bedchamber where he spent his time haranguing kings and princes to raise money for another crusade against the Turks.

So what exactly is going on now in Rome? Could this be the Papacy entering the twenty-first century?  It would make some sense. The Church, like any huge global organisation, needs a CEO who is physically and mentally up to the job.  Especially now that that job involves handling a tsunami of revealed corruption. While sex and money scandals in the church are hardly new, what has changed is our attitudes to children and sexual abuse as well as the willingness of victims to speak  out against the power of the church. Certainly times are challenging and it is possible that a man who needs a mobile platform to get from his bedroom to the council chamber simply cannot give what the job demands.

Except if you believe in the doctrines of the church, you believe that the Pope is the Pope because God, working through the cardinals, put him there and so it surely up to God to decide when to take him away.

I should add here that I have another interest in these things. I was seven when my first Pope died and family lore has it that I cried for hours. (Actually I think I quite enjoyed crying – I later saw the film “Spartacus” twice because knowing that it was going to end sadly, I could start crying at the beginning.) Still, my reaction to the Pope was more than mere melodrama. I was a young Catholic girl and, he, as the head of the Catholic flock, was my second father. Of course his going was a reason for grief.

And that surely is the problem now. Good fathers don’t just up and leave the family because they are getting on a bit.  On the contrary, the way they handle ageing, pain and infirmity is actually part of their role. Just as their life should be example to us, so should their death. Think about John Paul II. This much-loved and charismatic Pope met an agonising end from Parkinson’s disease. His decline, marked by growing suffering and incapacity was common knowledge with a public following who expressed their love and support. I remember watching Italian MTV in bars all over Italy while  messages of love for the Pope from thousands of young people ran as subtitles under the music. Some would say his painful journey to death mirrored that of Christ’s own. Throughout history Catholicism has preached that man can find comfort in pain through the contemplation of the suffering of Our Lord who died for our sins. If you believe that – and millions of Catholics do – then John Paul’s death was inspirational.

So what is Pope Benedict offering in its stead? The pleasures of early retirement? Slipping off to do some spiritual gardening? It just doesn’t have the same potency. Neither does it work in terms of some of the deeper concerns of religion in the west. We are at a moment when secular liberalism is pushing for people to take control of their own deaths, with the Right to Die movement growing ever stronger. In the face of threat, John Paul’s way of dying was an act of strategic brilliance.

If there is more to Pope Benedict’s resignation than meets the eye, then it will take a while to find out what it is. Meanwhile, as the rumour mill spins its wheels in the dust and the world’s media stake out their places in that Cecil B de Mille Square outside the Vatican, the power of history and tradition now take over.  We are about to experience a papal conclave: the oldest boys club in the world. While the cameras stay outside, our imagination can get in anywhere. Even to the Sistine chapel itself.

History has bequeathed to us some wonderful stories. Watch this space.

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3. An Exclusive Look at the Handwritten Diaries and Artefacts Behind These Wonderful Rumours!

‘An intensely readable account of 30 years of being in love with music … Most would recognise her distinctive, dark, deep voice, with its rich blend of melancholy and yearning. Her written voice is similarly distinctive: warm, assertive, sweetly funny, but most of all honest’

Chris Harvey, Daily Telegraph

‘Always a reluctant, almost accidental pop star, she has written one of the best books about ambivalence I’ve ever read’

Decca Aitkenhead, Guardian

‘As a witty and wise chronicle of the post-punk era and a life spent dipping in and out of the limelight, this is second to none’

Independent on Sunday

‘Tracey Thorn’s memoirs are as unconventional as her career – and the result is a wise and witty alternative history of pop music before the rise of The X-Factor… Tracey Thorn is not your average pop star. This is probably the key to why her memoir, BDQ, is so good … as idiosyncratic, clever and entertaining as you’d hope had you listened to her music for three decades.’

Claire Black, Scotsman

‘Witty, warm and utterly without prima donna pretensions, how could anyone not love her? For anyone who sat on their bed as a teenager, listening to records and fantasising about being in a band – most of us, then – Bedsit Disco Queen is the book of their dreams’

Francis Wheen, Mail on Sunday

‘She writes as perceptively about the politics and culture of the music business as she does about her own contribution to it. Her style is brisk and bright, direct and engaging. Fab’

Iain Finlayson, The Times

‘Wistful teen diaries and old ticket stubs aren’t too unusual. But since Tracey Thorn grew up to be a genuine pop star, with Everything But The Girl, her rock ‘n’ roll anecdotes are stellar. Part memoir, part social commentary and part reflection on the past few decades of the music industry, Thorn’s account of her life and career is both heart-breaking and hilarious’

Elle

Related posts:

1. Tracey Thorn's Christmas Treats
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3. October Inspiration: Gillian Slovo on her mother, Ruth First

‘Gripping’
Scotsman

‘A real corker’
Daily Mail

‘A beautifully drawn
historical novel’
Metro

To celebrate the publication of An Honourable Man, the exhilarating new novel from Gillian Slovo, we are offering 5 lucky Virago readers the chance to win a copy of the gorgeous paperback edition of the book.

A staggering 2000 of you entered our competition to win limited edition bound proof copies of An Honourable Man in hardback. If you weren't lucky enough to win a copy last time and haven’t read this beautiful epic of war, humanity and honour yet now is your chance.

Set against the glittering red sands and blood soaked battlefields of the Siege of Khartoum, it is the perfect novel for fans of literary historical fiction — a must-have for fans of authors like Pat Barker. Enter now using the form below and read it for yourself. Please be sure to read the full terms before entering.

The paperback edition of An Honourable Man is available to buy from bookshops nationwide on Thursday 7th February 2013. An Honourable Man is also available as an audio download and an ebook.

Name:
Email address:
Where is Khartoum:	Sudan Ethiopia Egypt

Related posts:

1. Gillian Slovo Kindle Blog Exclusive
2. An Honourable Start to 2012
3. WIN a beautiful copy of Tipping the Velvet and DVD

‘One of the best and most captivating novelists’
Philip Hensher

'Godden is a master storyteller, a genius at conveying a sense of place’
Observer

View the full collection of covers

Follow our Rumer Godden Pinterest board

Look out for more Rumer Godden titles publishing this year, in particular two wonderful coming-of-age ballet stories in April.

Related posts:

1. Rumer Godden, author of BLACK NARCISSUS, to be published in the Virago Modern Classics
2. WIN a set of Rumer Godden books CLOSED
3. A Brazilian Classic Loved by Elizabeth Bishop

For the chance to win a set of these three books please enter the form below. Competition will close at midnight 14th February.

For full T&Cs click here

Name:
Email address:

Related posts:

1. Rumer Godden, author of BLACK NARCISSUS, to be published in the Virago Modern Classics
2. WIN a beautiful copy of Tipping the Velvet and DVD
3. An Honourable Start to 2012

Caitlin Moran has called Tracey “The Alan Bennett of pop memoirists” and declared that “I loved her book so much I wanted to form a band too”

And she’s not the only one….

“it acts as a kind of eulogy for a forgotten era of British pop”
Alexis Petridis the Guardian 

‘A corker of a read: fascinating, compelling and beautifully written’
Emma Kennedy, bestselling author of The Tent, the Bucket and Me

'As a ‘burb-dwelling charity-shopping 1970s Herts teen, it speaks to me’
Kathryn Flett

If you're intrigued to see what everyone is raving about and are a subscriber to the Times you can read an extract from the book here. 

And if you'd like to hear more, we are also proud to announce that Bedsit Disco Queen will be Book of the Week on Radio 4, week commencing 4th March.

Related posts:

1. Tracey Thorn's Christmas Treats
2. A look inside These Wonderful Rumours! Extract Two.

We think that's a bit unfair on poor old January, but just in case the winter blues are getting you down, here are a few suggestions from us to put some cheer back into the darkest days of the year.

Two books to brighten and cheer…

Crampton Hodnet

Barbara Pym

Genteel North Oxford is riven by gossip and scandal in Barbara Pym's exquisitely entertaining comedy.

Formidable Miss Doggett fills her life by giving tea parties to young academics and acting as watchdog of the morals of North Oxford. Anthea, her great-niece, is in love with a dashing upper-class undergraduate with political ambitions. Of this, Miss Doggett thoroughly approves. Anthea's father, however, an Oxford don, is tired of his marriage and carrying on in the most unseemly fashion with his student Barbara Bird – they have been spotted together at the British Museum! Miss Doggett isn't aware, though, that under her very own roof the lodging curate has proposed to her paid companion Miss Morrow. She wouldn't approve of that at all.

Penelope

Rebecca Harrington

Armed with her Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights poster and small talk modelled on the repartee of Noel Coward, Penelope feels prepared to take her place amongst the American campus elite.

Harvard campus life however quickly complicates her best laid plans. Her roomates   are baffling, far from keen to share her unbreakable Tetris habit. Even more distressingly, Gustav, a dashing, rumpled-linen-suit-wearing upperclassman of uncertain European origins has caught Penelope's eye but never seems to be in the freshman dining hall, so it seems unlikely she will ever find out if he matches up to her hero, Hercule Poirot.

