Dusty Answer

The book was first published in 1927 and is the story of Judith Earle, over-earnest and inexperienced, who is brought up in seclusion in a large house in the Thames Valley. Longing for company, she has always been a little in love with each of the four cousins who come to stay next door and, on her return from Cambridge, becomes madly in love with one of them – Roddy, the 'sensation-hunter'. Dusty Answer traces with delicate nostalgia childhood friendships and the pangs of thwarted young love.

'The lyrical, sensuous quality of her descriptive writing and her clear yet compassionate insight into individual psychology puts her immediately into the front rank of English writers' The Times

'It will consume you entirely, transforming your whole inner life for the time it takes to read' Jonathan Coe

Related posts:

1. The Rector's Daughter is This Week's Radio 4 Book at Bedtime
2. New BBC Drama: South Riding by Winifred Holtby
3. I Am Slave, Channel 4 drama

Today we're sharing the details of the world premiere of the Feelgood Theatre production of Slave – A Question of Freedom, also inspired by the book.  It's running from 23  – 27 November at the Lowry in Manchester.

For more information on the theatre production, visit www.feelgoodtheatre.co.uk

Related posts:

1. I Am Slave, Channel 4 drama

This fragment set off Emma Donoghue. She situates her Mary in the streets of London , dreaming not just of food and warmth but of ribbons and fine clothes.  It is this hunger for glamour that makes her rebel against her lot in life, and lures her into prostitution at the age of thirteen.   But she flees London and ends up in Monmouth, her mother's home town, where she tries to start a new life as a maid.  New loyalties and old lies catch her in a tangle that she cannot shake off however and…. well, we know the end.

I love this book and  I love the genius of this writer who saw that it could all begin with a longing for a red, satin ribbon.

Related posts:

1. From Our Own Backlist:I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

If this sounds like you and you're looking to get into your first publishing job, you have until the 13th of September to apply.

If you're interested, have a read through the official job posting here and follow the instructions.

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Half The Sky has been getting lots of attention lately, and we've been getting some impassioned feedback from reading groups.  So, we thought we'd give your reading group the chance to win five free copies.

For your chance to win, let us know why your reading group should win Half The Sky copies using the comment box below.

The competition is only open to UK residents – see full terms and conditions before entering.

We'll pick a winner on Tuesday 31 August.

Related posts:

1. Half The Sky: How to Change the World
2. Half the Sky: exposing the greatest moral outrage of our century
3. Half The Sky: An excerpt from the book

If I can't persuade you, maybe the author can. Listen to Chioma reading from her book: Chioma reading from Bitter Leaf

Related posts:

1. Video of Michele Roberts at the Port Eliot Festival

‘The world is in the grip of a moral outrage on a par with slavery and genocide. The victims? Women.’

Inside is a fascinating and inspiring interview with Nick Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the authors of Half the Sky, who have made the book itself the centre of a campaign to end the oppression and abuse of women in less economically developed countries. As Nick and Sheryl point out:

‘Women aren’t the problem but the solution. The plight of girls is no more a tragedy than an opportunity.’

They argue that improving women’s lives around the globe will help to address pressing economic and political issues of our time, from famine to terrorism to climate change.

In the pages of Half the Sky, you will meet an array of extraordinary women who have overcome unimaginable hurdles in order to change their lives and in doing so begin to change the world. And you will see that almost everyone can do something to help.

The authors of Half the Sky received an email last week from Emma Thompson, the actor:

‘I had been told by countless friends about how good Half the Sky was, and to be honest, I thought, yes, yes, but how good can a book be? Very, very good, it turns out. Practical, unsanctimonious, unpompous, unjudgemental and honest about what’s possible. Just what we all need – a handbook.’

>Read the full Guardian article here.
>The Half The Sky book is available now. More info here.
>To get involved with the Half the Sky movement, visit halftheskymovement.org..

Related posts:

1. Half The Sky: How to Change the World
2. Half The Sky: An excerpt from the book

We received so many great Year of the Flood entries that we were compelled to not only announce the three prize winners, but also to create a whole host of new categories to acknowledge exceptional entries.

Read on below to see our complete list. Congratulations to our three prize winners who will be notified by email.

TOP PRIZE of £100
and a set of Margaret Atwood's incredible backlist (pictured).

TITLE: Liobams, Rakunks and Bees. Oh My!
QUOTE: 'A fantastical, ambitious, engaging sci-fi vision, but not very likely' – Dolly the Sheep

Winner: Kat Dray (@KatDray)

RUNNER UP PRIZES:
Each of these two winners will get a set of Margaret Atwood's gorgeous backlist (pictured).

TITLE: The Evangelical Allotment Handbook
QUOTE: 'I told you what would happen – and now, look' – John Calvin

Winner: Helen Lamont

TITLE: Armageddoner's Question Time.
QUOTE: 'In the event of mass destruction, should I prune my hydrangea? Atwood's novel gives essential apocalyptical gardening tips' – A. Titchmarsh.

Winner: Lydia Houghton

___________________________________________________

HONOURABLE MENTIONS:

CLEVEREST

TITLE: ARK
QUOTE: 'Atwood certainly knows how to keep her head above water and stay a float in the world of literature' – Noah

Entrant: Paul Diggett

GOOEY & GREASY

TITLE: Marg At the Wood
QUOTE: 'This read slips down like butter. A branch of fantasticness.Spread the word on this well oiled publication.'

Entrant: Rach Watson (@Rattycat)

TITLE: Morass
QUOTE: 'Atwood squeezes the last drop of bodily humours from a mass of unknown characters to fertilize this apocalyptic tale of the surviving ones.'

Entrant: Celia Kay Andrew

BEST USE OF PLUMBING

TITLE: The Year of Inadequate Drainage
QUOTE: 'Atwood's got the right idea, but the biblical metaphors could have been simpler. Also needs a big explosion.'-Stephen King, author, the Stand

Entrant: Chris Skene

MOST UNEXPECTED

TITLE: The Tom Cruise of Slow Fry Bologna
QUOTE: 'It's like Jesus Christ Superstar ate the Metalica Black album and pooped out a deep-woods version of Star Wars. Rock on Chewie, rock on.'

