As April is Women’s History Month, I’ll be sharing book lists with a focus on books considered classic feminist texts and other books by women authors.
Are you interested in reading fiction books that shaped literature and how women were perceived?
Here are five fiction books considered modern classic feminist fiction from the 1970’s until recently. A lot of books have been published in that time, so this is just a small selection of books.
All of these books have had a significant impact on literature and the way women have been perceived. I’ve listed them in order of when they were published.
Here’s a list of five fiction books considered to be modern feminist classics.
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter (1979)
Kindred by Octavia Butler (1979)
The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1982)
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985)
Kim Jiyoung, born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo (2016)
Keep reading to find out more about each one.
1. The Bloody Chamber (1979)
by Angela Carter
Year Published: 1979
Storygraph Categories: fiction, magical realism, short stories, dark, mysterious, medium-paced
Importance: One of the first feminist retellings of fairy tales
This is a collection of ten stories that are some kind of retelling or are based on fairytales or folk tales. As Carter stated: “My intention was not to do ‘versions’ or, as the American edition of the book said, horribly, ‘adult’ fairy tales, but to extract the latent content from the traditional stories.”
In general, the stories challenge the representation of women in fairy tales and was considered one of the first feminist retellings of fairy tales.
The stories vary in length, and the novelette which inspired the title, “The Bloody Chamber” is significantly longer than the rest. It won the Cheltenham Festival Literary Prize in 1979, the first year of the prize.
Summary (from Goodreads):
Angela Carter was a storytelling sorceress, the literary godmother of Neil Gaiman, David Mitchell, Audrey Niffenegger, J. K. Rowling, Kelly Link, and other contemporary masters of supernatural fiction. In her masterpiece, The Bloody Chamber—which includes the story that is the basis of Neil Jordan’s 1984 movie The Company of Wolves—she spins subversively dark and sensual versions of familiar fairy tales and legends like “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Bluebeard,” “Puss in Boots,” and “Beauty and the Beast,” giving them exhilarating new life in a style steeped in the romantic trappings of the gothic tradition.
Importance: Science fiction that centers Black characters
Octavia Butler was one of the most influential Black Women authors in Science Fiction. She grew up loving science fiction and set out to write books that she could see herself in and is often considered to cross genre boundaries.
In Kindred, it combines time travel with slave narratives. The story focuses on two interracial couples, and explores how issues of power, gender, and race intersect.
In an interview about the novel in 2004, Butler said, she “set out to make people feel history.”
Summary (from Goodreads):
The first science fiction written by a black woman, Kindred has become a cornerstone of black American literature. This combination of slave memoir, fantasy, and historical fiction is a novel of rich literary complexity. Having just celebrated her 26th birthday in 1976 California, Dana, an African-American woman, is suddenly and inexplicably wrenched through time into antebellum Maryland. After saving a drowning white boy there, she finds herself staring into the barrel of a shotgun and is transported back to the present just in time to save her life. During numerous such time-defying episodes with the same young man, she realizes the challenge she’s been given…
Importance: Winner of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize (making Walker the first black woman to win the prize)
The Color Purple won both the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. It was also on the BBC News’ list of the 100 most influential novels.
However, the novel has also frequently been thee target of censors or book challenges, as it appears at #17 on the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000-2010. It’s usually challenged due to explicit content, specifically in terms of its depiction of violence.
Summary (from Goodreads):
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Alice Walker’s iconic modern classic is now a Penguin Book.
A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance and silence. Through a series of letters spanning twenty years, first from Celie to God, then the sisters to each other despite the unknown, the novel draws readers into its rich and memorable portrayals of Celie, Nettie, Shug Avery and Sofia and their experience.
The Color Purple broke the silence around domestic and sexual abuse, narrating the lives of women through their pain and struggle, companionship and growth, resilience and bravery. Deeply compassionate and beautifully imagined, Alice Walker’s epic carries readers on a spirit-affirming journey towards redemption and love.
The Handmaid’s Tale is considered a feminist dystopian novel and is notable for sparking intense debate.
The novel is considered a feminist dystopian novel because it explores themes of how women are subjugated, especially their lost of agency, individuality and reproductive rights.
Atwood used history as inspiration as all scenarios portrayed within the novel have actually occurred in real life. In an interview Atwood stated, “…I didn’t put in anything that we haven’t already done, we’re not already doing, we’re seriously trying to do, coupled with trends that are already in progress… So all of those things are real, and therefore the amount of pure invention is close to nil.” The overlap with reality makes the novel that much more impactful and scary.
In 1985, the novel won the Governor General’s Award in Canada, along with the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987. It has also been nominated for a handful of other awards: the Nebula Award in 1986, the Booker Prize in 1986, and the Prometheus Award in 1987.
However, it has been criticized as “white feminism” for both the treatment of marginalized communities in the book (basically ”doing away with them” in a few lines and removing them from the conversation), while also primarily borrowing from the lived experiences of those communities but applying it to white women. A lot of the reproductive and human rights exploitation highlighted in the novel came from how Black and Indigenous women were treated in the past.