Full of blistering social commentary and genuine warmth, between laughing and wincing, between berating Penelope for her ineptitude and applauding her lack of guile, you will never again feel nostalgic about turning eighteen.

And two to suit a reflective mood . . .

The Return of the Soldier

Rebecca West

This is a masterful novel about a shell-shocked, amnesiac soldier returning from WWI to the three women who love him.

The soldier returns from the front to the three women who love him. His wife, Kitty, with her cold, moonlight beauty, and his devoted cousin Jenny, who never quite admits her love for him.  Margaret Allington, his first and long-forgotten love, is nearby in the dreary suburb of Wealdstone. But the soldier is shell-shocked and can only remember the Margaret he loved fifteen years before, when he was a young man and she an inn-keeper's daughter. His cousin he remembers only as a childhood playmate; his wife he remembers not at all. The women have a choice – to leave him where he wishes to be, or to 'cure' him…

The Evening of the Holiday

Shirley Hazzard

Passionate undercurrents sweep in and out of this eloquent novel about a love affair in the summer countryside in Italy and its inevitable end. It takes place in a setting of pastoral beauty during a time of celebration — a festival.

Sophie, half English, half Italian, meets Tancredi, an Italian who is separated from his wife and family. In telling the story of their love affair, author Shirley Hazzard punctures the placid surface of polite Italian society to reveal the intense yearnings and surprising responses in sophisticated people caught up in emotions they do not always understand.

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Anti-heroes

January 2013

Does a great or even a good novel depend on a great or good protagonist, and by good I mean likeable and decent and mostly trying to do the right thing? And if the character isn’t great or good at the beginning of the book, must there be some epiphany or redemption by the end? Most modern characters are a stew of contradictions, but what happens when the positives fail to outweigh the negatives or when the character is ambiguous and impossible to peg?

I remember when I first realized that Grace Winter, the protagonist of The Lifeboat, was manipulative and not necessarily truthful. This was an exciting writing moment. It not only offered up huge possibilities for the story, but it liberated me from forcing her to become something she clearly didn’t want to be.

I also realized that some of my favorite books focus on less than admirable characters: Madame Bovary, The Stranger, Crime and Punishment, Hunger, Vanity Fair, The Trial. The protagonists in these books range from troubled to selfish to bad, but we are interested in them for their torment or for the strangeness of their circumstances or for the compelling way they are presented or for how a glimpse into their minds lets us grapple with the conundrums of our own.

While Emma Bovary and Becky Sharp are represented in the list above, the truth is that female anti-heroes are hard to come by. In a 92-entry Wikipedia list of fictional anti-heroes in film, only 4 are female; in another list, the count is 2 out of 50. Examples from literature are just as rare.

Often anti-heroes are protagonists we can root for even as they succumb to circumstance, so perhaps there is something in our attitude toward women that limits the transgressions we will allow them. Jack Bauer of television’s 24 can get away with torture on a weekly basis, but Carrie Mathison of Homeland needs the cover of mental illness to explain her intensity and willingness to defy protocol for the cause.

Another explanation for the dearth of female anti-heroes might be that many writers see flawed heroines as damsels in distress—in need of saving, often from themselves. Even though we have come a long way from sleeping beauty (who not only lacks the smallest bit of agency in her rescue, but even lacks consciousness) we still fall for stories where the romantic bad girl finds a man—problem solved! And we are still happy to believe that love will continue to conquer all even after the book’s end.

It could also be that society’s need for women to be nurturing social creatures is so deeply ingrained that readers react viscerally and negatively when they aren’t. Grace Winter is hardly nice or nurturing. In The Lifeboat, she uses what she has to save herself: not only her looks and sex appeal, but also her ability to observe and play to power shifts. Who she loves and exactly how much remain open to question, so she is not easily redeemed by the love-conquers-all trope.

At book events, people invariably ask me if I like Grace, and I reply that I love her. I love her not because she would be my best friend or because I would be glad to sit next to her in a lifeboat, but because she opened my writer’s mind to what a female protagonist can be.

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‘Janet Frame’s luminous words are the more precious because they were snatched from the jaws of the disaster of her early life. It is one of the classics of autobiography.’ Hilary Mantel

‘A journey from luminous childhood, through the dark experiences of supposed madness, to the renewal of her life through writing . . . a heroic story, and told with such engaging tone, humorous perspective and imaginative power’ Michael Holroyd

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We'll be discussing the book as our Virago Book Club choice from next week onwards on the website and on our forum – in the meantime, if you haven't read it yet, here's an exclusive audio extract of the first chapter of the book, read by the wonderful Rebecca Gibel. Enjoy!

http://www.viragobooks.net/wp-content/uploads/028-The-Lifeboat.mp3

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As well as her many books, of which Mad, Bad and Sad and All About Love are both published by Virago, she was a deputy president, then president, of English PEN for many productive years during which time, among other achievements, she led the No Offence Campaign which led to amendments to the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006. 

Lisa Appignanesi also co-edited Fifty Shades of Feminism, which is published by Virago this March.

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The chance to have a lovely long time to read at Christmas has got to be rewarded with the perfect book. I recommend two novels we published this autumn, both with impassioned witty women at their centre – though they couldn't be more different. The Small Hours by Susie Boyt is a wonderful, dark contemporary novel of great hope and spirit set in a school and Valentine Grey by Sandi Toksvig is a great and thoughtful adventure story about a Victorian girl who dons her cousin's uniform and heads off to war.

- Lennie

 

For me the perfect winter holiday read has to be beautifully written, pure escapism and preferably glamorously jacketed. This is also the time of year when you can finally relax with all those hardbacks too heavy for your morning commute, and all the classics or hidden treasures that weren't in the bestseller charts or didn't make your reading group shortlist. So my recommendation for a book to read this holiday season would have to be one of my two favourite hardback VMC's — Jacqueline Susann's cult sensation The Valley of the Dolls or Elaine Dundy's gorgeous roman à clef The Dud Avocado. Both books whisk the reader away to glamorous locales (1940’s Hollywood in 'Valley' and 1950s Paris in 'Avocado'), both are peopled with unforgettable characters and both follow women embarking on their own brilliantly realised soap opera-esque escapades with dry wit and plenty of drama.

- Carleen

It's cold. It's dark. And if you venture outside the front door, it is quite frankly pretty miserable out there. But it could be worse – you could be shivering on a lifeboat out at sea for three weeks with twenty-one other (not entirely trustworthy) people for company. And Charlotte Rogan's debut novel is so atmospheric and skillfully written, that you will imagine you are there with them. The Lifeboat caused quite a stir when it was published earlier this year, with the book's mysterious narrator Grace coming in for much discussion among readers. And that sense of mystery and tension (along with the fact it will make you feel glad you are safe and warm indoors) makes it my perfect Christmas read.

 - Stephen

My Virago Christmas read would the twentieth century classic Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. If you haven’t yet read this masterpiece I urge you to do so this holiday season, and if you have, I recommend reading again! It’s one of those rare novels where you notice so many more things a second time. It’s perfect for wrapping yourself up in a blanket in a cozy chair by the fire. The story is truly mesmerising with the narrative delicately guiding you through all the twists and turns. It’s perfectly atmospheric for a winter read and will keep you guessing until the last page.

- Hollie

 

My perfect Christmas read has to be Shelter. The book tells the tale of two sisters, who lose their safety conscious father in a tragic accident. Their mother struggles to support them on her own, and promising to return, she leaves them with an elderly couple and disappears. Left with no parents, the two sisters are forced to rely on one another to create their own home. But Maggie never stops wondering about her mother, and when her sister, Jenny, finds herself in trouble, Maggie sets off to find their mother. The surreal setting and quiet narration keeps you gripped in a way that requires a cold day outside, a roaring fire and a comfy armchair to camp out in until the book is finished. The resilient narrator Maggie is at once heartbreakingly innocent and wise beyond her years and it is impossible not to sympathise with her . With the harsh landscape of rugged Northern Canada beautifully offsetting the troubles which befall Maggie and her sister, Shelter is a mysterious and spellbinding read that is perfect for those cold winter days and crisp winter nights.

- Naomi

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In time for the festive season, Tracey Thorn has released a Christmas album called ‘Tinsel and Lights’ and you can listen to Tracey talk about it on the Guardian podcast. Tracey has also created a fantastic online advent calendar full of Christmassy treats, including a video of the making of the album and other things such as a recipe for her special Yule time log. Follow it up until Christmas for more wonderful content.

Merry Christmas!

The Virago Team

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The Tortoise and the Hare by Elizabeth Jenkins: ‘Apart from a war, what could be more interesting than a marriage? A love affair, though it is one of the central concerns of fiction, is a self-limiting tactical skirmish, but a marriage is a long campaign, a grand game of strategy involving setbacks, bluffs and regroupings . . . I have admired this exquisitely written novel for many years . . . The way we run our lives has changed vastly since Elizabeth Jenkins wrote, but this does not make her insights obsolete . . . What she offers us does not date: descriptive grace and narrative pulse, dry humour and moral discrimination, tempered elegance and emotional force.’ Read the full introduction here.  

