Constance Maud’s No Surrender: A Graphic Novel

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No Surrender is a women’s suffrage novel published in 1911, written by Women Writers Suffrage League member Constance Maud. The novel follows the friendship between mill worker Jenny Clegg and the middle class suffragette Mary O’Neil, whose brother is engaged to the local mill owner, Sir Godfrey Walker. It’s a novel that draws on real events and actions in the fight for women’s right to vote and features a handful of characters based on leading women in the movement. This edition is a graphic novel adaptation by sisters Sophie and Scarlett Rickard.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 2

Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London

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Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse is more than the book I was expecting it to be. I thought it was going to be an examination of city streets and public spaces and how they welcome or exclude women, of a similar ilk to Leslie Kern’s Feminist City. It turned out to be more like Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City. Which is fortunate, because I loved Laing’s book and hated Kern’s. Elkin blends personal memoir with the stories of other women who have worked things out through walking and sought anonymity in city streets across the world. It gave me a lot to think about. This one’s going to be a long one – make yourself a brew.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 3

Lost for Words

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Lost for Words is the fifth novel by Stephanie Butland. It’s the only novel of hers that I’ve read. It was a trying things out type purchase for me. It has been on my e-reader since 2017. There were lots of things I enjoyed about it. A key factor was the main character’s love for A S Byatt’s Possession, which is a book I have read multiple times.

The story largely takes place in a bookshop and is a tale aimed at bookish readers who like quirky characters and a bit of grit in their escapism.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 5

Resurrection Bay

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Resurrection Bay is the first novel in Emma Viskic’s Caleb Zelic series. Caleb is a private security specialist and fraud investigator. Deaf since childhood, he has developed an outsider mentality and has made some poor choices in life that see him living in a poorly decorated rental at the start of this book. Before we find this out about him, though, his best friend is killed, dying in Caleb’s arms. Caleb’s presence at the scene when the police arrive places him under suspicion of being involved in the murder.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 0

Strong Female Character

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Strong Female Character is the autobiography of Fern Brady. I love Fern Brady. If you don’t know her, she’s a comedian from Bathgate in West Lothian, Scotland. I first encountered her on the Wheel of Misfortune podcast that she created with co-host Alison Spittle. I loved her blunt humour. I loved her even more when she appeared on Taskmaster and wrote a song about why she should be crowned Queen of the Taskmaster house. Her autobiography explains how she came to be the strong female character of the title. My love for her has increased now I’ve read her book. The telling is raw in its honesty, as is Brady in her comedy.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 4

The Shipping Forecast Puzzle Book

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I’ve never listened to the Shipping Forecast. It’s broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at 00:48 and 05:34 each morning (plus 17:34 at the weekend) when I am tucked up in bed/doing something weekend-y. I know of it, of course. It’s famous. Some people mimic it like it’s a poem.

A friend bought me a copy of Alan Connor’s The Shipping Forecast Puzzle Book for Christmas. I was intrigued.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 0

Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies

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Noopiming, an Ojibwe word meaning ‘in the bush‘, is narrated by Mashkawaji, an entity frozen in a lake who, over the course of the book, is visited by seven characters. Mashkawaji describes these characters as making up their being: the Elder Akiwenzii, Ninaatig the maple tree, the Elder Mindimooyenh, a recovering alcoholic called Sabe who is also a sasquatch, a caribou called Adik, and two young lovers, Asin and Lucy. Each of these characters, Mashkawaji tells us, represents a specific part of them: Akiwenzii is the will, Ninaatig the lungs, Mindimooyenh the conscience, Sabe the marrow, Adik the nervous system, Asin the eyes and ears, and Lucy the mind. The book begins with a poem, a single line or sometimes three on each page for 32 pages, that introduces Mashkawaji and the seven component characters, and is a meditation on place and time, on connection and nature. It is a strange and unsettling start for a person raised in the western European tradition of storytelling.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 0

Lessons in Chemistry

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Bonnie Garmus’s celebrity-endorsement-bedecked global number one and multi-million-copy bestseller Lessons in Chemistry was a Christmas gift in 2024. It’s a curious fish, part roustabout women’s lib comedy, part devastating document of just how abhorrently men can treat women in the workplace and the home, part sensitive examination of how tragedy shapes people’s lives and how love doesn’t always conquer all. There’s a workplace rape after 18 pages of light-hearted scene setting that pulled me up short, just as I was settling in for a less serious read than has been my habit of late. It sets out the stall of this exploration of the fight for equality in the workplace as seen through the life of one very particular woman.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 9