Entrant: Jimackey (@jimackey)

BEST T.S. ELIOT

TITLE: And Then Rain…
QUOTE: 'Atwood's cautionary worlds have moral centers,abiding values:Jeremiads,tonic for parched spirits in the Wasteland,dreaming of remembered love'

Entrant: Carla Steinberg (@Carlochka)

FEMINIST FAVOURITE

TITLE: SNOW WOMEN
QUOTE: 'The women's tale. Atwood's startling portrait of female ingenuity in the face of terror is her chilling best. Solidarity!' -Germaine Greer

Entrant: Christine Lees (@The_Daily_Twit)

Related posts:

1. In Conversation with Margaret Atwood
2. Margaret Atwood 'Publisher for a Day' Competition

This is a novel about Ernest Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley. Told from the point of view of Hadley, The Paris Wife is the story of their whirlwind courtship and wedding as they are thrust into a life of artistic ambition, hard liquor, sparky talk and spur-of-the-moment dashes to Pamplona, the Riviera and the Swiss Alps. But Jazz Age Paris – hectic, glamorous, its inhabitants running headlong from the shadow of the Great War – does not lend itself to family life and fidelity…

I read this book at work one day last year. Ursula Doyle, Editorial Director here at Virago, wanted to buy it and wanted my opinion. As I finished, I looked up, blinking at the office life around me as I came to the realisation that I wasn't in Paris and Hadley hadn't just been talking to me. I wanted to turn back to the beginning of the manuscript and start again (I have done actually, more than once).

This book is competely amazing. Paula McLain has carefully crafted every word; she's brought Hadley and Ernest and their mad friends lovingly to life, and created a Paris that makes you be the very best version of yourself. And at the same time she's written a heart-wrenching love story between two unforgettable people who can't quite stop everything unravelling.

It's out in March 2011, but keep an eye out on Twitter – @ViragoBooks - where I'll be giving away some of these truly special proofs.

He tells me his name is Ernest.
‘I’m thinking of giving it away, though. Ernest is so dull, and Hemingway? Who wants a Hemingway? What do you think? Should I toss it out?’
‘Maybe not just yet. You never know. A name like that could catch on.’

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Today comes the news that film rights for The Bolter by Frances Osborne have been acquired by New Regency Productions. The Bolter has been a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, and a major screenwriter is expected to sign up to the project in the next few months.

'A tragic and deeply moving tale . . . far more gripping than any novel I have read for years' Anthony Beevor

'A corker of a subject. Idina's behaviour . . . probably inspired The Bolter in Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love. Osborne's richly wrought descriptions of glittering Paris nights and lush mountainous landscapes of Kenya's Happy Valley are fabulous . . . A breakneck-paced, thoroughly diverting story' Valerie Grove, The Times

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Sunday Times

The drama to be broadcast on August 30 is loosely based on Slave, first published by Virago in 2004. The book tells Mende Nazer's  extraordinary story of how , aged twelve, she was kidnapped from her home in the Nuba mountains of Sudan and sold into slavery, and how she finally escaped to freedom.

"All the cliches of such survival stories – ‘life-affirming, heartwarming’- are inadequate to describe the emotional impact of [Mende’s] eventual deliverance." Observer

Related posts:

1. New BBC Drama: South Riding by Winifred Holtby

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I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou is  an astonishing book, one of the best memoirs I have ever read.  Funny, moving, revealing, it is truly brilliant.  Almost like a novel, it takes the reader into a time and place never to be forgotten.  It was first published in America by Random House in 1969. Maya Angelou says that  Bob Loomis (who is still Maya Angelou's editor in America) asked her many times to write her story and she demurred until finally he said ‘Well I am not surprised –  it's hard to write a good autobiography.’  ‘Right then!’ she replied, ‘I will do it.’

It was a huge hit in America, hailed by the likes of James Baldwin among thousands of others.  But when it was shown to British publishers in the 1970s,  according to Maya Angelou, they all said it was a story just for Americans.  British people wouldn't care about a young black girl growing up in the American south in the 1930s, they said.  So no British edition appeared.  Then, in the mid 1980s, Ursula Owen, then Editorial Director of Virago, visited American publishers, and the Rights Director of Random House USA showed her the book saying she might just like this title, long turned down by the Brits, which was still a huge hit (along with the subsequent volumes) in America.

For Virago it was love at first sight.  We were blown away by the book – and we hadn't yet met the author! I was the Publicity Director at that time and as soon as Ursula Owen signed the contract, I got a funny, crazily mistyped letter from Jessica Mitford (author of the fabulous Hons and Rebels), who told me she was going to make it her business to tell the world about her great friend and this book.   I copied parts of her letter to send to all the press and the positive response was immediate.

And then… Maya Angelou came to visit us. Well, that is just too tame a description. In our tiny office, six-foot Maya Angelou sang and danced and laughed her way into our lives. She was not afraid to speak hard truths.  She recited her poem Phenomenal Woman. We immediately invited her back for publication.

Fifteen years after the first US publication, in 1984, we published I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in a Virago paperback.  Maya Angelou appeared on ‘Afternoon Plus’, Thames Television with the extraordinary interviewer, Mavis Nicholson.  It was a heartfelt, bold piece – including Maya Angelou talking about being raped at 8 and becoming mute – but it was also very raucous, with a huge amount of laughter, I recall.  Their switchboards were jammed.  The reviews and features that followed (with the Mitford blessing) were stunning.  Maya Angelou beamed straight into  British hearts.

But even still I don't think we quite knew what we had.  Our first print run was around 8,000 paperbacks and was sold out before publication.  We printed another, cautious 8,000.    Today, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings has sold over 600,000 copies and it's still selling year on year, month on month. It's on courses, reading lists and remains, to my mind, one of the world’s and certainly one of  Virago's great autobiographies.

We have gone on to publish all of Maya Angelou's works: five more volumes of autobiography, her poetry, essays, and, most recently, her cookbooks.   We have sold well beyond a million copies of her books.  She is a one-off.  I am thrilled to be her publisher, honoured now to be her friend.