Summary (from Goodreads):
Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are valued only if their ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the years before, when she lived and made love with her husband, Luke; when she played with and protected her daughter; when she had a job, money of her own, and access to knowledge. But all of that is gone now . . .
Funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing, The Handmaid’s Tale is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and tour de force.
This is the most recent of the five novels, but it’s notable for how it depicts sexism in Korea and the recent impact it has had on sparking discussion around women’s experiences.
Even though it’s a fictional novel, all the main character’s experiences are based on statistics and research done by the author (with footnotes and references to back it up).
The novel focuses on sexism experienced throughout everyday life, the constant and pervasive sexism.
The author, Cho Nam-Joo, said that she intended to “make this into a public debate.”
“I thought of Kim Jiyoung’s character as a vessel that contains experiences and emotions that are common to every Korean woman.”
Cho Nam-Joo
In 2020, the novel was longlisted for both the U.S. National Book Award for Translated Literature and the French Emile Guimet Prize for Asian Literature.
Summary (from Storygraph):
One of the most notable novels of the year, hailed by both critics and K-pop stars alike, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 follows one woman’s psychic deterioration in the face of rampant misogyny. In a tidy apartment on the outskirts of Seoul, millennial “everywoman” Kim Jiyoung spends her days caring for her infant daughter. But strange symptoms appear: Jiyoung begins to impersonate the voices of other women, dead and alive. As she plunges deeper into this psychosis, her concerned husband sends her to a psychiatrist. Jiyoung narrates her story to this doctor—from her birth to parents who expected a son to elementary school teachers who policed girls’ outfits to male coworkers who installed hidden cameras in women’s restrooms. But can her psychiatrist cure her, or even discover what truly ails her?
Have you read any of these books? I’d love to hear your thoughts on the book in a comment below?
Final thoughts
I know this is such a small selection of books, and it’s clearly not representative of all feminist fiction in the past 50 ish years. Though, I did try and provide a range of novels both in genre and authors.
Each one of these is so distinct and I like how each book has it’s own way of sparking conversation and provoking debate. I believe each of these will leave a strong impression on you and give you lots to think about. However you feel about these books, you’ll likely have an opinion about it and something to say.
I think some of the best books help inspire both questions and conversation. If it can make you reconsider aspects of reality or get you talking to others about big topics, I think that’s powerful.
Do you have a favourite feminist fictional book? I’d love you to share it in a comment below.
This is an excerpt from the book The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder.
“May I ask you something?” I said, still looking at him.
“Of course,” he answered.
“How does it feel to remember everything? To have everything that the rest of us have lost saved up in your heart?”
“That’s a difficult question,” he said, using his forefinger to push up the frames of his glasses and then leaving his hand at his throat.
“I’d imagine you’d be uncomfortable, with your heart full of so many forgotten things.”
“No, that’s not really a problem. A heart has no shape, no limits. That’s why you can put almost any kind of thing in it, why it can hold so much. It’s much like your memory, in that sense.”
“So you have everything inside you that has disappeared from the island?”
“I’m not sure about everything. Memories don’t just pile up—they also change over time. And sometimes they fade of their own accord. Though the process, for me, is quite different from what happens to the rest of you when something disappears from the island.”
“Different how?” I asked, rubbing my fingernails.
“My memories don’t feel as though they’ve been pulled up by the root. Even as they fade, something remains. Like tiny seeds that might germinate again if the rain falls. And even if a memory disappears completely, the heart retains something. A slight tremor or pain, some bit of joy, a tear.”
He chose his words carefully, as though weighing each one on his tongue before pronouncing it.
“I sometimes wonder what I’d see if I could hold your heart in my hands,” I told him. “I imagine it fitting perfectly in my palms, soft and slippery, like gelatin that hasn’t quite set. It might wobble at the slightest touch, but I sense I’d need to hold it carefully, so it wouldn’t slip through my fingers. I also imagine the warmth of the thing. It’s usually hidden deep inside so it’s much warmer than the rest of me. I close my eyes and sink into that warmth, and when I do, the sensations of all the things that have disappeared come back to me. I can feel all the things you remember, there in my hands. Doesn’t that sound marvelous?”
“Would you really like to remember all the things you’ve lost?” R asked.
I told him the truth. “I don’t know. Because I don’t even know what it is I should be remembering. What’s gone is gone completely. I have no seeds inside me, waiting to sprout again. I have to make do with a hollow heart full of holes. That’s why I’m jealous of your heart, one that offers some resistance, that is tantalizingly transparent and yet not, that seems to change as the light shines on it at different angles.”
“When I read your novels, I never imagine that your heart is hollow.”
“But you have to admit that it’s difficult to be a writer on this island. Words seem to retreat further and further away with each disappearance. I suspect the only reason I’ve been able to go on writing is that I’ve had your heart by my side all along.”