Faces in the Water by Janet Frame: ‘A life so creative, diligent and self-directed suggests not damage or dereliction, but grip and focus beyond the powers of many of those who have spent a lifetime without their sanity being examined or questioned . . . Its darkest pages are lit up by the perception of human life as precious, and each life as unique. It is also a shrewd and clever book . . . A life almost blighted flowered into beauty. Janet Frame is one of those writers who make you think, whether you like it or not, of the workings of grace.’

Angel by Elizabeth Taylor: ‘Angel is a book in which an accomplished, deft and somewhat underrated writer has a great deal of fun at the expense of a crass, graceless and wildly overpaid one. Taylor is a writer of impeccable taste, while Angelica Deverell is a high priestess of schlock. Taylor excelled at the short-story form, where Angel, with her almost demonic energy, seems made for the epic. Taylor is quietly and devastatingly amusing, while her creation never makes a joke, and is upset and suspicious if anyone makes one in her vicinity. Taylor is observant, while Angelica never notices the life that goes on about her; for her, the only true reality is inside her head . . . Writers are monsters, she is telling us; how else would you be reading this book?’

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Angela Thirkell is today relatively unknown, by no means as familiar to readers as Benson or Trollope, or even Nancy Mitford, writers with whom she is sometimes compared. Unlike Barbara Pym, she has not enjoyed a significant moment of rediscovery; unlike Rose Macaulay, she did not write anything of quite the same status as The Towers of Trebizond. Yet her work has its adherents, and the republication of these two works High Rising and Wild Strawberries will be welcomed by those who feel that these unusual, charming English comedies deserve a wider audience.

She led her life in much the same milieu as that in which she set her novels. She came from a moderately distinguished family: her father became Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and her mother was the daughter of Edward Burne-Jones, the pre-Raphaelite painter. She was related to both Rudyard Kipling and Stanley Baldwin; she was the goddaughter of J. M. Barrie. Her life, though, was not always easy: there was an unhappy spell living in Australia, and two unsuccessful marriages. Financial exigency meant that she had to make her own way, first as a journalist, and then as the author of a series of novels produced to pay the bills.

Books flowed fast from her pen, and their quality was perhaps uneven. Many of them are now largely forgotten, but amid this enthusiastic somewhat breathless literary output there are some highly enjoyable and amusing novels. High Rising and Wild Strawberries are two such. These books are very funny indeed.

The world she depicts is that of rural England in that halcyon period after the First World War when light began to dispel the stuffiness and earnestness of the Victorian and Edwardian ages. It was a good time for the upper-middle classes: they still lived in largish houses and they still had servants, even if not as many as they used to. They drove cars – made of enamel! Angela Thirkell informs us – and they entertained one another with stylish throwaway comments in which exaggeration played a major role. They were in turn delighted or enraged – all in a rather arch way – by very small things.

The social life depicted in these books is fascinating. We are by no means in Wodehouse territory – Thirkell’s characters do have jobs, and they do not spend their time in an endless whirl of silliness. Occasionally, though, they express views or use language that surprises or even offends the modern ear – there is an instance of this in the wording of one of the songs in Wild Strawberries. But this, of course, merely reflects the attitudes of the time: it is a society in which nobody is in any doubt about his or her place. Servants observe and may comment, for example, but they must not get above themselves. Miss Grey, who takes up the position of secretary to Mr Knox in High Rising, is not exactly a servant, but she is an employee and should remember not to throw her weight around with her employer’s friends. Of course she does not remember this, which is a major provocation to the novel’s heroine, Laura Morland. One cannot help but feel sympathy for Miss Grey, who is described as having no relations to whom she can be expected to go. That was a real difficulty for women: unless you found a husband or were able to take one of the relatively few jobs that were available to you (and somebody like Miss Grey could not go into service), you were dependent on relatives. Finding a husband was therefore a deadly earnest task – almost as important as it was in the time of Jane Austen.

The children in this world were innocent and exuberant. In High Rising we see a lot of Laura’s son, Tony, whom she brings home from his boarding school at the beginning of the book. Like most of those whom we encounter in Thirkell’s novels, Tony is overstated to the point of being something of a caricature. He is as bouncy and excitable as a puppy dog, full of enthusiasm for trains, a subject by which he is obsessed. He knows all the  technical details of trains – their maximum speed, and so on – and spends the ‘tips’ he receives from adults on the purchase of model carriages and engines. These tips are interesting. It was customary for adult visitors to give presents to the children of the house, and a boy might reasonably expect such a gift simply because he was there at the time of the visit. As a child I remember getting these tips – not earning them in any way, just getting them as of right. Today, children would be surprised if anybody gave them money and would probably immediately reject it, it having been drilled into them that such gifts are always to be refused.

Tony also has a degree of freedom unimaginable today. Not only is he interested in model trains; his passion for railways extends to the real thing, and he is allowed to go off to the local railway station by himself. There the stationmaster permits him to sit in the signal box and also to travel in the cab on shunting engines. Whatever else is unlikely in the novels, this sounds entirely realistic. Childhood was different then.

Engaging though these period details may be, this is in itself insufficient reason to read Thirkell. What makes her novels so delightful is their humour. The affairs that occupy the minds of her characters are classic village concerns. In that respect, we could as easily be in Benson’s Tilling as we are in the Risings. There are dislikes and feuds; there are romantic ambitions; there are social encounters in which people engage in highly amusing exchanges. These come thick and fast, just as they do in Tilling, and are every bit as delicious. Affection for the social comedy is not something we should have to apologise for, even if that sort of thing is eschewed in the contemporary novel. Such matters may seem unimportant, but they say a lot about human nature. Above all, though, we do not read Angela Thirkell for profundity of emotional experience; we read her for the pleasure of escape – and there is a perfectly defensible niche for escapist fiction in a balanced literary diet.

Another attraction is the coruscating wit of the dialogue and, to an extent, of the authorial observations. Angela Thirkell is perhaps the most Pym-like of any twentieth-century author, after Barbara Pym herself, of course. The essence of this quality is wry observation of the posturing of others, coupled with something that comes close to self-mockery. The various members of the Leslie family in Wild Strawberries are extremely funny. Lady Leslie, like Mrs Morland in High Rising, is a galleon in full sail, and we can only marvel at and delight in the wit of both.

The exchanges that take place between the characters in these books would look distinctly out of place in a modern novel – but therein, I believe, lies their charm. These people talk, and behave, as if they are in a Noël Coward play. In real life, a succession of insouciant sparkling observations would become tedious, but it is impossible to read these books without stopping every page or two to smile or to laugh at the sheer audacity of the characters and their ebullient enthusiasms. We are caught up by precisely those questions that illuminate the novels of Jane Austen: who will marry whom? Who will neatly be put in her place? Which men will escape and which will be caught? These are not the great questions of literature, but they are diverting, which is one of the roles of fiction. Angela Thirkell creates and peoples a world whose note can be heard today only in the tiniest of echoes, but in her books it comes through loud and clear, reminding us that the good comic novel can easily, and with grace, transcend the years that stand between us and the time of its creation.

Alexander McCall Smith, 2012

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We were inspired to find out more about the wonderful world of male impersonators

in the nineteenth century and beyond. Here are a few of our favourite findings:

1. Male impersonation in performance can be seen as early as medieval England, with husbands and wives donning each other’s clothes for Christmas ‘mumming’ performances.

2. One of the earliest documented male impersonators was a woman called Mary Frith (or Moll Cutpurse) a pickpocket who gained notoriety in the fifteenth century for wearing a doublet and britches, smoking a pipe and swearing in public.

3. Between 1660 and 1700 (when the first female actresses were allowed on stage, replacing Shakespeare’s infamous men in dresses) it is estimated that nearly a quarter of all plays performed on London stages contained one or more roles for actresses in male clothes, also known as ‘breeches roles’.

4. The practice of women performing en travesti (literally in [male] disguise) in operas became increasingly common in the early nineteenth century as castrato singers went out of fashion and were replaced by mezzo-sopranos or contraltos in the young masculine roles.

5. Late nineteenth- and twentieth-century male impersonators include: Annie Hindle (a New Yorker who went on to marry her dresser in 1886), Afro-American Blues singer Gladys Bentley (who performed in male attire in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco from the 1920s through to the 1940s), Billy Tipton (a Southern American swing artist, born Dorothy Lucille Tipton, who was only revealed to be female upon her death aged seventy-four in 1989), and the most famous and well paid music hall male impersonator of her day, Vesta Tilley—who found international fame and performed for over thirty years (retiring in 1920) as a female soprano in full male garb. As well as being a hugely popular entertainer, Tilley was also particularly famous for playing a significant role in the recruitment efforts of World War One.

