The Top Ten – 2021

It's slimmer pickings than usual this year, not because it hasn't been an excellent year for books (it absolutely has) but because I've struggled to read as much as I usually do. The Booker shortlist didn't get a look-in this autumn, and my ability to review has been much curtailed. This has largely been due …

Advertisement

The Fell – Sarah Moss

As I write, we're currently waiting to see if there will be new restrictions brought in over the next few days. But even if that is the case, we're not in the same unknowing state that we experienced back in 2020. In The Fell, a crisp and highly charged novel, Moss has now tackled the …

Wanderers; A History of Women Walking – Kerri Andrews

This book gathers together a marvellous collection of intrepid women who walk, or walked, usually alone, and who write about the intellectual and physical freedoms afforded by getting out by themselves. Some of the feats of physical exertion are incredible - Dorothy Wordsworth walking 33 miles from Kendal to Keswick in one day, Sarah Stoddart …

A Pin to See the Peepshow – F. Tennyson Jesse #BritishLibraryWomenWriters

Julia Almond, as a character says towards the end, ‘isn’t an ordinary woman.’ But she is a very recognisable woman in literature– a woman who uses whatever skills she has to better her existence, who craves nicer things, and who possessively guards her own room so she can sometimes be alone. She isn’t one of …