“If that’s true then I’m glad,” R said.
I turned my palms up and held them out. Then we stared at them for a time, without so much as blinking, as though I were actually holding something in my hands. But no matter how hard we looked, it was painfully clear that they were empty.
Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!
The Memory Police – Summary
Here is the book summary from Goodreads:
On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses—until things become much more serious. Most of the island’s inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten.
When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past.
A surreal, provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, The Memory Police is a stunning new work from one of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in any language.
This is a quote from the book Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.
Quote by Emily St. John Mandel, “First we only want to be seen, but once we’re seen, that’s not enough anymore. After that, we wanted to be remembered.”
Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!
If you’re interested, you can read an excerpt from the book here.
Station Eleven – Summary
Here is the book summary from Goodreads:
Set in the days of civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells the story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.
One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time—from the actor’s early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains—this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor’s first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet.
As April is Women’s History Month, I’ll be sharing book lists with a focus on books considered classic feminist texts and other books by women authors.
Are you interested in reading fiction books that shaped literature and how women were perceived?
Here are five older fiction books considered classic feminist fiction from the 19th century up to the 1960’s. Obviously that’s a large time span, so this is just a small selection of books.
All of these books have had a significant impact on literature and the way women have been perceived. I’ve listed them in order of when they were published.
Alcott wrote this coming-of-age novel focused around the lives of the four March sisters.
Through this novel, Alcott developed a new genre of literature by combining romantic children’s fiction with sentimental novels.
The book was an immediate success! Readers were eager for more about the characters, so Alcott quickly completed a second part. It was originally published in two volumes, however now the two volumes are often sold together in a single novel.
Summary (from Storygraph):
The lives and adventures of the four March sisters–Jo, Meg, Beth, and Amy–are set against the backdrop of nineteenth-century New England while their father is off fighting in the Civil War.
Storygraph Categories: fiction, classics, horror, short stories, dark, mysterious, fast-paced
Importance: Mental health portrayal
This is a short story that powerfully portrays health issues and their treatment faced by women of this era (late 19th century).
It’s considered an important work of early American feminist literature due to its portrayal of women’s mental and physical health. It’s also considered a great work of horror fiction.
I find it’s a short story you can keep re-reading, getting something new from it each time.
Summary (from Storygraph):
First published in 1892, The Yellow Wall-Paper is written as the secret journal of a woman who, failing to relish the joys of marriage and motherhood, is sentenced to a country rest cure. Though she longs to write, her husband and doctor forbid it, prescribing instead complete passivity. Narrated with superb psychological and dramatic precision, this short but powerful masterpiece has the heroine create a reality of her own within the hypnotic pattern of the faded yellow wall-paper of her bedroom–a pattern that comes to symbolize her own imprisonment.
This key women’s studies text by a pivotal first-wave feminist writer, lecturer, and activist (1860-1935) is reprinted as it first appeared in New England Magazine in 1892, and contains the essential essay on the author’s life and work by pioneering Gilman scholar Elaine R. Hedges.
The Awakening is considered a precursor to American modernist literature, due to its blend of social commentary, a realistic narrative, and psychological complexity. It’s also one of the earlier American novels that discussed women’s issues without condescension (surprise surprise it took a woman to accomplish that).
It was considered quite controversial at the time of publication, mostly due to its open discussion of female marital infidelity.
Chopin faced many barriers when she tried to publish stories after she published this novel, and unfortunately she did not write another novel after this one.
Summary (from Goodreads):
When first published in 1899, The Awakening shocked readers with its honest treatment of female marital infidelity. Audiences accustomed to the pieties of late Victorian romantic fiction were taken aback by Chopin’s daring portrayal of a woman trapped in a stifling marriage, who seeks and finds passionate physical love outside the confines of her domestic situation.
Aside from its unusually frank treatment of a then-controversial subject, the novel is widely admired today for its literary qualities. Edmund Wilson characterized it as a work “quite uninhibited and beautifully written, which anticipates D. H. Lawrence in its treatment of infidelity.” Although the theme of marital infidelity no longer shocks, few novels have plumbed the psychology of a woman involved in an illicit relationship with the perception, artistry, and honesty that Kate Chopin brought to The Awakening.
Importance: Realistic depiction of women’s lived experiences
The Golden Notebook is considered as a companion volume to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. It also became popular with feminists due to its realistic depiction of women’s lived experiences.
This 1962 novel by the British writer Doris Lessing is considered one of the best English-language novels since 1923 (according to Time Magazine).
Margaret Drabble describes Lessing’s writing style as “inner space fiction” because Lessing’s work explores a combination of mental and societal breakdown.
Doris Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007 for being “that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny”.
Summary (from Goodreads):
Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier year. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine relives part of her own experience. And in the blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna tries to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook.
This was an experiment where seven women read the book online, while also commenting on the book and discussing it together. Each page/website has a short part of the book with the comments from the seven women below. You can read along the book together as if in a group.