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'No other novel of mine has inspired such a range of responses in its audience, and that's been a fascinating experience.'

Read on for the full article here.

Related posts:

1. Sarah Waters – Glamour Magazine Writer of the Year

South Riding

Award-winning screenwriter Andrew Davies (Brideshead Revisited, Affinity, Tipping the Velvet) is adapting Winifred Holtby's classic novel South Riding for the BBC. It stars David Morrissey and Anna Maxwell Martin, and is due to be screened later this year.Andrew Davies has said of South Riding, which is set in Yorkshire:

'What appealed to me most about South Riding is how fresh and relevant it feels, even though it was written and set in the Thirties. It's a terrific love story but it's also a portrait of a whole community in turmoil, with the country in recession, and bitter struggles between the advocates of change, like our heroine Sarah the new forward-thinking headmistress, and the forces of conservatism embodied in Robert Carne. It's also full of rich comedy, with some wonderful minor characters, splendidly cast. I feel as if we've rediscovered a forgotten masterpiece.'

See the BBC Press Release

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Virago author Chioma Okereke filmed Michele and kindly gave us the link to share on the site. Thank you, Chioma! (Check out Chioma's brilliant debut novel, Bitter Leaf.)

Related posts:

1. Great Reviews for Mud: Stories of Sex and Love by Michele Roberts

You may have seen the BBC drama starring Maxine Peake earlier this year, which has been shown at over 50 festivals around the world and won best feature at three of the most prestigious.

Anne Lister (1791-1840) was an incredible woman who, in Regency Yorkshire, lived life on her own terms. Refusing to marry, she defied convention, yet became a wealthy landowner, industrialist and traveller; she also took lovers and even ‘married’ another woman. Anne kept a detailed account of her life, loves and emotions in a fascinating four-million-word journal. A sizeable portion of the journal was written in code, which Helena Whitbread spent decades deciphering and editing into this astonishing book.

We have received some amazing quotes:

Engaging, revealing, at times simply astonishing: Anne Lister's diaries are an indispensable read for anyone interested in the history of gender, sexuality, and the intimate lives of women’ Sarah Waters

‘The Lister diaries are the Dead Sea Scrolls of lesbian history: they changed everything. By resurrecting them and editing them with such loving attention and intelligence, Helena Whitbread has earned the gratitude of a whole generation’ Emma Donoghue

Read an article by Jeanette Winterson

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The purpose of this Q&A session was to answer questions from Atwood's incredible Twitter following (70,000!) who had posed them to #askmargaretatwood. Watch carefully to see if your questions are answered, 'T-pals!'

Margaret Atwood: a Twitter Q&A with Virago

Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood is published in paperback on 29 July.

Follow Margaret Atwood on Twitter @MargaretAtwood

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Be Margaret Atwood's Publisher for a day, and you could win a cash prize or a set of Margaret's books

Details follow:

Margaret Atwood considered five titles for The Year of the Flood before choosing ‘The Year of the Flood.’

Put on your publishing hat and propose a different but appropriate title.  Then write an imaginary back cover quote — from a newspaper, from a celebrity, from one of your friends, from your cat — it's wide open!

Word limit for the quote only: 140 characters. (We'll be tweeting the best entries out once the competition closes on 12 August)

Submit your publisher for a day entry below, with title AND quote, and you could win £100 and a set of Margaret Atwood’s titles!

Want to see which quotes were used on the actual book? View them here
You can also read the first chapter, here.

Sample entry:

TITLE: Falling From Edencliff Garden

QUOTE: 'Atwood is a speculative fiction mastermind, no question, but I’m in no way pleased with the portrayal of fast food outlets'-Ronald McDonald

ENTRY FORM

N.B. By entering this competition you agree to be bound by the competiton terms and conditions. Please make sure you have read the t&cs before you enter the competition.

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FACT: This routine ‘gendercide’, which manifests in particularly in the developing world, is becoming one of the biggest worldwide threats – it is even bound up with the global economy.

FACT: We don’t have to rely on the greater powers to change the fortunes of these women and our world.

On 5th August, Virago publish Half the Sky by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting team Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn – a call to arms against the most pervasive human rights violation of the 21st century: the oppression of women in the developing world. Fierce, moral, pragmatic, full of amazing stories of courage and inspiration, Half The Sky is essential reading for everyone concerned about the world today.

To raise awareness about what many consider is the central moral challenge of this century, we are encouraging people to find out more about the scale of the problem, how this situation came to be and what we can all do about it.

We’ll be posting extracts and statistics from the book every day until publication, along with latest news and updates as we start spreading the word.

Here’s what you can do to get involved:

1) Read an extract here
2) Join the movement at www.halftheskymovement.org
3) Share the conversation and follow @ViragoBooks and #HalfTheSky on Twitter for updates
4) Read what others are saying about this book:

‘It’s impossible to stand by and do nothing after reading Half the Sky’
George Clooney

‘These stories show us the power and resilience of women who would have every reason to give up but never do… you will not want to put this book down’
Angelina Jolie

‘A thrilling manifesto for advancing freedom for hundreds of millions of human beings’
Johann Hari

5) Watch related videos:

Related posts:

1. Half The Sky: An excerpt from the book

Women hold up half the sky.
– CHINESE PROVERB

INTRODUCTION
The Girl Effect

What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce.
– MARK TWAIN

Srey Rath is a self-confident Cambodian teenager whose black hair tumbles over a round, light brown face. She is in a crowded street market, standing beside a pushcart and telling her story calmly, with detachment. The only hint of anxiety or trauma is the way she often pushes her hair from in front of her black eyes, perhaps a nervous tic. Then she lowers her hand and her long fingers gesticulate and flutter in the air with incongruous grace as she recounts her odyssey.

Rath is short and small-boned, pretty, vibrant, and bubbly, a wisp of a girl whose negligible stature contrasts with an outsized and outgoing personality. When the skies abruptly release a tropical rain shower that drenches us, she simply laughs and rushes us to cover under a tin roof, and then cheerfully continues her story as the rain drums overhead. But Rath’s attractiveness and winning personality are perilous bounties for a rural Cambodian girl, and her trusting nature and optimistic self-assuredness compound the hazard.