6. Although still nowhere near as prevalent as male to female impersonation in entertainment, examples of the influence of male impersonators can be seen in popular culture from Julie Andrews in Victor/ Victoria the 1982 adaptation of the 1933 German musical comedy of the same name about a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman, to the 1993 adaptation of Virginia Woolfe’s Orlando: A Biography staring Tilda Swinton as the titular Orlando, a young man who, two thirds of the way through the film, wakes to find himself metamorphosed into the body of a woman.

7. According to the OED ‘drag king’ as a term for female performers dressing in male clothing was first cited in print in 1972 by Bruce Rodgers in The Queens' Vernacular: A Gay Lexicon.

If this post has left you eager to find out more about the real-life women who might have inspired Tipping the Velvet you can find out more about the famous music hall male impersonators Vesta Tilley and Billy Tipton in Vesta Tilley by Sara Maitland and Suits Me: The Double Life Of Billy Tipton by Diane Middlebrook.

To see more related images head to our Tipping the Velvet inspired pinboard over on Pinterest.

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We received an enormous number of entries and each one of them was enlightening, funny, fascinating and hopeful. Thank you all. There could be only one winner though, and after much deliberation and discussion, the editors have chosen the piece ‘Save the Bush’ by Alice Stride. Many congratulations, Alice!

Congratulations too to our shortlisted entries, each of whom wins a copy of Fifty Shades of Feminism.

Edel Brady
Jennifer Brough
Jen Campbell
Cora Gilroy-Ware
Caitlin Hayward-Tapp
Rachel Mackey
Harriet Williams

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I must confess to a weakness: I am simply incapable of resisting a good old-fashioned comic novel. I came to this kind of fiction relatively late, having been raised in a boffinish sort of household where books, though good and plentiful, tended to belong to the more serious end of the spectrum. But then I was introduced by altruistic types of my acquaintance to the novels of Wodehouse, Benson, Delafield, Gibbons and Pym, and found myself swept along on a healing tide of wit, exuberance and sheer delight in the comic possibilities of the English language and character. These are the writers to whom I turn when I am feeling in need of amusement, comfort, solace or simple relaxation, and I know they won’t let me down.

Imagine my pleasure, then, in discovering recently another classic author, hitherto unknown to me, to add to my collection of delicious comic voices. Angela Thirkell was born in 1890 and began her writing career with journalism and short stories in the 1920s, mainly to make ends meet when she found herself in the position of single mother to young boys (like her heroine Laura Morland in High Rising). She brought out a handful of books in the early 1930s, and in 1933 hit upon the magic formula with High Rising, an English country-house comedy set in the fictional county of Barsetshire. The second book in the series, Wild Strawberries, was published the following year, and a couple of dozen more followed over the next two decades. She was prolific, very successful and hugely loved by her readers. As in the comic novels of her contemporaries such as Wodehouse, romantic entanglements, broken or ill-conceived engagements, one-upmanship and social high-jinks are the order of the day in her Barsetshire stories – but they are written with great warmth, affection and feminine insight, and these qualities shine through too.

High Rising’s Laura Morland, a lady novelist of renown, is a winning heroine, somewhere between Flora Poste of Cold Comfort Farm and Helen Cresswell’s Mrs Bagthorpe in her ability to sow harmony where there is discord, her exasperated tender adoration of her sons and her friends, and her constant habit of shedding hairpins at moments of stress. The novel opens at Christmas time, when Laura and her youngest son Tony travel to their cottage in the eponymous Barsetshire village and are reunited with their indomitable cook Stoker, eccentric local landowner George Knox, who lives in the big house at neighbouring Low Rising, Laura’s suave London publisher Adrian Coates, and many other delightful characters.

Wild Strawberries has a more straightforwardly romantic plot, being the story of a love triangle between beautiful but cash-strapped Mary Preston and her relatives David and John Leslie, scions of the Rushwater estate, located in some other lush corner of Thirkell’s Barsetshire. But the repartee, sharp observation and irresistible comedy are there still, particularly in the persons of the matriarch Lady Emily and her daughter Agnes, who manage the great house and Agnes’ vast brood of children in admirably chaotic fashion.

I read these two and a few other Barsetshire novels appropriately enough in the run-up to Christmas last year; December festivities were under way, there was tinsel in the air, but for me personally it was an unsettled time of being temporarily between addresses and somewhat at sixes and sevens. Angela Thirkell’s High Rising and Wild Strawberries offered the perfect antidote: they were wonderful, easy-going company – funny, charming, as comforting as coming in to a roaring log fire from the cold night outside – and I couldn’t think of anything nicer than to republish them for a new audience of Virago Modern Classics readers. I very much hope you enjoy them this Christmas.

Rowan Cope, Virago Commissioning Editor

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There’s no way to tell the whole truth about a life. If we think of our own lives, and want to tell all, it would be impossible. From the start – a biography of Eliot – I asked myself: what story do you want to tell? In the case of a writer’s life, the answer comes readily because poems and novels direct the biographer to the vital story, what Henry James calls, famously, ‘the pattern in the carpet’ of a great career.

Eliot’s story was simple: ‘the sequence that culminates in faith’. He explores this repeatedly, dramatising the tension between the model lives of the saints, ‘burning in every moment’, and the flaws of people like himself. A gift to a biographer is his honesty about his flaws: his pride, intolerance, and guilt over his treatment of women. ‘Things ill done and done to others’ harm’, he confesses in his wartime masterpiece, Four Quartets.

Vital to Eliot’s spiritual search were five remarkable and very different women: his mother, the guiding light; his first wife, Vivienne, who provided the inferno for his poetry; his first love, Emily Hale, a Bostonian drama teacher whom his poetry transformed into a Beatrice figure, a ‘Lady of Silences’; the brisk, brainy Mary Trevelyan, his companion in the forties and fifties; and finally his much younger second wife, Valerie Eliot, who offered him forgiveness.  I wanted to find out what they were like in actual life and what they wanted, measured against what Eliot made of them in his imagination. It was fascinating to find how far they lent themselves to the roles his poetry assigned.

Henry James had a power, beyond that of any other man, to plumb the unknown potentialities of women. I wanted to tell the story of two women in particular. The first was his beloved cousin, Minny Temple, a free spirit – far too free for James’s mother – who was the real-life ‘heroine’ of his youth in Newport, Rhode Island. The second woman was his friend and fellow-writer, Constance Fenimore Woolson, a great-niece of James Fenimore Cooper, whose depressive solitude led to her suicide in Venice in 1894. Both drew James’s attention, a creative attention that claimed them through their untimely deaths. I was intrigued by the creative fertility of James’s almost obsessive, posthumous relationships with these rare women.

I’ve always chosen lives that push me to experiment with biography. Eliot’s masks opened up the challenge of the hidden life, as did James’s concentration on secrets: the centrality of what is unstated. Both Eliot and James direct the biographer to the gaps and silences, the mystery at the core of lives. Both are sceptical about the kind of outer shell stressed in what used to be called ‘definitive’ biography: the official chronicle of public events like, say, the Nobel Prize ceremony Eliot attended in 1948.  ‘Our lives are covered by the currents of action’, he remarks. To peel back the visible action, to discern the movements of the mind and spirit, this is the exciting challenge.

Lyndall Gordon

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Tipping the Velvet follows the glittering career of Nan King on her journey from Whitstable oyster-girl to music-hall star to cross-dressing rentboy to East End 'tom'. Its a saucy, sensuous and multi-layered historical romance set in the 'roaring' 1890s.

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I have to confess that I really fall for books with quirky/odd titles and covers and The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed out of the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson definitely has both. The book’s plot is just as oddball as its title and follows slipper clad Allan Karlsson as he escapes through the window of his nursing  home and shuffles off on a somewhat perilous (for those who encounter him anyway) and absolutely hilarious, quite madcap journey through Sweden, picking up the most unlikely cohorts along the way. Throughout Allan’s journey, the reader also learns about his history, and his “right place (or in many cases, very wrong), right  time” luck which has led to his involvement in everything from the creation of the first nuclear bomb in America to political uprisings in Bali and China to the first-hand sampling of the delights of a Russian gulag. This book is devilishly funny and incredibly sharp. Its story packs much more of a punch than expected and each character is extremely well crafted and unique. I was genuinely upset that the book had to end! However, it is impossible to feel anything but happy after reading it.

- Naomi Doerge, Publicity Assistant

When I read that Stylist had quoted Daughter of Smoke and Bone as ‘Northern Lights and Pan’s Labyrinth in one’ – I was already hooked.  The idea of fantastical worlds colliding with our own isn’t new but Laini Taylor’s world building is both beautiful and haunting. Seventeen year old Karou is our heroine, art student in Prague in the human world yet also errand girl to Brimstone, a monstrous creature who is the closest thing she has to family. Brimstone trades in teeth, for reasons that Karou still doesn’t understand, and his shop resides not in our world but in ‘Elsewhere’  a place that is neither here nor there. Karou doesn’t know how she came to be and is plagued by the idea that she might not be whole. With the secret doors to Elsewhere closing, Karou must decide between her human life or the war-ravaged world that might hold answers to who she really is. This is a gripping, unique tale wonderfully visualised and brought to life. It’s the first instalment to what promises to be a fascinating trilogy.