Importance: Powerful depiction of mental health and Plath’s only novel
The Bell Jar is the only novel written by Sylvia Plath, an American writer and poet. It was originally published under a pseudonym (”Victoria Lucas”) as it is semi-autobiographical.
The novel portray’s the main character, Esther Greenwood, as she descends into mental illness. The book is often considered a roman à clef as the protagonist’s experience tends to mirror the author’s, with Plath dying by suicide only a month after its publication in the UK.
I think it’s important to acknowledge and warn individuals that there are racists parts of the book. I personally don’t think that those parts are enough to negate the rest of the book, but I completely understand if you don’t want to read the book because of this.
Summary (from Goodreads):
We follow Esther Greenwood’s personal life from her summer job in New York with Ladies’ Day magazine, back through her days at New England’s largest school for women, and forward through her attempted suicide, her bad treatment at one asylum and her good treatment at another, to her final re-entry into the world like a used tyre: “patched, retreaded, and approved for the road” … Esther Greenwood’s account of her year in the bell jar is as clear and readable as it is witty and disturbing.
I couldn’t help to think that so many of the books considered to be “feminist texts” are just a genuine portray of women’s experiences.
Most of them are just women written as fully developed characters dealing with normal life experiences. Or, if they were considered controversial at the time, it might just be women going through experiences that society didn’t want to know about (like mental health and unfulfilling marriages).
I know that older male authors are not known for writing strong or well-rounded women characters, but I didn’t realize that the bar was so low.
I recently read Kafka’s novel The Trial and I was astounded at how terrible the women characters were. Now, I understand that his stories were groundbreaking and powerful commentaries on society, but the one-dimensional female characters were such a turn off, and made it extremely difficult to finish the book.
All that to say, I think we need to understand what it means to be considered a feminist text within the literary context of that era. It’s unlikely for it to match with what we consider feminism to be today.
This is an excerpt from the book Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng.
For a long time, this was the only image Mia had of Mr. Wilkinson, a mysterious cross between Marco Polo and Santa Claus who filled his home with treasures. But one afternoon, just after her thirteenth birthday, Mr. Wilkinson had called to her sternly from his front porch.
“I’ve been seeing you traipsing around for a year now,” he’d said. “I want to see what you’ve been up to.”
Mis, terrified, collected a stack of her photographs and brought them to the Wilkinsons’ the next morning. She had never shown her photos to anyone but Warren before, and Warren, of course, had oohed and aahed. But Mr. Wilkinson was an adult, a man, a man she barely knew. He would have no incentive to be kind.
When she rang the Wilkinsons’ doorbell, Mrs. Wilkinson led her into the den, where Mr. Wilkinson sat at a large desk typing something on a cream-colored typewriter. But when Mia entered, he swiveled around in his chair and swung the typewriter shelf down and under, where it folded into a cabinet in the desk as neatly as if it had been swallowed.
“Now then,” he said. He unfolded a pair of halfmoon glasses that hung around his neck and placed them on his nose, and Mia’s knees trembled. “Let’s have a look.”
Mr. Wilkinson, it turned out, was a photographer himself—though he preferred landscapes. “Don’t like shots with people in them,” he told her. “I’ll take a tree over a person any day.” When he went on a trip, he took his camera with him and always scheduled himself half a day to go exploring. From a file he pulled a stack of photographs: a redwood forest at dawn, a river snaking through a field shot with dew, a lake reflecting the sun in a glittering triangle that pointed to the woods beyond. The photographs all over the hallway, Mia realized, were his as well.
“You’ve got a good eye,” Mr. Wilkinson said at last. “Good eye and good instincts. See this one here?” He tapped the top picture, a photo of Warren perched in the low branches of a sycamore, back to the camera, silhouetted against the sky. “That’s a fine shot. How’d you know how to frame that?”
“I don’t know,” Mia admitted. “It just looked right.”
Mr. Wilkinson squinted at another. “Hold onto that. Trust your eyes. They see well.” He plucked out another photo. “But see this? You wanted that squirrel, didn’t you?” Mia nodded. It had been running along the ridge of the fence and she’d been mesmerized by the undulating arc its body and tail had traced as it ran. Like watching a ball bounce, she’d thought as she clicked the shutter. But the photo had come out blurry, focused on the fence instead of the squirrel, the squirrel itself simply a smudge. She wondered how Mr. Wilkinson knew.
“Thought so. You need a better camera. That one’s fine for a starter, or for birthday parties and Christmas. Not for you.” He went to the closet and rummaged in the back, the old overcoats and bagged dresses inside muffling his voice. “You—you want to take real pictures.” In a moment he returned and held out a compact box. “You need a real camera, not a toy.”
It was a Nikon F, a little silver-and-black thing, heavy and solid in her hands. Mia ran her fingers over the pebbled casing. “But I can’t take this.”
“I’m not giving it, I’m lending it. You want it or not?” Without waiting for her to answer, Mr. Wilkinson opened a drawer in his desk. “I’m not using that one anymore. Someone might as well.” He removed a black canister of film and tossed it to Mia. “Besides,” He said, “I’m looking forward to seeing what you do with it.”
Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!
Little Fires Everywhere – Summary
Here is the book summary from Goodreads:
Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down.
In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is meticulously planned – from the layout of the winding roads, to the colours of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules.
Enter Mia Warren – an enigmatic artist and single mother- who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenage daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than just tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past, and a disregard for the rules that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.
When old family friends attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town – and puts Mia and Elena on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Elena is determined to uncover the secrets in Mia’s past. But her obsession will come at an unexpected and devastating cost . . .
This is a quote from the story Big Blonde by Dorothy Parker.
Quote by Dorothy Parker, “To her who had laughed so much, crying was delicious.”
Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!
If you’re interested, you can read an excerpt from another story from Dorothy Parker here.
Collection of short stories – Summary
Here is the book summary from Goodreads:
Three brilliant tales by a master storyteller: ‘Big Blonde’, ‘The Sexes’ and ‘Dusk Before Fireworks’.
W. Somerset Maugham on Parker: ‘Dorothy Parker has a wonderfully delicate ear for human speech …. Her style is easy without being slipshod and cultivated without affectation. It is a perfect instrument for the display of her many-sided humour, her irony, her sarcasm, her tenderness, her pathos.’
As April is Women’s History Month, I’ll be sharing book lists with a focus on books considered classic feminist texts and other books by women authors.
Are you hoping to read more award winning books? While also wanting to read more books by women?
Here’s the perfect list for you. Here are six books by women that have recently (within the last 10 years) won international prizes!
I have included a diverse collection of prizes to showcase a range of genres and book recommendations.
Here’s a list of books with women authors that have won an award in the past 10 years.
The Vegatarian by Han Kang 2016 Man Booker International Prize
Olga Takarczuk Won the Novel Prize for Literature in 2018 Two books to highlight are: Flights & Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction
Network Effect by Martha Wells 2021 Hugo Award for Best Novel
Tomb of Sand 2022 International Booker Prize
Keep reading to find out more about each one.
1. The Vegetarian – 2016 Man Booker International
by Han Kang Translated by Deborah Smith
Year Published: 2007
Storygraph Categories: fiction, contemporary, literary, dark, sad, tense, medium-paced
Language: Korean
Importance: Winner of the 2016 Man Booker International Prize
The Vegetarian was published in 2007 in Korea, with the English version published in 2015. This is Han’s second book that has been translated into English.
The Vegetarian is considered the biggest win for Korean translated literature since the book Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin, which won the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2012.
Summary (from Goodreads):
Before the nightmare, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary life. But when splintering, blood-soaked images start haunting her thoughts, Yeong-hye decides to purge her mind and renounce eating meat. In a country where societal mores are strictly obeyed, Yeong-hye’s decision to embrace a more “plant-like” existence is a shocking act of subversion. And as her passive rebellion manifests in ever more extreme and frightening forms, scandal, abuse, and estrangement begin to send Yeong-hye spiraling deep into the spaces of her fantasy. In a complete metamorphosis of both mind and body, her now dangerous endeavor will take Yeong-hye—impossibly, ecstatically, tragically—far from her once-known self altogether.
Olga won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2018 for “a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life”. She was the first Polish female prose writer to win the Nobel Prize.
Here are two of her novels that have been translated into English.
Importance: Won the Man Booker International Prize in 2018
This is a book of vignettes that are all narrated by a “nameless female traveller.” There are 116 vignettes in the book, varying in length with some only one sentence and others up to 31 pages.
Flights has gotten quite a bit of literary attention. In 2008, it won the Nike Award, Poland’s highest literary award. Then after it was translated, it won the Man Booker International Prize in 2018.
Summary (from Goodreads):
From the incomparably original Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, Flights interweaves reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration. Chopin’s heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time. Where are you from? Where are you coming in from? Where are you going? we call to the traveler. Enchanting, unsettling, and wholly original, Flights is a master storyteller’s answer.
Importance: Shortlisted for the 2019 International Booker Prize
The title of the book comes from William Blake’s poem call “Proverbs of Hell.” These are the specific lines:
In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.
William Blake
Source: Proverbs of Hell
It was shortlisted for the 2019 International Booker Prize, and as mentioned above the author won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The main character of the novel is a middle aged woman, which is quite rare, but very enjoyable to read.
Summary (from Goodreads):
One of Poland’s most imaginative and lyrical writers, Olga Tokarczuk presents us with a detective story with a twist in DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD. After her two dogs go missing and members of the local hunting club are found murdered, teacher and animal rights activist Janina Duszejko becomes involved in the ensuing investigation. Part magic realism, part detective story, DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD is suspenseful and entertaining reimagining of the genre interwoven with poignant and insightful commentaries on our perceptions of madness, marginalised people and animal rights.