When Rath was fifteen, her family ran out of money, so she decided to go work as a dishwasher in Thailand for two months to help pay the bills. Her parents fretted about her safety, but they were reassured when Rath arranged to travel with four friends who had been promised jobs in the same Thai restaurant. The job agent took the girls deep into Thailand and then handed them to gangsters who took them to Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. Rath was dazzled by her first glimpses of the city’s clean avenues and gleaming high-rises, including at the time the world’s tallest twin buildings; it seemed safe and welcoming. But then thugs sequestered Rath and two other girls inside a karaoke  lounge that operated as a brothel. One gangster in his late thirties, a man known as ‘the boss,’ took charge of the girls and explained that he had paid money for them and that they would now be obliged to repay him. ‘You must find money to pay off the debt, and then I will send you back home,’ he said, repeatedly reassuring them that if they cooperated they would eventually be released.

Rath was shattered when what was happening dawned on her. The boss locked her up with a customer, who tried to force her to have sex with him. She fought back, enraging the customer. ‘So
the boss got angry and hit me in the face, first with one hand and then with the other,’ she remembers, telling her story with simple resignation. ‘The mark stayed on my face for two weeks.’ Then the boss and the other gangsters raped her and beat her with their fists.

‘You have to serve the customers,’ the boss told her as he punched her. ‘If not, we will beat you to death. Do you want that?’ Rath stopped protesting, but she sobbed and refused to cooperate actively. The boss forced her to take a pill; the gangsters called it ‘the happy drug’ or ‘the shake drug.’ She doesn’t know exactly what it was, but it made her head shake and induced lethargy, happiness, and compliance for about an hour. When she wasn’t drugged, Rath was teary and insufficiently compliant – she was required to beam happily at all customers – so the boss said he would waste no more time on her: She would agree to do as heordered or he would kill her. Rath then gave in. The girls were forced to work in the brothel seven days a week, fifteen hours aday. They were kept naked to make it more difficult for them to run away or to keep tips or other money, and they were forbidden to ask customers to use condoms. They were battered until they smiled constantly and simulated joy at the sight of customers, because men would not pay as much for sex with girls with reddened eyes and haggard faces. The girls were never allowed out on the street or paid a penny for their work.

‘They just gave us food to eat, but they didn’t give us much because the customers didn’t like fat girls,’ Rath says. The girls were bused, under guard, back and forth between the brothel and a tenth-floor apartment where a dozen of them were housed. The door of the apartment was locked from the outside. However, one night, some of the girls went out onto their balcony and pried loose a long, five-inch-wide board from a rack used for drying clothes. They balanced it precariously between their balcony and one on the next building, twelve feet away. The board wobbled badly, but Rath was desperate, so she sat astride the board and gradually inched across.

‘There were four of us who did that,’ she says. ‘The others were too scared, because it was very rickety. I was scared, too, and I couldn’t look down, but I was even more scared to stay. We thought that even if we died, it would be better than staying behind. If we stayed, we would die as well.’

Once on the far balcony, the girls pounded on the window and
woke the surprised tenant. They could hardly communicate with him because none of them spoke Malay, but the tenant let them into his apartment and then out its front door. The girls took the elevator down and wandered the silent streets until they found a police station and stepped inside. The police first tried to shoo them away, then arrested the girls for illegal immigration. Rath served a year in prison under Malaysia’s tough anti-immigrant laws, and then she was supposed to be repatriated. She thought a Malaysian policeman was escorting her home when he drove her to the Thai border – but then he sold her to a trafficker, who peddled her to a Thai brothel.

Rath’s saga offers a glimpse of the brutality inflicted routinely on women and girls in much of the world, a malignancy that is slowly gaining recognition as one of the paramount human rights problems of this century.

The issues involved, however, have barely registered on the global agenda. Indeed, when we began reporting about international affairs in the 1980s, we couldn’t have imagined writing this book. We assumed that the foreign policy issues that properly  furrowed the brow were lofty and complex, like nuclear nonproliferation. It was difficult back then to envision the Council on Foreign Relations fretting about maternal mortality or female genital mutilation. Back then, the oppression of women was a fringe issue, the kind of worthy cause the Girl Scouts might raise money for. We preferred to probe the recondite ‘serious issues.’

So this book is the outgrowth of our own journey of awakening as we worked together as journalists for The New York Times. The first milestone in that journey came in China. Sheryl is a Chinese-American who grew up in New York City, and Nicholas is anOregonian who grew up on a sheep and cherry farm near Yamhill, Oregon. After we married, we moved to China, where seven months later we found ourselves standing on the edge af Tiananmen Square watching troops fire their automatic weapons at prodemocracy protesters. The massacre claimed between four hundred and eight hundred lives and transfixed the world. It was the human rights story of the year, and it seemed just about the most shocking violation imaginable.

Then, the following year, we came across an obscure but meticulous demographic study that outlined a human rights violation that had claimed tens of thousands more lives. This study found that thirty-nine thousand baby girls die annually in China because parents don’t give them the same medical care and attention that
boys receive – and that is just in the first year of life. One Chinese family-planning official, Li Honggui, explained it this way: ‘If a boy gets sick, the parents may send him to the hospital at once. But if a girl gets sick, the parents may say to themselves, “Well, let’s see how she is tomorrow.”’ The result is that as many infant girls die unnecessarily every week in China as protesters died in the one incident at Tiananmen. Those Chinese girls never received a column inch of news coverage, and we began to wonder if our journalistic priorities were skewed.

A similar pattern emerged in other countries, particularly in South Asia and the Muslim world. In India, a ‘bride burning’ – to punish a woman for an inadequate dowry or to eliminate her so a man can remarry – takes place approximately once every two hours, but these rarely constitute news. In the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi, Pakistan, five thousand women and girls have been doused in kerosene and set alight by family members or in-laws – or, perhaps worse, been seared with acid – for perceived disobedience just in the last nine years. Imagine the outcry if the Pakistani or Indian governments were burning women alive at those rates. Yet when the government is not directly involved, people shrug.