- Hollie Smyth, Marketing Executive

Nora Ephron is famous for many things, most notably her films – When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle – and her wonderful novel Heartburn. But this collection of short pieces, mainly written for newspapers and magazines over the years, shows off her sharp wit, keen eye for the absurd and her absolute class. It’s full of gems about  so many things: being a woman, negotiating relationships and break ups, what it’s like to live in New York, and her love of cooking, that ring true whatever your age. But she’s not just funny – every so often you come across a sentence that you stumble on for its haunting truth. The last chapter in which Ephron, by now inured to the changes age has brought about, looks forward to reaching her eighties with her husband is particularly sad when read now, just months after her death at the age of seventy-one. So read this, if you haven’t already. You’ll be so glad you did.

- Victoria Pepe, Junior Commissioning Editor

Related posts:

1. What we're reading this month
2. Girl Reading – our next Virago Book Club choice
3. Girl Reading is Cosmo's Book of the Week

Matt Thorne called Sarah Waters ‘one of the best storytellers alive today’ and surely few would disagree.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be discussing this wonderful Victorian novel, and will run a competition to win copies of the gorgeous new hardback VMC edition as well as the DVD of Andrew Davies’ BBC adaptation. Among other things, there will be fun over on Twitter as we wonder what your Victorian stage name might be. And why not visit For Books’ Sake, who’ll be discussing the book alongside us, as well as holding a competition to win a copy of our gorgeous new paperback edition.

And this is why Virago loves this book:

Carleen Peters, Senior Marketing Executive

I’ll be honest – I was a little worried when Tipping the Velvet was picked for this month’s book club. I’m a bit of a contemporary fiction diehard, so post-university, the closest I generally come to reading anything vaguely historical is dipping into Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald or Kerouac.

So I was really pleasantly surprised to find that it was the little historical flourishes that I liked most about Sarah Waters’ debut novel. From musical hall mashers to the Victorian lesbian scene and all the streets, houses and politics of 1890’s London in-between, I LOVED delving deep into the worlds that Waters described.

The descriptions of the musical hall costumes and songs and the effect they had on audiences had me wishing I was there, drawing parallels between the musical hall scene of yore and the modern burlesque revival (and yes, okay, dreaming about strolling the streets in a little Victorian dandy outfit of my own!).  I loved the use of idiom and Waters’ capacity for double entendre (I can’t believe that the names Nancy and Kitty are a coincidence) and also enjoyed the insight into the gay Victorian scene – my knowledge of which before Tipping relating mostly to Oscar Wilde.

Victoria Pepe, Junior Commissioning Editor

I started reading Tipping the Velvet about a week after I began working for Virago in 2007. It was the one book that so many of my new colleagues pressed upon me to read and so I started reading straight away and became completely hooked. I finished the book in about a day and quickly moved on to all of Sarah’s other novels. I loved them all, and still recommend them to everyone I know. They’re all brilliant. But Tipping the Velvet always has a special place in my heart. It’s funny, it’s bawdy, it’s gripping, it trips across London and delights in making you laugh, gasp and cry and I urge you to read it if you haven’t already.

Hollie Smyth, Marketing Executive

What I love about Tipping the Velvet is the glorious way in which Sarah Waters brings to life a whole new side to Victorian London from the jolly, colourful music halls brimming with fantastic characters to the intriguing worlds of the gay and lesbian scenes that all had to exist shrouded in secrecy. The language is full of fabulous phrases (swell, tom, masher). It’s mischievous, funny, touching and highly entertaining. Although the theatrical phase of Nan King’s life was my favourite, every new stage to her story was wonderfully executed and fabulously more explicit than the last. Sarah has an uncanny ability to draw the reader completely into her world, close enough that you can smell and hear Victorian London all around you. A rare treat indeed.

Naomi Doerge, Publicity Assistant

What I love so much about Tipping the Velvet is the complexity and many nuances of Sarah’s characters and their relationships with one another. Nan may progress from a shy and withdrawn oyster girl to a bawdy and daring Londoner but despite her many changes, I love that even at the end of the novel, there is always a shade of the early vulnerability and romanticism to her which so endeared the reader from the start. I think that there are no ‘heroines’ or ‘villains’ in Tipping, each character is as flawed as the last and each relationship in the novel is ultimately shaped by the character’s previous one. I love Tipping for its colourful atmosphere and the drama and decadence of its scenes, but the way in which each character is so carefully layered, with hidden depths and sometimes shocking actions, is what draws me so deeply into its pages.

Related posts:

1. Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters, our next Virago Book Club choice
2. Girl Reading: Our next Virago book club choice
3. Girl Reading – our next Virago Book Club choice

Today’s extract is taken from May's entry for November 8th 1939.

Wednesday, November 8th:

Was proceeding in my usual hurried manner to school this afternoon when Mr H stopped me and asked if I had Been Following the Situation. Said uncertainly Well No, to which he declared that All Things Point the Same Way – the Small Countries are going to be Wiped Out. With that he solemnly departed, and I resumed my way to school very uneasily.
Seemed to spend the afternoon snarling. Children shouldn’t be made with such chatty natures. They should make excellent conversationalists when they grow up – they have a perpetual and never-ending flow of small talk.

These Wonderful Rumours! is available as a beautiful hardback and as an eBook now.

View previous excerpts:

A look inside These Wonderful Rumours! Extract Four.

A look inside These Wonderful Rumours! Extract Three.

A look inside These Wonderful Rumours! Extract Two.

A look inside These Wonderful Rumours! Extract One.

Related posts:

1. A look inside These Wonderful Rumours! Extract Two.
2. A look inside These Wonderful Rumours! Extract Three.
3. A look inside These Wonderful Rumours! Extract Four.

 Damage – her first novel – remains one of the most chilling explorations of physical passion and dark obsessive love ever written. Memorably filmed in 1992 starring Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche, the Sunday Times described it as 'genuinely frightening in its ruthless intensity'.

World Book Night 2013 launches today with the announcement of the full list of titles, and the official opening of the giver recruitment process.  20,000 members of the public will volunteer to give away 20 copies of one of 20 books on 23^rd April 2013 to help spread a love of reading.  In total, 400,000 books will be distributed by individual givers  –  the equivalent of an average day’s book sales in the UK. An additional 100,000 books will be distributed centrally by World Book Night through charity partners and institutions.

World Book Night CEO Julia Kingsford said:

“Fiction and non-fiction, classic and contemporary, prize winners and bestsellers; this year’s World Book Night books are united by being brilliantly enjoyable reads. With the help of 20,000 passionate volunteers putting them directly into the hands of those who don’t regularly read, they’ll inspire hundreds of thousands of people across the country to fall in love with reading.”

If you would like to be a giver at next year's World Book Night, here's how you can register to take part.

And for more information on WBN, and the full list of next year's books, see here for details.

Virago has just published Life Saving, a wonderful selection of introductions from Josephine Hart's Poetry Hour.

Related posts:

1. REBECCA has been chosen for World Book Night
2. World Book Night – Call for Volunteer Book Givers
3. Some favourite quotes from Damage, our Virago Book Club choice

Read on for more information about these titles, including a snippet from each.

Forbidden Lessons in a Kabul Guesthouse

'Terrific . . . the moving story of a remarkable woman'
Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner

'An inspirational tale'
Daily Telegraph

Suraya Sadeed grew up in a peaceful Afghanistan. Following the Soviet invasion in 1979, she left for America with her family, building a new life. But after a sudden tragedy, Suraya returned to Afghanistan for a visit that changed everything.

Shocked by the suffering and destruction wreaked on her homeland, Suraya was determined to help. Smuggling herself across borders in various disguises, braving warlords and drug-runners, she set up an underground girls' schools in Kabul in order to bring hope and aid to thousands of Afghans. Once back in America she founded Help the Afghan Children, a charity that over 17 years has raised millions to set up schools and clinics in Afghanistan and to help the displaced people of the region.

The true story of an extraordinarily courageous Afghan woman, Forbidden Lessons in a Kabul Guesthouse is essential reading for anyone wanting to find out more about the situation in Afghanistan and the efforts being made to improve it.

Forbidden Lessons in a Kabul Guesthouse is now available in paperback.

Read a snippet from Forbidden Lessons in a Kabul Guesthouse.

Under the Hawthorn Tree

Jingqiu, an innocent young woman from a politically questionable family in the city, is selected as one of a small group of students to be sent to the countryside to work on a project that will further the Cultural Revolution. Clever, curious and eager, she tries to fit in with her hosts and the rural way of life, and it isn't appropriate for her to fall in love. But she does, with the son of a mighty army general. This beautiful, simple story of love against the odds will break your heart.

Originally appearing on a Chinese website in 2007, Under the Hawthorn Tree  went on to sell over one million copies in China and has been made into a film by acclaimed director Zhang Yimou. Touching and inspiring, it has been embraced across generations and cultures worldwide.

Ai Mi is a pseudonym. She lives in the United States, after having grown up in China.

Under the Hawthorn Tree is now available in paperback.

