Fiction Titles
Note: a catalogue with more information (publisher/date, number of tapes and reader) is available from FAB.
Author, title, synopsis, catalogue number:
Allende, Isabel
The stories of Eva Luna
Vibrant and colourful. 23 magical tales, of anger that turns to laughter and revenge that turns to love.
039
Barfoot, Joan
Dancing in the Dark
A literary tour de force that stunningly portrays a housewife’s descent into madness and murder
001
Barker, Pat
Blow your House Down
A novel about violence against women. A killer of prostitutes sets off a wave of terror and evil until one woman outlasts him and regains love.
016
Barnes, Lisa
Hand Me Downs
Meet Cass Blevins, she is only five going on six, but she knows a lot of things. This spirited child learns to say no to those who hurt her, and yes to herself.
036
Brantenberg, Gerd
Daughters of Egalia
Satire about the land of Egalia where it’s the wim who hold power, control the government and the economy while the menwim stay at home minding the children and curling their beard bows.
029
Cameron, Anne
The Journey
Anne runs away from her tyrannical uncle at 14. Sarah, a prostitute is driven out of town. They cross the Canadian frontier together in this adventure story. A Feminist Western based on a true account.
037
Colmore, Gertrude
Suffragettes: a story of three women
A Suffragette novel written in 1911 in the midst of women’s struggle for the vote. The story of three women from different walks of life, who find a common cause in the campaign for women’s suffrage.
006
Conlon, F; da Silva, R; Wilson, B (eds),
The Things That Divide U
sixteen stories of women in situations from our own lives. Powerful, haunting and funny, these are stories to savour and to use.
240
Dunker, Patricia
James Moranda Barry
At the turn of the 19th century, 10 year old James Miranda Barry enrolled as a medical student in Edinburgh, the start of a glorious career as a military surgeon. Across the empire Barry achieved fame, not only as a brilliant physician, but also as a legendary duelist and celebrated social figure. James Miranda Barry was also a woman. Her greatest achievement of all had been to “pass” for a man for over 50 years. This novel tells Barry’s story for the first time in a richly inventive and entertaining tale of dark family secrets, adultery, questioned paternity and colonial history.
243
Edwards, Nicky
Mud
An ex-peace campaigner back in London to write a play about World War 1 meets an 80-year-old woman. They explore why wars are started. A book which is challenging about war, peace, and bonds between women.
012
Forster, Margaret
The Memory Box
After both her father and stepmother die, Catherine finally brings herself to open the box that her birth mother left for her before dying when Catherine was six months old. As she traces each item’s meaning and pieces together her mother’s short life story, Catherine herself changes.
101
Franklin, Miles
My Brilliant Career
Sybilla, trapped in drudgery on her parents’ outback farm, loves the wild Australian bushland and its way of life but hates the bitter constraints and physical burdens which are her lot as a mere woman.
027
French, Marilyn
The Women’s Room
Classic Feminist fiction. It’s 1968 – Mira Ward is lonely, depressed and in a mess. Having spent years subscribing to the American Dream of a husband, children and a spotless kitchen in suburbia, Mira decides it’s time for a change. Her world is about to be turned gloriously upside down.
017
Garden, Jane
The Summer After the Funeral
Athene Price has always been dutiful, clever, sweet-natured and, above all, calm. But then her father dies and just as if a stopper has been removed, all sorts of wilder emotions come bubbling forth.
033
Geller, Ruth
Triangles
A novel about a woman coming to terms with her Jewish identity in the context of her family, her relationship and her job
032
Grekova, Irina
The Ship of Widows
In Moscow, five women live together by chance in 1943; each life has been torn apart by war. The apartment – the ‘ship’ – becomes the centre of their world. One tells their stories as they journey through decades.
043
Jenson, Tovi
The Summer Book
A book about Bas, an elderly artist and her 6 year old grand daughter, while away the summer on a tiny island gulf of Finland. Gradually the 2 learn to adjust to each others’ fears, whims and yearnings for independence, and a fierce yet understated love emerges, one that not only encompasses the summer inhabitants, but the island itself.
244
Kay, Jackie
Trumpet
When jazz musician Billy Tipton died in 1989, the paramedics who tried to save his life also uncovered Tipton’s lifelong secret, that he was a woman. For 50-odd years he had fooled audiences, fellow musicians, his adopted children, and even some of his five wives. Now lesbian poet and playwright Jackie Kay takes on the same story by reimagining it as a novel.