When a prominent dissident was arrested in China, we would write a front-page article; when 100,000 girls were routinely kidnapped and trafficked into brothels, we didn’t even consider it news. Partly that is because we journalists tend to be good at covering events that happen on a particular day, but we slip at covering events that happen every day – such as the quotidian cruelties inflicted on women and girls. We journalists weren’t the only ones who dropped the ball on this subject: A tiny portion of U.S. foreign aid is specifically targeted to women and girls.

Amartya Sen, the ebullient Nobel Prize-winning economist, has developed a gauge of gender inequality that is a striking reminder of the stakes involved. ‘More than 100 million women are missing,’ Sen wrote in a classic essay in 1990 in The New York Review of Books, spurring a new field of research. Sen noted that in normal circumstances women live longer than men, and so there are more females than males in much of the world. Even poor regions like most of Latin America and much of Africa have more females than males. Yet in places where girls have a deeply unequal status, they vanish. China has 107 males for every 100 females in its overall population (and an even greater disproportion among newborns), India has 108, and Pakistan has 111. This has nothing to do with biology, and indeed the state of Kerala in the southwest of India, which has championed female education and equality, has the same excess of females that exists in the United States.

The implication of the sex ratios, Professor Sen found, is that about 107 million females are missing from the globe today. Follow-up studies have calculated the number slightly differently, deriving alternative figures for ‘missing women’ of between 60 million and 101 million. Every year, at least another 2 million girls worldwide disappear because of gender discrimination.

The West has its own gender problems. But discrimination in wealthy countries is often a matter of unequal pay or underfunded sports teams or unwanted touching from a boss. In contrast, in much of the world discrimination is lethal. In India, for example, mothers are less likely to take their daughters to be vaccinated than their sons – that alone accounts for one fifth of India’s missing females – while studies have found that, on average, girls are brought to the hospital only when they are sicker than boys taken to the hospital. All told, girls in India from one to five years of age are 50 percent more likely to die than boys the same age. The best estimate is that a little Indian girl dies from discrimination every four minutes.

A big, bearded Afghan named Sedanshah once told us that his wife and son were sick. He wanted both to survive, he said, but his priorities were clear: A son is an indispensable treasure, while a wife is replaceable. He had purchased medication for the boy alone. ‘She’s always sick,’ he gruffly said of his wife, ‘so it’s not worth buying medicine for her.’ Modernization and technology can aggravate the discrimination. Since the 1990s, the spread of ultrasound machines has allowed pregnant women to find out the sex of their fetuses – and then get abortions if they are female. In Fujian Province, China, a peasant raved to us about ultrasound: ‘We don’t have to have daughters anymore!’ To prevent sex-selective abortion, China and India now bar doctors and ultrasound technicians from telling a pregnant woman the sex of her fetus. Yet that is a flawed solution. Research shows that when parents are banned from selectively aborting female fetuses, more of their daughters die as infants. Mothers do not deliberately dispatch infant girls they are obligated to give birth to, but they are lackadaisical in caring for them. A development economist at Brown University, Nancy Qian, quantified the wrenching tradeoff: On average, the deaths of fifteen infant girls can be avoided by allowing one hundred female fetuses to be selectively aborted.

The global statistics on the abuse of girls are numbing. It appears that more girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the battles of the twentieth century. More girls are killed in this routine ‘gendercide’ in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the twentieth century.

In the nineteenth century, the central moral challenge was slavery. In the twentieth century, it was the battle against totalitarianism. We believe that in this century the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality around the world.

The owners of the Thai brothel to which Rath was sold did not beat her and did not constantly guard her. So two months later, she was able to escape and make her way back to Cambodia.

Upon her return, Rath met a social worker who put her in touch with an aid group that helps girls who have been trafficked start new lives. The group, American Assistance for Cambodia, used $400 in donated funds to buy a small cart and a starter selection of goods so that Rath could become a street peddler. She found a good spot in the open area between the Thai and Cambodian customs offices in the border town of Poipet. Travelers crossing between Thailand and Cambodia walk along this strip, the size of a football field, and it is lined with peddlers selling drinks, snacks, and souvenirs.

Rath outfitted her cart with shirts and hats, costume jewelry, notebooks, pens, and small toys. Now her good looks and outgoing personality began to work in her favor, turning her into an effective saleswoman. She saved and invested in new merchandise, her business thrived, and she was able to support her parents and two younger sisters. She married and had a son, and she began saving for his education.

In 2008, Rath turned her cart into a stall, and then also acquired the stall next door. She also started a ‘public phone’ business by charging people to use her cell phone. So if you ever cross from Thailand into Cambodia at Poipet, look for a shop on your left, halfway down the strip, where a teenage girl will call out to you,  smile, and try to sell you a souvenir cap. She’ll laugh and claim she’s giving you a special price, and she’s so bubbly and appealing that she’ll probably make the sale.

Rath’s eventual triumph is a reminder that if girls get a chance, in the form of an education or a microloan, they can be more than baubles or slaves; many of them can run businesses. Talk to Rath today – after you’ve purchased that cap – and you find that she exudes confidence as she earns a solid income that will provide a better future for her sisters and for her young son. Many of the stories in this book are wrenching, but keep in mind this central truth: Women aren’t the problem but the solution. The plight of girls is no more a tragedy than an opportunity.

That was a lesson we absorbed in Sheryl’s ancestral village, at the end of a dirt road amid the rice paddies of southern China. For many years we have regularly trod the mud paths of the Taishan region to Shunshui, the hamlet in which Sheryl’s paternal grandfather grew up. China traditionally has been one of the more repressive and smothering places for girls, and we could see hints of this in Sheryl’s own family history. Indeed, on our first visit, we accidentally uncovered a family secret: a long-lost stepgrandmother. Sheryl’s grandfather had traveled to America with his first wife, but she had given birth only to daughters. So Sheryl’s grandfather gave up on her and returned her to Shunshui, where he married a younger woman as a second wife and took her to America. This was Sheryl’s grandmother, who duly gave birth to a son – Sheryl’s dad. The previous wife and daughters were then wiped out of the family memory.