Read a snippet from Under the Hawthorn Tree.

Related posts:

1. Monthly Highlights: August 2012
2. Monthly Highlights: September 2012
3. October Inspiration: Gillian Slovo on her mother, Ruth First

A unique snapshot into life on the Home Front, through May Smith’s diary we gain a brand new understanding of how the people of Britain coped with the uncertainty, the heartbreak and the black comedy of life during wartime.

Today’s extract is taken from May's entry for November 6th 1939.

 Monday, November 6th

Our first day on full time again. Goodness! Felt as if I’d done a week’s toil and grind at the end of it. Escaped with relief.

Our weekly inroad into International Relations this evening. Mr G made his usual involved and high-sounding outbursts. Every sentence either began or ended with ‘In hard practice’ and we all had to stifle hysterical giggles. Could hear Charlie Fairbrother asking Where Hard Practice is – is it in the Balkans? whereat all in his row giggled, and I was afraid the man G would hear them.

Mr H was enquiring very earnestly about The Red Menace, and seems to have a positive complex about it. He asked in a sinister way, ‘What about Russia and Japan? What if Germany Goes Red?; What about Communism among the English Intellectuals?’ And so forth.

For more fun titbits from These Wonderful Rumours! you can now follow @MaySmithsDiary on Twitter.

These Wonderful Rumours! is available as a beautiful hardback and as an eBook now.

Related posts:

1. A look inside These Wonderful Rumours! Extract Three.
2. A look inside These Wonderful Rumours! Extract Two.
3. A look inside These Wonderful Rumours! Out Now.

Observant, witty and sometimes delightfully dry, May’s diaries offer a unique snapshot into life on the Home Front.

Today’s extract is taken from May's entry for November 5th 1939.

Sunday, November 5th

Bonfire Night, whiz bang! Or rather pitter-patter, lash, lash, howl, howl. It was a really dreadful night, wild storms and as dark as the proverbial bag. The wind rose and moaned around the house, and we groped our way blindly to Grandma’s. No degrees of darkness tonight – just one thick blanket without shape colour or dimension. Usually one can distinguish a dark grey object here or a moving shape there, but not tonight. The darkness seemed to have seeped into everything.

For more fun titbits from These Wonderful Rumours! you can now follow @MaySmithsDiary on Twitter.

These Wonderful Rumours! is available as a beautiful hardback now. These Wonderful Rumours! is also available as an eBook.

Related posts:

1. A look inside These Wonderful Rumours! Extract Two.
2. A look inside These Wonderful Rumours! Out Now.
3. An Exclusive Look at the Handwritten Diaries and Artefacts Behind These Wonderful Rumours!

Today’s extract is taken from May's entry for November 2nd 1939.

Thursday, November 2nd

End of term today. Broke up for our marvellously long holiday. After promising us very grandly a week, they fling a scrap of a day at us.

Yanked myself to the English lecture. The emaciated young lady there again, very earnestly making apt remarks, leaning forwards as she did so to Mr Addison, while the rest of us sat back and looked dumb. Mr Addison’s nostrils contract as he speaks, but I think he has a nice face – shrewd and intelligent and clean.

My blue wool georgette arrived from Mrs W, and is awfully sweet and has the general approval. Paraded in same.

For more fun titbits from These Wonderful Rumours! (for those who missed the photo of Dougie see here!) you can now follow @MaySmithsDiary on Twitter.

These Wonderful Rumours! is available as a beautiful hardback now. These Wonderful Rumours! is also available as an eBook.

Related posts:

1. A look inside These Wonderful Rumours! Out Now.
2. An Exclusive Look at the Handwritten Diaries and Artefacts Behind These Wonderful Rumours!
3. A sneak preview of The Red Book

To celebrate publication we are giving Virago readers an exclusive look inside the book with a series of extracts from May's diaries from the years 1939-1945.

Today's extract is taken from May's entry for November 1st 1939.

Wednesday, November 1st:

Had a voluminous mail this morn – 3 letters, from Dougie, Vera and Hilda Tooth. Dougie says viciously that he wants to have A Real Good Bust at some sort of a German, and thinks he will enlist as a carpenter. How he will have his bust that way, I know not. He is now 12 st 3! How coarse and obese! He has picked a cockerel from his stock for me for Christmas, but says that it is still wilting under the strain of present circumstances. Fancy being wooed with a cockerel!

Miss Tooth’s effusion was very stilted and precise, as usual, but quite friendly and very typical. She is annoyed, in a ladylike way, about our one day’s holiday instead of the promised week, but has decided philosophically to Grin and Bear It like a True Briton, fortifying ourselves with the knowledge that Christmas is not far away. She says that the Birmingham teachers are bemoaning the cold and asking what it will be like in the winter. She adds grimly Perhaps It is Better that they should Not Know.

For more fun titbits from These Wonderful Rumours! (today including a very fetching photo of Dougie!) you can now follow @MaySmithsDiary on Twitter.

These Wonderful Rumours! is available as a beautiful hardback now. These Wonderful Rumours! is also available as an eBook.

Related posts:

1. An Exclusive Look at the Handwritten Diaries and Artefacts Behind These Wonderful Rumours!
2. The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister – new acquisition for Virago

To mark publication we caught up with Susie to find out what inspired her to write her latest book — the deliciously dark, moving and sometimes humorous tale of Harriet Mansfield, a damaged woman who seeks to right the wrongs of her own upbringing by giving a school full of precocious little girls the happy childhood she wished she'd had.

Just before I started writing The Small Hours, I read the diary of Alice James, William and Henry James’s sister, and was struck by the character of this super-intelligent, outlandish, outspoken, mischievous, passionate invalid. I briefly thought of writing a book about her, or someone like her: a woman who was perhaps as able as her distinguished brothers but because of the lack of opportunities for women in her times, and her failing health, was not able to leave the sort of stunning legacy that they left. Alice’s wit, her unceasing consciousness and her supreme mental agility, crossed with the paralysis leading from the ‘bankruptcy of her health’, really caught my imagination.

At this point I was also looking for a nursery for my daughter and was astonished by how fraught some of the schools I visited were. I remember posing a mild query to one of the heads, nothing approaching a criticism, and her responding, ‘I only want you here if you love me and you love my school!’ At another school the head proudly read out a letter from a satisfied parent praising the nursery very highly, but when I looked closely at the envelope it was from years ago and had yellowed with age. Both teachers were quite disparaging about other schools in the neighbourhood. I could see their schools represented not just their hopes and dreams but a chance for them to enforce their belief systems. These women, it seemed to me, shared one thing in common: they hated, loathed and abominated being in the wrong.

What would make these teachers so passionate and defensive? Obviously the work they were doing was everything to them. In my imagination I decided that they must be so obsessive about their schools because they were trying to set right something that had gone awry in their own childhoods. What might it be? I allowed my thoughts to run free. What if opening the schools was a way of trying to bear something that wasn’t bearable? Could that sort of literal response to pain ever work? What if some break with their own families made them want to fill their lives with as many new parents and children of their own as they could possibly find? To fill the void left by a feud with a whole lot of new stock?

So the difficult, brilliant and invalid Alice James character and the nursery teachers I met and heard about somehow came together in my head, where Lucy Snowe from Villette, Olive Chancellor from The Bostonians and Miss Jean Brodie were also jostling for my attention. Alice’s physical difficulties were partially translated into Harriet’s mental difficulties and her ungainliness. (She is six feet tall in the book.) The limited opportunities of Alice’s times were somehow translated into the impediments that growing up in a very unloving family can provide. From all these things my, endearing, maddening, courageous and self-destructive heroine Harriet Mansfield was born.

The Small Hours is available from all good book retailers as a beautiful hardback and ebook now.

Related posts:

1. Early Praise for Susie Boyt’s The Small Hours
2. September Inspiration: Susie Boyt recommends Elizabeth Taylor
3. Find out in today's guest post how Stella Duffy discovered the heroine of her new novel, THEODORA

Those of you who follow us on Facebook and Twitter will already know how very excited we are to be publishing These Wonderful Rumours!, the newly discovered wartime diaries of a young school teacher, which will be available to buy next week. Now we are very pleased to give you a sneak peek at the handwritten diaries and artefacts which came together to become this wonderful book.

(Double Click on an Image to Enlarge)

May’s diaries, which were presented to Virago in pristine condition by the late author’s son, shine a unique and surprising light onto life on the Home Front. At the outbreak of World War Two, May Smith was just twenty-four. She lived in a small village near Derby with her parents, and taught at the local elementary school. The war brought many changes: evacuees arrived in the village; nights were broken by the wail of the siren as bombers flew overhead; the young men of May’s circle donned khaki and disappeared to far-flung places to ‘do their bit’. But a great deal remained the same: May still enjoyed tennis parties, holidays to Llandudno and going shopping for new outfits – coupons and funds permitting. And it was during these difficult times that May fell in love.