Importance: Winner of the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction
Susanna Clarke is well known for her debut novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell from 2004. After her debut novel was published, she became ill with chronic fatigue syndrome, which made writing torturous for her. Piranesi is her second novel, published 16 years later.
The title, Piranesi, alludes to an Italian artist from the 18th century named Giovanni Battista Piranesi. He produced a series of prints prints entitled Imaginary Prisons that depict large, intricate architectural structures.
Piranesi was a finalist for the Hugo Award and nominated for a Nebula Award in 2021. Both awards are for works within the genres of science fiction and fantasy.
Summary (from Goodreads):
Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house.
There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.
Importance: Winner of the 2021 Hugo Award for Best Novel
Martha Wells is well known for her Murderbot series (The Murderbot Diaries), a science fiction series about a part human and part robot construct called a Security Unit.
Network effect is the fifth book in the Murderbot series. The first book is called All Systems Red.
The first four books in the series are quite short, whereas this fifth book is much longer. It has been described as “… if the first books were episodes in a four-part TV miniseries, then ‘Network Effect’ is the feature-length movie with the bigger budget and scope, and it is no less enjoyable.”
So far I’ve only read the first book (due to a very long hold time line at my library), but I really enjoyed it and can’t wait to read the rest of the series.
Summary (from Goodreads):
Murderbot returns in its highly anticipated, first, full-length standalone novel.
You know that feeling when you’re at work, and you’ve had enough of people, and then the boss walks in with yet another job that needs to be done right this second or the world will end, but all you want to do is go home and binge your favorite shows? And you’re a sentient murder machine programmed for destruction? Congratulations, you’re Murderbot.
Come for the pew-pew space battles, stay for the most relatable A.I. you’ll read this century.
—
I’m usually alone in my head, and that’s where 90 plus percent of my problems are.
When Murderbot’s human associates (not friends, never friends) are captured and another not-friend from its past requires urgent assistance, Murderbot must choose between inertia and drastic action.
Importance: Winner of International Booker Prize in 2022
Tomb of Sand won the International Booker Prize in 2022, making it the first novel translated from an Indian Language to win the prize.
The English version of the book was published by Titled Axis Press, a small non-profit publishing house that focuses on work by Asian and African writers.
The main character is an 80-year old woman! I think it’s important to read stories both from diverse authors and about diverse characters, which would include a range of ages. I’m really excited to read more books with older women main characters.
Summary (from Goodreads):
An eighty-year-old woman slips into a deep depression at the death of her husband, then resurfaces to gain a new lease on life. Her determination to fly in the face of convention – including striking up a friendship with a hijra (trans) woman – confuses her bohemian daughter, who is used to thinking of herself as the more ‘modern’ of the two.
At the older woman’s insistence they travel back to Pakistan, simultaneously confronting the unresolved trauma of her teenage experiences of Partition, and re-evaluating what it means to be a mother, a daughter, a woman, a feminist.
Rather than respond to tragedy with seriousness, Geetanjali Shree’s playful tone and exuberant wordplay results in a book that is engaging, funny, and utterly original, at the same time as being an urgent and timely protest against the destructive impact of borders and boundaries, whether between religions, countries, or genders.
If you spend much time on booktube, booktok, or other book-social media areas you’ve probably heard of some of these book awards.
When I started trying to understand which was what, it got to be a bit overwhelming as there are so many book awards out there. But that also means you can find awards for almost any category you want to read.
This is an excerpt from the book Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.
“These people you coach, do they ever actually change? I mean in any kind of lasting, notable way?”
He hesitated. This was actually something he’d wondered about.
“They change their behaviors,” he said, “some of them. Often people will simply have no idea that they’re perceived as needing improvement in a certain area, but then they see the report…”
She nodded. “You differentiate between changing people and changing behaviors, then.”
“Of course.”
“Here’s the thing,” Dahlia said. “I’ll bet you can coach Dan, and probably he’ll exhibit a turnaround of sorts, he’ll improve in concrete areas, but eh’ll still be a joyless bastard.”
“A joyless…”
“No, wait, don’t write that down. Let me rephrase that. Okay, let’s say he’ll change a little, probably if you coach him, but he’ll still be a successful-but-unhappy person who works until nine p.m. every night because he’s got a terrible marriage and doesn’t want to go home, and don’t ask how I know that, everyone knows when you’ve got a terrible marriage, it’s like having bad breath, you get close enough to a person and it’s obvious. And you know, I’m reaching here, but I’m talking about someone who just seems like he wishes he’d done something different with his life, I mean really actually almost anything—is this too much?”
“No. Please, go on.”
“Okay, I love my job, and I’m not just saying that because my boss is going to see my interview comments, which by the way I don’t believe he won’t be able to tell who said what, anonymous or not. But anyway, I look around sometimes and I think—this will maybe sound weird—it’s like the corporate world’s full of ghosts. And actually, let me revise that, my parents are in academia so I’ve had front-row seats for that horror show, I know academia’s no different, so maybe a fairer way of putting this would be to say that adulthood’s full of ghosts.”