Something bothered us each time we explored Shunshui and the surrounding villages: Where were the young women? Young men were toiling industriously in the paddies or fanning themselves indolently in the shade, but young women and girls were scarce. We finally discovered them when we stepped into the factories that were then spreading throughout Guangdong Province, the epicenter of China’s economic eruption. These factories produced the shoes, toys, and shirts that filled America’s shopping malls, generating economic growth rates almost unprecedented in the history of the world – and creating the most effective antipoverty program ever recorded. The factories turned out to be cacophonous hives of distaff bees. Eighty percent of the employees on the assembly lines in coastal China are female, and the proportion across the manufacturing belt of East Asia is at least 70 percent. The economic explosion in Asia was, in large part, an outgrowth of the economic empowerment of women. ‘They have smaller fingers, so they’re better at stitching,’ the manager of a purse factory explained to us. ‘They’re obedient and work harder than men,’ said the head of a toy factory. ‘And we can pay them less.’

Women are indeed a linchpin of the region’s development  strategy. Economists who scrutinized East Asia’s success noted a common pattern. These countries took young women who  previously had contributed negligibly to gross national product (GNP) and injected them into the formal economy, hugely increasing the labor force. The basic formula was to ease repression, educate girls as well as boys, give the girls the freedom to move to the cities and take factory jobs, and then benefit from a demographic dividend as they delayed marriage and reduced childbearing. The women meanwhile financed the education of younger relatives, and saved enough of their pay to boost national savings rates. This pattern has been called ‘the girl effect.’ In a nod to the female chromosomes, it could also be called ‘the double X solution.’

Evidence has mounted that helping women can be a successful poverty-fighting strategy anywhere in the world, not just in the booming economies of East Asia. The Self Employed Women’s Association was founded in India in 1972 and ever since has supported the poorest women in starting businesses – raising living standards in ways that have dazzled scholars and foundations. In Bangladesh, Muhammad Yunus developed microfinance at the Grameen Bank and targeted women borrowers – eventually winning a Nobel Peace Prize for the economic and social impact of his work. Another Bangladeshi group, BRAC, the largest antipoverty organization in the world, worked with the poorest women to save lives and raise incomes – and Grameen and BRAC made the aid world increasingly see women not just as potential beneficiaries of their work, but as agents of it.

In the early 1990s, the United Nations and the World Bank began to appreciate the potential resource that women and girls represent. ‘Investment in girls’ education may well be the highest return investment available in the developing world,’ Lawrence Summers wrote when he was chief economist of the World Bank. ‘The question is not whether countries can afford this investment, but whether countries can afford not to educate more girls.’ In 2001 the World Bank produced an influential study, Engendering Development Through Gender Equality in Rights, Resources, and  Voice, arguing that promoting gender equality is crucial to combat global poverty. UNICEF issued a major report arguing that gender equality yields a ‘double dividend’ by elevating not only women but also their children and communities. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) summed up the mounting research this way:
‘Women’s empowerment helps raise economic productivity and reduce infant mortality. It contributes to improved health and nutrition. It increases the chances of education for the next generation.’

More and more, the most influential scholars of development and public health – including Sen and Summers, Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs, and Dr. Paul Farmer – are calling for much greater attention to women in development. Private aid groups and foundations have shifted gears as well. ‘Women are the key to ending hunger in Africa,’ declared the Hunger Project. French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, who founded Doctors Without Borders, bluntly declared of development: ‘Progress is achieved through women.’ The Center for Global Development issued a major report explaining ‘why and how to put girls at the center of development.’ CARE is taking women and girls as the centerpiece of its antipoverty efforts. The Nike Foundation and the NoVo Foundation are both focusing on building opportunities for girls in the developing world. ‘Gender inequality hurts economic growth,’ Goldman Sachs concluded in a 2008 research report that emphasized how much developing countries could improve their economic performance by educating girls. Partly as a result of that research, Goldman Sachs committed $100 million to a ‘10,000 Women’ campaign meant to give that many women a business education.

Concerns about terrorism after the 9/11 attacks triggered interest in these issues in an unlikely constituency: the military and counterterrorism agencies. Some security experts noted that the countries that nurture terrorists are disproportionally those where women are marginalized. The reason there are so many Muslim terrorists, they argued, has little to do with the Koran but a great deal to do with the lack of robust female  participation in the economy and society of many Islamic countries. As the Pentagon gained a deeper understanding of counterterrorism, and as it found that dropping bombs often didn’t do much to help, it became increasingly interested in grassroots projects such as girls’ education. Empowering girls, some in the military argued, would disempower terrorists. When the Joint Chiefs of Staff hold discussions of girls’ education in Pakistan and Afghanistan, as they did in 2008, you know that gender is a serious topic that fits squarely on the international affairs agenda. That’s evident also in the Council on Foreign Relations. The wood-paneled halls that have been used for discussions of MIRV warheads and NATO policy are now employed as well to host well-attended sessions on maternal mortality.

We will try to lay out an agenda for the world’s women focusing on three particular abuses: sex trafficking and forced prostitution; gender-based violence, including honor killings and mass rape; and maternal mortality, which still needlessly claims one woman a minute. We will lay out solutions such as girls’ education and microfinance, which are working right now.

It’s true that there are many injustices in the world, many worthy causes competing for attention and support, and we all have divided allegiances. We focus on this topic because, to us, this kind of oppression feels transcendent – and so does the opportunity. We have seen that outsiders can truly make a significant difference.

Consider Rath once more. We had been so shaken by her story that we wanted to locate that brothel in Malaysia, interview its owners, and try to free the girls still imprisoned there. Unfortunately, we couldn’t determine the brothel’s name or address. (Rath didn’t know English or even the Roman alphabet, so she hadn’t been able to read signs when she was there.) When we asked her if she would be willing to return to Kuala Lumpur and help us find the brothel, she turned ashen. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to face that again.’ She wavered, talked it over with her family, and ultimately agreed to go back in the hope of rescuing her girlfriends.