These Wonderful Rumours! is the perfect accompaniment to books such as The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and Nella Last’s War (dramatised on the BBC as Housewife 49) and has something for readers of everything from social history and nostalgia memoirs to fiction and non-fiction set during World War Two. Through May Smith’s observant, witty and sometimes acerbic diary, we gain a new understanding of how the people of Britain coped with the uncertainty, the heartbreak and the black comedy of life during wartime.

For more fun titbits from These Wonderful Rumours! you can now follow @MaySmithsDiary on Twitter.

And stay tuned to the website for exclusive extracts from the book – coming next week!

Related posts:

1. The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister – new acquisition for Virago
2. Bitter Leaf – exclusive reading by author
3. Starting the year as we mean to go on: with a wonderful review of a January debut!

And we want to hear from you. We are running a competition for one lucky feminist to have their work included in the book. The winning entry will sit in the anthology alongside some of the greatest writers and commentators of our time: Siri Hudstvedt, Linda Grant, Bidisha, Natasha Walter, Jeanette Winterson, Helena Kennedy, Shami Chakrabarti and many more.

We want to know what twenty-fives and under are thinking about feminism and so we're looking for the views of those on the cusp of their adult life to contribute to our new book. We need up to 1000 words on what feminism means to you. With this competition we are trying to reach young feminists whose views might otherwise not be represented in this book.

But hurry – you don’t have long! We need your entries emailed to us at virago@littlebrown.co.uk by midnight on Thursday 1 November. Alternatively you can post your pieces to Virago Press, 100 Victoria Embankment, London, EC4Y 0DY, ensuring we receive them by the closing date. See full terms and conditions here.

So . . . what are you waiting for?

Related posts:

1. Win signed copies of The Lifeboat!

Punjab, Pakistan, June 2009. 

The temperature is 45° and you have been out picking fruit for several hours. It's exhausting, sweaty work, but you have five children to feed. At midday you go to the nearest well, pick up a cup and take a long drink of cool water. You refill the cup, drink some more and then offer it to another woman.

Suddenly one of your fellow workers cries out that the water belongs to the Muslim women and that with your actions, you –a Christian – have contaminated it. An argument ignites and in an instant, with one word, your fate is sealed. 'Blasphemy!' someone shouts. A charge punishable by death.

This is just the start of the heart-breaking, true story of Asia Bibi, whose startling memoir, Blasphemy, we publish this month.

Recently Rimsha Masih, a teenage girl with learning difficulties who was accused of desecrating the Koran for carrying burnt pages of the book in a carrier bag made global headlines with world leaders and human rights activists calling for Pakistan to reform its blasphemy laws. Rimsha has since been freed.

Meanwhile Asia Bibi sits, sentenced to die. The only way to affect change is for us to hear and pass on her story – shocking and inspiring – which she tells us from her prison cell.

As one Amazon reviewer says:

‘Many have spoken for her including the Pope yet three years on and she is no closer to freedom. What can we do? I asked this question over and over. When tens of thousands of people can gather to call for the death of one woman, where are the crowds to call for her release? If the west is so large and so strong why can't we free her?’

You can find out more about Blasphemy and Asia Bibi here . Blasphemy is available from Virago now.

Related posts:

1. Gillian Slovo is elected 25th President of English PEN
2. Today Marks the 75th Anniversary of Winifred Holtby's Death
3. Is there a story that has a permanent place in your heart?

So without further ado, here's a selection of what we're reading this month:

Me Talk Pretty One Day is a hilarious collection of stories from the life and times of US humourist David Sedaris. Sedaris has an uncanny ability to observe the idiosyncrasies of life and deliver them up in an eye wateringly funny manner. Topics range from learning French whilst living in Paris (and the difficulties with limited vocab to express the celebration of Easter −“It is a party for the little boy of God who call himself Jesus,” “He nice, the Jesus”) to becoming a conceptual artist whilst on crystal meth to becoming part of a furniture removal team in Manhattan (“My place [was] here, riding in a bread truck with my friends. My friend the communist, my friend the schizophrenic and my friend the murderer.”) If you want a book that will brighten up your day this is definitely for you.

- Hollie Smyth

A repeat appearance from David Sedaris this month with both Vogue and the LA Times likening my pick – Sloane Crosley’s eloquent, madcap and (yes, I’ll admit it) pant-wettingly funny essays on her life in the Big City – to the aforementioned master of loopy, cranky, hilariousness.  I picked this up for the chintzy hipster cover and the great title, which perfectly sums up the silly and ever so slightly wretched tales which await. I stayed for the creepy and rather vain realisation that in Sloane Crosley city girls everywhere will likely see themselves.  She covers everything from the traumas of her first job (an essay which starts ‘There comes a point in most abusive relationships when it occurs to the beaten party that they are guilty of putting their face in the way of someone else’s fist.’), to the surprising and hilarious difficulties involved in fulfilling her long-time ambition to have a one night stand.

At the time of writing I am head over heels in love with this book. If you like Sedaris, Candace Bushnell circa Sex and the City, or are just looking for something smart, irreverent, hilarious, and ultimately quite touching to read – I’d recommend this!

- Carleen Peters

I had the best recommendation of all for this book – from my mother – so I had high expectations about Josephine Tey’s 1953 classic novel based upon the infamous Princes in the Tower murders supposedly committed by Richard III. And it didn’t disappoint. It’s a fascinating piece of historical detection on the part of Tey, disguised as a police procedural starring her regular series character, Alan Grant. Grant becomes transfixed by a portrait of Richard while recovering in hospital from a fall, surprised that the face in the painting looks nothing like the monster of legend, and begins to dig into the facts and myth surrounding the murders. The Daughter of Time, as well as being a gripping page-turner, has greatly influenced the debate around one of our most controversial monarchs, and indeed later works by the likes of Alison Weir and Phillipa Gregory. And my mother’s timing was good too, as no sooner had I finished it than Richard’s body (possibly, still awaiting confirmation) was discovered underneath a Leicester car-park, rather prosaically, reigniting a centuries old debate again.

- Stephen Dumughn

Related posts:

1. The Paris Wife is a Mumsnet Book of the Month!
2. Girl Reading is Cosmo's Book of the Week

Read on for more information on both.

A Force to be Reckoned With

Everyone knows three things about the Women’s Institute: that they spent the war making jam; that the sensational Calendar Girls were WI; and, more recently, that the WI were responsible for the slow-handclapping of Tony Blair.

In this first fully independent history of the WI, Jane Robinson illustrates how the WI became one of the most powerful and high profile organisations in the UK. Now nearly a century old, the WI’s ‘think globally, act locally’ ethic has placed it at the forefront of change from practical improvements on a village scale to national campaigning.

Based on WI archives, both local and national, and on first-hand accounts by members past and present, this is a history bursting with originality, unique influence, vivid personalities and an indomitable spirit.

Daily Mail, 'This highly entertaining history of the movement shines a light on a far more radical and important organisation'

Daily Express, ‘An arresting read’

A Force to be Reckoned With is now available in paperback.

Tea by the Nursery Fire

Emily Huckwell spent almost her entire life working for one family . . .

Born in a tiny Sussex village in the 1870s, Emily went into domestic service in the Burton household before she was twelve, earning £5 a year. She began as a nursery maid, steadily progressing to under nurse and then head nanny, looking after two generations of children.

One of the children in Emily’s care was William, the father of Noel Streatfeild. Noel is the author of the well-known Ballet Shoes and one of the best-loved children's writers of the 20th century. In Tea by the Nursery Fire, Noel tells Emily's story, carefully pieced together from fact and family hearsay. With Noel’s characteristic warmth and intimacy, the reader is transported to Victorian and Edwardian life above and below stairs, and meets the extraordinary woman who raised many children with as much love and tenderness as though they were her own.

Daily Mail, ‘Streatfeild’s narrative skills have woven a delightfully warm and nostalgic story of a life as rigidly hierarchal below as above stairs’

Tea by the Nursery Fire is now available in paperback.

Related posts:

1. Monthly Highlights: August 2012
2. September Inspiration: Susie Boyt recommends Elizabeth Taylor
3. Naomi Wolf has arrived in the UK

We’ll be discussing this extraordinary book from 22nd October onwards, and we’d love to know what you think.

You can join the conversation on our forum or email us a review at virago.press@littlebrown.co.uk 

Happy Reading!

The Virago Team

For more information on Sarah Waters, visit www.sarahwaters.com.

Related posts:

1. Girl Reading: Our next Virago book club choice
2. Sarah Waters on writing a ghost story
3. Girl Reading – our next Virago Book Club choice

The author of four previous novels and the hugely popular memoir My Judy Garland Life (Virago, 2009), Boyt’s first novel for Virago is a wonderful, humorous and truly original tale of family and secrets, love and lies and one woman’s quest to spill some retrospective kindness onto her own harsh beginnings by giving a school full of precocious little girls, rich in everything but care, the happy childhood she herself dreamt of.