104
Kay, Jackie
Why Don’t You Stop Talking?
Short stories: Ordinary lives are transformed by secrets or trauma in a disturbingly familiar world where love and sex, death and family life cast long shadows. In these stories, women’s role as mothers, daughters and lovers are magically, comically or poignantly examined.
218
Mendelsohn, Jane
I was Amelia Earhart
Biographical Fantasy: This limpid, not quite surreal story of the famous aviatrix and her drunken, handsome navigator is about, among other things, the wish for solitude and the opposing need for companionship.
121
Morrison, Toni
Paradise
Structured round 8 chapters, each bearing a woman’s name, each adding a different point of view to the narrative. Set in Ruby, a fictitious Black Town, founded by proud, racially pure men, who emerged from the fight against slavery only to find there was yet another hierarchy – this time based on gradations of skin colour – to keep them down. Yet the myth of Ruby’s own racial genealogy, its piety and self-righteousness is fragile, and the women who skirt the town’s boundaries preferring to take refuge in their own company threaten to blow it apart.
122
Roberts, Michell
Visitation
A book highlighting the conflict between the desire to be a creative woman and the desire to love men. Heterosexual sex from a female point of view. Luscious, sensual writing.
010
Russ, Joanna
Extra(ordinary) People
Linked short stories. A medieval abbess defends her community against Viking invasion; a time-traveller disguises himself as a male god on an errand of mercy; evolves a Gothic romance between two women.
046
Salvatore, Diane
Paxton Court
A close circle of lesbian and gay friends retire together to Florida. The newcomers to ‘Paxton Court’ are a shock to the neighbours. This book is about how people learn to live together. It is sexy, moving and very funny.
161
Scott, Manda
Boudica: Dreaming the Eagle
Historical Fiction: In AD 60, Boudicca, war leader of the Eceni, led her people in the final bloody revolt against the occupying armies of Rome. This epic recounts the growth to adulthood of Breaca, who at twelve kills her first warrior. Scott takes us into a world of druids and dreamers and the magic of the gods where horses and towns and the landscape itself become characters in their own right.
189
Smith, Ali
Hotel World
Five people: four are living, three are strangers, two are sisters, one is dead. Forget Room Service, this is a life-affirming book about death, a death-affirming book about life.
171
Waters, Sarah
The Night Watch
The story of four Londoners, three women and a young man, which moves back from 1947, through air-raids, illicit liaisons and sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941. Their lives and their secrets connect, in sometimes startling ways. War leads to strange alliances.
212
Wilson, Barbara Ellen
Ambitious Women
Alison and Holly own and operate a print shop together. When Alison helps a woman who is wanted for a bombing, she is threatened with a grand jury investigation that could lead to a jail sentence.
040
Wilson, Elisabeth
Prisons of Glass
Crystal, child of the Second World War, daughter of a broken home, with a degree and a lover in the 60′s, encounters the women’s movement, which stands her life on its head.
011
Winterson, Jeanette
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit
the story of a childhood filled with unusual character and events – her mother having picked her as a foundling to be a missionary. Witty, original and eccentric.
021
Winterson, Jeanette
Boating for Beginners
Winterson has re-written the book of Genesis and turned it into a surreal Cecil B De Mille epic. Feminism and 20th century kitchenware run riot in the ancient city of Ur; Noah is Howard Hughes crossed with Frankenstein – an eccentric overseer of thriving capitalism who makes ‘God’ by accident out of a piece of gateau and a giant electric toaster.
116
Winterson, Jeanette
Written on the Body
Written on the Body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes. Never unfold too much, tell the whole story.
123
Winterson, Jeanette
Sexing the Cherry
Jordan and his mother live on the banks of the Thames in 17th Century England, but there are other realities: the family who celebrate ceilings but deny floors; the 12 dancing princesses who escape each night and murder their unwanted husbands. Jordan returns to London, meanwhile his mother has been helping out in a brothel that promises a few surprises.
004
Winterson, Jeanette
The World and Other Places
This challenging collection is a kaleidoscope of people and places, with some just a tad out of the reach of reality and others just within the boundaries of dreams. Yet all somehow manage to tug at the soul.
231
Woolf, Virginia
A Room of One’s Own
Virginia Woolf’s blazing polemic on female creativity and the role of writers, and the silent fate of Shakespeare’s imaginary sister remains a powerful reminder of a woman’s need for financial independence and intellectual freedom.
110