Rath voyaged back to Kuala Lumpur with the protection of an interpreter and a local antitrafficking activist. Nonetheless, she trembled in the red-light districts upon seeing the cheerful neonsigns that she associated with so much pain. But since her escape, Malaysia had been embarrassed by public criticism about trafficking, so the police had cracked down on the worst brothels that imprisoned girls against their will. One of those was Rath’s. A modest amount of international scolding had led a government to take action, resulting in an observable improvement in the lives of girls at the bottom of the power pyramid. The outcome underscores that this is a hopeful cause, not a bleak one.

Honor killings, sexual slavery, and genital cutting may seem to Western readers to be tragic but inevitable in a world far, far away. In much the same way, slavery was once widely viewed by many decent Europeans and Americans as a regrettable but ineluctable feature of human life. It was just one more horror that had existed for thousands of years. But then in the 1780s a few indignant Britons, led by William Wilberforce, decided that slavery was so offensive that they had to abolish it. And they did. Today we see the seed of something similar: a global movement to emancipate women and girls.

So let us be clear about this up front: We hope to recruit you to join an incipient movement to emancipate women and fight global poverty by unlocking women’s power as economic catalysts. That is the process under way – not a drama of victimization but of empowerment, the kind that transforms bubbly teenage girls from brothel slaves into successful businesswomen.

This is a story of transformation. It is change that is already taking place, and change that can accelerate if you’ll just open your heart and join in.

More information on the Half The Sky book is available here.

To get involved with the Half the Sky movement, visit halftheskymovement.org.

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1
Toby
Year Twenty-Five, the Year of the Flood

In the early morning Toby climbs up to the rooftop to watch the sunrise. She uses a mop handle for balance: the elevator stopped working some time ago and the back stairs are slick with damp, and if she slips and topples there won’t be anyone to pick her up.

As the first heat hits, mist rises from among the swath of trees between her and the derelict city. The air smells faintly of burning, a smell of caramel and tar and rancid barbecues, and the ashy but greasy smell of a garbage- dump fire after it’s been raining. The abandoned towers in the distance are like the coral of an ancient reef – bleached and colourless, devoid of life.

There still is life, however. Birds chirp; sparrows, they must be. Their small voices are clear and sharp, nails on glass: there’s no longer any sound of traffic to drown them out. Do they notice that quietness, the absence of motors? If so, are they happier? Toby has no idea. Unlike some of the other Gardeners – the more wild- eyed or possibly overdosed ones – she has never been under the illusion that she can converse with birds.

The sun brightens in the east, reddening the blue-grey haze that marks the distant ocean. The vultures roosting on hydro poles fan out their wings to dry them, opening themselves like black umbrellas. One and then another lifts off on the thermals and spirals upwards. If they plummet suddenly, it means they’ve spotted carrion.

Vultures are our friends, the Gardeners used to teach. They purify the earth. They are God’s necessary dark Angels of bodily dissolution. Imagine how terrible it would be if there were no death!

Do I still believe this? Toby wonders.

Everything is different up close.

The rooftop has some planters, their ornamentals running wild; it has a few fake- wood benches. There was once a sun canopy for cocktail hour, but that’s been blown away. Toby sits on one of the benches to survey the grounds. She lifts her binoculars, scanning from left to right. The driveway, with its lumirose borders, untidy now as frayed hairbrushes, their purple glow fading in the strengthening light. The western entrance, done in pink adobe-style solarskin, the snarl of tangled cars outside the gate.

The flower beds, choked with sow thistle and burdock, enormous aqua kudzu moths fl uttering above them. The fountains, their scallop-shell basins filled with stagnant rainwater. The parking lot with a pink golf cart and two pink AnooYoo Spa minivans, each with its winking- eye logo. There’s a fourth minivan farther along the drive, crashed into a tree: there used to be an arm hanging out of the window, but it’s gone now.

The wide lawns have grown up, tall weeds. There are low irregular mounds beneath the milkweed and fleabane and sorrel, with here and there a swatch of fabric, a glint of bone. That’s where the people fell, the ones who’d been running or staggering across the lawn. Toby had watched from the roof, crouched behind one of the planters, but she hadn’t watched for long. Some of those people had called for help, as if they’d known she was there. But how could she have helped?

The swimming pool has a mottled blanket of algae. Already there are frogs. The herons and the egrets and the peagrets hunt them, at the shallow end. For a while Toby tried to scoop out the small animals that had blundered in and drowned. The luminous green rabbits, the rats, the rakunks, with their striped tails and raccoon bandit masks. But now she leaves them alone. Maybe they’ll generate fish, somehow. When the pool is more like a swamp.

Is she thinking of eating these theoretical future fish?

Surely not. Surely not yet.

She turns to the dark encircling wall of trees and vines and fronds and shrubby undergrowth, probing it with her binoculars. It’s from there that any danger might come. But what kind of danger? She can’t imagine.

In the night there are the usual noises: the faraway barking of dogs, the tittering of mice, the water-pipe notes of the crickets, the occasional grumph of a frog. The blood rushing in her ears: katoush, katoush, katoush. A heavy broom sweeping dry leaves.

“Go to sleep,” she says out loud. But she never sleeps well, not since she’s been alone in this building. Sometimes she hears voices – human voices, calling to her in pain. Or the voices of women, the women who used to work here, the anxious women who used to come, for rest and rejuvenation. Splashing in the pool, strolling on the lawns. All the pink voices, soothed and soothing.

Or the voices of the Gardeners, murmuring or singing; or the children laughing together, up on the Edencliff Garden. Adam One, and Nuala, and Burt. Old Pilar, surrounded by her bees. And Zeb. If any one of them is still alive, it must be Zeb: any day now he’ll come walk ing along the roadway or appear from among the trees.

But he must be dead by now. It’s better to think so. Not to waste hope.

There must be someone else left, though; she can’t be the only one on the planet. There must be others. But friends or foes? If she sees one, how to tell?

She’s prepared. The doors are locked, the windows barred. But even such barriers are no guarantee: every hollow space invites invasion.