“I’m sorry, I’m not sure I quite—”
“I’m talking about these people who’ve ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? They’ve done what’s expected of them. They want to do something different but it’s impossible now, there’s a mortgage, kids, whatever, they’re trapped. Dan’s like that.”
“You don’t think he likes his job, then.”
“Correct,” she said, “but I don’t think he even realizes it. You probably encounter people like him all the time. High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.”
What was it in this statement that made Clark want to weep? He was nodding, taking down as much as he could. “Do you think he’d describe himself as unhappy in his work?”
“No,” Dahlia said, “because I think people like him think work is supposed to be drudgery punctuated by very occasional moments of happiness, but when I say happiness, I mostly mean distraction. You know what I mean?”
”No, please elaborate.”
“Okay, say you go into the break room,” she said, “and a couple people you like are there, say someone’s telling a funny story, you laugh a little, you feel included, everyone’s so funny, you go back to your desk with a sort of, I don’t know, I guess afterglow would be the word? You go back to your desk with an afterglow, but then by four or five o’clock the day’s just turned into yet another day, and you go on like that, looking forward to five o’clock and then the weekend and then your two or three annual weeks of paid vacation time, day in day out, and that’s what happens to your life.”
“Right,” Clark said. He was filled in that moment with an inexpressible longing. The previous day eh’d gone into the break room and spent five minutes laughing at a colleague’s impression of a Daily Show bit.
“That’s what passes for a life, I should say. That’s what passes for happiness, for most people. Guys like Dan, they’re like sleepwalkers,” she said, “and nothing ever jolts them awake.”
He go through the rest of the interview, shook her hand, walked out through the vaulted lobby of the Graybar Building to Lexington Avenue. The air was cold but he longed to be outside, away from other people. He took a long and circuitous route, veering two avenues east to the relative quiet of Second Avenue.
He was thinking of the book, and thinking of what Dahlia had said about sleepwalking, and a strange thought came to him: had Arther seen that Clark was sleepwalking? Would this be in the letters to V? Because he had been sleepwalking Clark realized, moving half-asleep through the motions of his life for a while now, years; not specifically unhappy, but when had he last found real joy in his work? When was the last time he’d been truly moved by anything? When had he last felt awe or inspiration? He wished he could somehow go back and find the iPhone people whom he’d jostled on the sidewalk earlier, apologize to them—I’m sorry, I’ve just realized that I’m as minimally present in this world as you are, I had no right to judge—and also he wanted to call every target of every 360° report and apologize to them too, because it’s an awful thing to appear in someone else’s report, he saw that now, it’s an awful thing to be the target.
Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!
Station Eleven – Summary
Here is the book summary from Goodreads:
Set in the days of civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells the story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.
One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time—from the actor’s early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains—this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor’s first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet.
This is a quote from the book The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yōko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder.
Quote by Yōko Ogawa, “Among the many things that made the Professor an excellent teacher was the fact that he wasn’t afraid to say “we don’t know.” For the Professor, there was no shame in admitting you didn’t have the answer, it was a necessary step toward the truth. It was as important to teach us about the unknown or the unknowable as it was to teach us what had already been safely proven.”
Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!
If you’re interested, you can read an excerpt from the book here.
The Housekeeper and the Professor – Summary
Here is the book summary from Goodreads:
He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem–ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory.
She is an astute young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, who is hired to care for him.
And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them.
Though he cannot hold memories for long (his brain is like a tape that begins to erase itself every eighty minutes), the Professor’s mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son. The Professor is capable of discovering connections between the simplest of quantities–like the Housekeeper’s shoe size–and the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer and more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away.
The Housekeeper and the Professor is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family.
As April is Women’s History Month, I’ll be sharing book lists with a focus on books considered classic feminist texts and other books by women authors.
Are you interested in learning more about the history of women’s movements and gaining tools to think critically about how society is shaped by the patriarchy?
Here are five older nonfiction books considered classic feminist texts from a range of eras, from as early as 1792 up until the 1970’s. They each had a considerable impact on women and society.
However, as these are older, they may lack the depth of insight provided by intersectionality (considering more than just gender to affect one’s experience). I’ve listed them in order of when they were published.
It’s important to note that these books are primarily focused on the women’s movements in the Western societies (including North America and the UK). They are also all written by white women, who tend to have a limited understanding of gender.
If you have suggestions for books that focus on women’s movements from elsewhere around the world, especially from early in the 20th or 19th century, please let me know in a comment below!
Importance: One of the earliest feminist philosophy works
Mary Wollstonecraft argues in this work that women should have access to education and that we are depriving society of their contributions. It’s considered on the of the earliest feminist philosophical works.
The book was generally well received when it was first published in 1792.
Wollstonecraft’s work ended up having significant impacts on the women’s rights movements, especially those in the 19th century. The influence of her work can be seen during the suffragette movement in the US, particularly at the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention.