Praise is already coming in for The Small Hours with everyone from authors Alain de Botton & Libby Purves, to Waterstone’s staff and our own international sales reps all writing in to say how much they are loving it:

`You have to read The Small Hours by Susie Boyt- amazing'
Emma Herdman, Waterstone's

`Like the writing of Siri Hustvedt the intense story telling is moving, pure and perfect… a clever mix of despair, humour and menace. What a privilege it is to read this book’
Sales Rep, Australia

`Don’t be misled by this book's slight bulk. It packs a mighty wallop'
Sales Rep, Australia

With echoes of A.L. Kennedy, Ali Smith and Colm Tóibín it promises to be a real treat for existing fans of Boyt’s fiction and newcomers alike.

Stay tuned for more on The Small Hours as we approach publication. The Small Hours is published as a beautiful hardback on November 1 2012. The hardback and eBook are available for pre-order now.

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Written and directed by Charles Sturridge, it stars Matthew Rhys, Dame Eileen Atkins, Sheridan Smith, Johdi May and Phoebe Nicholls.

The story is set in England at the time of the coronation of Elizabeth II and begins with the chance meeting of two men who look uncannily alike.

Gripping and complex,  The Scapegoat is a masterful exploration of double identity, and of the dark side of the self. Filled with du Maurier’s trademark elements of suspense, dark humour and unexpected twists it is a wonderful story in the tradition of Don’t Look Now, Rebecca and The Birds.

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I wept when I received my acceptance letter to Harvard, knowing, even without really knowing, what it meant: I was finally free to pursue a life and education unconstrained by the restrictive mores of my suburban Maryland upbringing. I would read Nietzsche! Drop acid! Don black, photograph nudes, pursue a hands-on, dedicated field study of every position in the Kama Sutra!

Little did I realize how quickly those four years of exclamatory endeavors would grind to an abrupt semi-colon; or how ill-prepared I was to face the rest of the sentence, life. Finding a Calling; Earning a Living; Meeting a Mate; Navigating a Marriage; Being a Woman; Surviving Assault; Parenting a Teen; Weathering Failure; Withstanding Illness; Writing a Eulogy: where were those classes in the Harvard course catalogue? Because, really, they would have been a lot more useful than The Monuments of Ancient Japan.

Worse, every five years Harvard forces a discomfiting reckoning with one’s commitment toward anything more taxing than dental hygiene—and even then, who amongst us can honestly say we’re 100% faithful to flossing?—when they ask for a short essay summarizing your life, which subsequently gets shared with all 1600 of your classmates in a printed tome called the red book. Oh, sure, you can lie and tell everyone how perfect your life is, how you’ve never wavered from your one true path, how your spouse is the greatest spouse since the dawn of holy matrimony, and your kids compose arias while simultaneously nailing the formula for cold fusion. Or you can simply choose not to write an entry. But your name and contact information appear in the book regardless of whether you write your micro-biography or not, exposing, via its absence, your inability to complete even the most minor of administrative tasks.

With the imminent approach of my twenty-fifth reunion, the Harvard Alumni Affairs office chose to send me the email asking for my submission the same day I’d angrily flipped open my laptop to google “cheap divorce nyc.” What had my husband and I been arguing about? Oh, who knows? I can’t remember the exact details, but it was no doubt the same fight we’ve been having for twenty-two years—the same narrative with different minutiae, the same verbs with different nouns—and we’d reached a point where we weren’t sure it was worth yet another round of revisions, despite a still-ample inkwell of love. I’d also, that same week, lost my uterus to illness, a good friend to cancer, and the security of our home to the vagaries of the market, after a real estate agent pounded a for-sale sign in front of the Harlem brownstone whose top floors we and our three children have been renting since the start of the recession.

Then there was the issue of my career. In fact, if you are the kind of person whose job it is to predict which industries will die, I have a failsafe scheme for you: call me, ask me to name the industry in which I’m currently embroiled, and short it. Seriously, my track record is impeccable. Photojournalism, TV journalism, magazine journalism, publishing, I’ve planted little flags in each just as the bulldozers arrived.

So there I sat, in front of that blank Word file named “Red_Book_essay_2012,” for days, wondering what to report to my former classmates, all of whom had no doubt weathered life with far more aplomb. The specifics of my story felt embarrassing: my marriage was on the rocks; I’m a novelist in a twitter world; I was about to be homeless. Clearly, my spot at Harvard should have gone to a worthier candidate.

I started flipping back through other red books, hoping for inspiration, realizing that the essays to which I was drawn—like all stories to which I'm drawn—were not the ones that painted the prettiest pictures of life, but those that showed its muddy underbelly: the father mourning the loss of his child; the former happy-go-lucky woman who’d hit a wall of depression; the scads of alumni dealing with infertility, infidelity, dreams deferred indefinitely.

Then I chastised myself: so you’re 46 years old and haven’t figured out life yet? So what? Get a grip! Not on life—it’s a slippery fish—but on your inability to grasp it. Have you loved? Have you lost? Have you made? Have you destroyed? Have you witnessed sunsets, revolutions, kindness, cruelty, first steps and last rites? Congratulations. You’ve lived a life. Now stop pining for a less wriggly version, and set that sucker down.

So I spat out my story, sentence by sentence, and copied and pasted it into the proper blank on the Harvard website. I hit send with a sober mix of relief and mortification. There you are, dear friends: my life, in all of its absurd, naked, unpolished glory.

Of course, there’s still a little time left to change it.

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Why write a book about the vagina?

I have always been interested in female sexuality, and in the history of female sexuality. The way in which any given culture treats the vagina – whether with respect or disrespect, caringly or disparagingly – is a metaphor for how women in general in that place and time are treated. And there have been as many ways of seeing the vagina as  there have been cultures. When I began this journey, I thought that if I looked at the vagina from these different historical perspectives, I would learn a great deal about women, both as sexual subjects and as members of communities; this investigation would surely illuminate where we are today. (Also, since I am a woman and I like pleasure, I was eager to learn things I might not know about female sexuality.) I thought I would find the truth about the vagina by studying all of these constructs. I believed that some would prove to be basically accurate, and others, deeply inaccurate. But I now believe that all of them are only partially true, and that some constructs – including our own – are thoroughly subjective and full of misinformation.

Is the vagina a pathway to enlightenment, as it was for Indian practitioners of the Tantra? Or a ‘golden lotus,’ as Chinese Tao philosophy maintained? Is it the ‘hole’ that the Elizabethans saw it as being? Or the test site for female maturity, an organ whose response separates the women from the girls, as Sigmund Freud believed? Or is it what American feminists from the 1970s and on claim it to be: a not-so-important organ subordinated to the more glamorous clitoris? Or is it what contemporary mass-produced pornography says it is: a ‘hot,’ but essentially interchangeable, orifice, available visually by the thousands to anyone with a modem? Or is it what right-on sex-positive 2000s post-feminism says it is: a zippy pleasure producer for lusty women that demands dial-up satiation, from the texting of random partners for booty calls to high-tech vibrating electronics?

I read books such as evolutionary biologists Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá’s Sex at Dawn; I reread sociologist Shere Hite’s The Hite Report on Female Sexuality; I studied histories of the vagina such as The Story of V: A Natural History of Female Sexuality by cultural historian Catherine Blackledge; and I looked at the latest research on female orgasm, from scientific databases such as the archives of Human Reproduction. I journeyed to laboratories where some of the most cutting-edge neuro biological research is being done on the role of female sexual pleasure – such labs as that of Dr Jim Pfaus, at Concordia University in Montreal, where landmark experiments are establishing that female sexual pleasure plays an important role in mate selection even among lower mammals. I began to feel that all these books, articles, and destinations were only pieces of the puzzle.

For personal as well as for intellectual reasons, I began to realize that the real headline is one that is rarely talked about, outside of a small circle: that there is a profound brain–vagina connection that seemed to me to contain more of the truth of the matter than anything else I was exploring. This book’s germ started as a historical and cultural journey, but it quickly grew into a very personal and necessary act of discovery. I needed to learn the truth about the vagina because of a glimpse I had, by accident, into a dimension of its reality that I had never seen before. Due to a medical crisis, I had a thought-provoking, revelatory experience that suggested a possibly crucial relationship of the vagina to female consciousness itself. The more I learned, the more I understood the ways in which the vagina is part of the female brain, and thus part of female creativity, confidence, and even character.

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Jemima Lewis, The Mail on Sunday: `Naomi Wolf has tried hard to look at female sexuality as it really is, not as pop culture or political correctness would like it to be… The science of female arousal is complex and woefully neglected, and Wolf has done us all a favour by trying to drag it into the mainstream’

Viv Goskrup, Independent on Sunday: `Wolf’s tome could not be better timed… at a time when Western women’s bodies have never been more highly politicised, the one person who might be able to shine a ray of light… has to be Wolf. Perhaps this history will do for 21st century activism what The Beauty Myth did for 1990s feminists… Wolf is exploring territory we haven’t heard about since Germaine Greer in the 1970s’

Sarah Vine, The Times: `worth respecting, even celebrating… there is [here] a very intriguing thesis about love… If you are one of those School of Cosmo feminists who has been arguing for decades that women should be more like men sexually… then Wolf’s take is genuinely revolutionary.’

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