Even when she sleeps, she’s listening, as animals do – for a break in the pattern, for an unknown sound, for a silence opening like a crack in rock.

When the small creatures hush their singing, said Adam One, it’s because they’re afraid. You must listen for the sound of their fear.

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Dear Readers,

Virago has always been a uniquely collaborative enterprise. Since the beginning, over thirty years ago, when readers sent letters and postcards about the books, the covers, the titles, and ideas for the Virago Modern Classics, our Virago readers – and indeed Virago authors – have never been backward in coming forward.

Rarely has there been such a close and intimate relationship between publisher and reader. And, like any familial relationship, it isn’t always harmonious! You tell us when you don’t think the jacket image is right, when an introducer gives away the plot, when titles are out of print, when there are too many typos – but you have also poured in your praise and pleasure and thoughts, and Virago has become a brand name.

I am convinced that one of the reasons Virago has flourished is because of our relationship with our readers. And now conducted via emails, websites, networking sites, twittering – it’s a relationship still very much alive and still very active. And still, just like family …

Welcome to the brand new Virago news and blogging site. Keep ‘em coming!

Lennie Goodings
Virago Publisher

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From the BBC website: "F. M. Mayor's masterful novel, The Rector's Daughter, is a rare thing – a novel with a deceptively small canvas, set in the backwaters of a dull East Anglia a century ago, but still as fresh as ever. Much loved by those who have discovered it, it now comes to Radio 4 as one of the Open Book listeners' Neglected Classics."

The first episode will be broadcast tonight (Monday 28th June) at 22:45 on BBC Radio 4. See the BBC Radio 4 Website for more information.

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'An exhilarating collection of stories suffused with a wry wit and a warm – even hot – heartedness. Writing of such a high calibre can make you feel that the life of the mind is everything, that the acute observation and intelligence of the writer is a sort of mirror to what matters most in life. Yet these stories constantly remind us, in their strong and lustrous prose, that in the fullest lives the physical realm is equally if not more pressing and important' – Susie Boyt, Financial Times [read the full review at www.ft.com]

'Her greatest skill is the insight with which she writes about women caught up in heightened states of awareness. And while in subject matter she may be ploughing a familiar furrow, her writing nevertheless breaks new ground' – The Times

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1. David Lodge: Memento Mori is 'an exhilarating and life-enhancing read'

Read how Stella discovered Theodora in an empty church in Italy, and came to reimagine her life at www.guardian.co.uk.

Tom Holland is full of praise in his review in the Guardian: 'Duffy certainly makes the most of her material: not only is Theodora herself engagingly brought to life as a sassy, wise-cracking tart with a heart, but Constantinople, the great imperial capital whose crowds she woos and seduces, is also a pulsingly vivid presence . . . What she does get spot on, and to the immense benefit of her novel, is the life-changing potency of Christianity in the Byzantine world: the way in which it could indeed bring about spectacular prodigies of repentence. Theodora's own conversion is not Damascene, but something far more convincing: "no glorious epiphany," as Duffy nicely puts it, "but a slow erosion of her cynicism."'

'Duffy aims high … this fiction delivers colourful, compelling answers' – Boyd Tonkin, Independent

'Duffy's storytelling talents are given full rein as she recounts the epic adventures of Theodora's early life … Duffy proves herself equal to the grand scope of her tale' – Metro

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Sarah was presented with the award by actress Keeley Hawes who appeared in the TV adaptation of Tipping the Velvet.

The awards were voted on by readers of Glamour Magazine.

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1. Virago's Lennie Goodings wins Editor and Imprint of the Year award

He said: 'Muriel Spark's novel may be about the various physical and mental afflictions of old age, but far from being depressing or morbid, it is a wonderfully funny and exhilarating read.' Read the full review at www.guardian.co.uk.

Memento Mori was re-issued in the Virago Modern Classics range in February 2010.

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It is 92 years since women were first allowed to stand for Parliament and yet Britain still has one of the smallest percentages of women in Government in Europe. Why is this? The Women, Power and Politics Season seeks to ask questions, and look at the complexity of women and political power in the United Kingdom.

Twelve playwrights have written a response to this issue through history to the present day. The plays are presented in two parts, THEN and NOW, and express a diversity of opinions, stories and perspectives. Verbatim accounts have been edited by Virago author, Gillian Slovo.

As part of the debate alongside this the Tricycle Cinema will focus on women in politics around the world, and the gallery will celebrate women in politics over the last 100 years.

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See www.ashamaward.com for details and deadlines. Judges are Sarah Waters, Polly Samson and UK Publisher of the Year 2010, Lennie Goodings.

Related posts:

1. Virago's Lennie Goodings wins Editor and Imprint of the Year award

Here's a quick precis of the book:

From Flora, Roman goddess of plants, to today’s gardeners at Kew, women have always gardened. Women gardeners have grown vegetables for their kitchens and herbs for their medicine cupboards. They have been footnotes in the horticultural annals for specimens collected abroad. They taught young women about gardening twenty-five years before women’s horticultural schools officially existed. And their influence on the style of our gardens, frequently unacknowledged, survives to the present day.

From these triumphs to the battles fought against male-dominated institutions, from the horticultural pioneers to the bringers of change in society’s attitudes, this book is a celebration of the best of the species – gardening women.

To find out more about Catherine, please visit her website at www.gardeningwomen.com.

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The Bookseller reported on the double award:

"Little, Brown was the Publishing Technology Publisher of the Year, in part for its runaway success with Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series, the publishing phenomenon of 2009. Its young adult imprint Atom sold 16 million copies of the vampire series worldwide last year.

"It capped a successful night for the Hachette publisher. Lennie Goodings, editor at Little, Brown imprint Virago, won the Bookseller's Imprint and Editor of the Year. Buoyed by its literary awards, including Marilynne Robinson's Orange Prize-winning Home, and list of titles selected for television book clubs, judges also singled out Virago's balance of the commercial and critical success. One said: "Lennie sticks by her authors and comes up with winner after winner after winner – all the while remaining exceptionally modest."

Read the full article at www.thebookseller.com.

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