Summary (from Goodreads):
In the present state of society, it appears necessary to go back to first principles in search of the most simple truths, and to dispute with some prevailing prejudice every inch of ground. To clear my way, I must be allowed to ask some plain questions, and the answers will probably appear as unequivocal as the axioms on which reasoning is built; though, when entangled with various motives of action, they are formally contradicted, either by the words or conduct of men.In what does man’s pre-eminence over the brute creation consist?The answer is as clear as that a half is less than the whole; inReason.
Importance: Highlights the importance of space for women
This book is actually a collection of lectures she delivered to two women’s colleges in October 1928, which is important to note to better understand the audience and context of the work. She was addressing women enrolled in higher education, which would be quite privileged women of that era.
This quote sums up her key message:
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
Virginia Woolf
Source: A Room of One’s Own
The book highlights the need for women to have space to create, both a physical space (a room) with sufficient needs ($) to alleviate stress from daily tasks, along with a metaphorical space to be accepted in the literary world.
The book also highlights the lived experiences of different women authors in fiction, along with theorizing what would happen if Shakespeare had an equally talented sister.
I found this book quite enlightening and interesting. However, it does come with limitations. The book is primarily focused on a certain demographic (white, privileged and educated women), limiting her analysis.
Summary (from Goodreads):
A Room of One’s Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on the 24th of October, 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women’s colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928. While this extended essay in fact employs a fictional narrator and narrative to explore women both as writers and characters in fiction, the manuscript for the delivery of the series of lectures, titled Women and Fiction, and hence the essay, are considered nonfiction. The essay is seen as a feminist text, and is noted in its argument for both a literal and figural space for women writers within a literary tradition dominated by patriarchy.
Importance: Groundbreaking work of feminist philosophy
Simone de Beauvoir is a famous philosopher who was part of the existentialist movement in France.
The Second Sex is a feminist philosophical work that discusses the treatment of women both now and throughout history. The book had a huge impact on the second wave of feminism and inspired The Feminine Mystique among other feminist texts.
Simone de Beauvoir was one of the first to identify the sex-gender divide, meaning the difference between biological sex and the societal/social construct of gender.
Simone de Beauvoir was bisexual and had an open relationship with fellow philosopher Jean Paul Sartre. She had many lovers throughout her life. However, her relationships with young women, many of whom were her students, are questionable, with some sexual abuse allegations.
Summary (from Goodreads):
Newly translated and unabridged in English for the first time, Simone de Beauvoir’s masterwork is a powerful analysis of the Western notion of “woman,” and a groundbreaking exploration of inequality and otherness. This long-awaited new edition reinstates significant portions of the original French text that were cut in the first English translation. Vital and groundbreaking, Beauvoir’s pioneering and impressive text remains as pertinent today as it was back then, and will continue to provoke and inspire generations of men and women to come.
Importance: Credited with sparking second-wave feminism in the USA
The Feminine Mystique is considered to be one of the most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century. It is also commonly associated with sparking the second wave of feminism in the US.
Betty Friedan was asked to conduct a survey of her former classmates only to find that many were unhappy with their lives as housewives. This inspired her to began researching what would ultimately become this book.
In this book, Friedan challenges the concept that women could only be fulfilled as a “housewife-mother.” Rather she showed that many felt unfulfilled in this role.
The book was a best seller, and sold over a million copies. It drew many women to the feminist cause, specifically white, middle class women.
Despite its huge influence and significance, the message is clearly aimed at a specific demographic: the white suburban housewife. I think it’s important to both acknowledge its influence and its limitations.
Summary (from Goodreads):
Landmark, groundbreaking, classic—these adjectives barely do justice to the pioneering vision and lasting impact of The Feminine Mystique. Published in 1963, it gave a pitch-perfect description of “the problem that has no name”: the insidious beliefs and institutions that undermined women’s confidence in their intellectual capabilities and kept them in the home. Writing in a time when the average woman first married in her teens and 60 percent of women students dropped out of college to marry, Betty Friedan captured the frustrations and thwarted ambitions of a generation and showed women how they could reclaim their lives. Part social chronicle, part manifesto, The Feminine Mystique is filled with fascinating anecdotes and interviews as well as insights that continue to inspire. This 50th–anniversary edition features an afterword by best-selling author Anna Quindlen as well as a new introduction by Gail Collins.
Importance: Made shockwaves within the feminist movement
The Female Eunuch made shockwaves within the feminist movement in 1970 as it focused on how women are taught to repress their sexuality.
Greer’s focus of the book is to show that a “traditional” (read as white), suburban nuclear family sexually represses women, which also devitalizes them and turns them into eunuchs.
I am looking forward to reading this book, as I think it will have interesting points to make. However, I also expect this to have limited applicability because women who aren’t white tend to either be overly sexualized or exoticized, which are just different ways to control women’s sexuality.
Summary (from Goodreads):
The clarion call to change that galvanized a generation.
When Germaine Greer’s “The Female Eunuch” was first published it created a shock wave of recognition in women, one that could be felt around the world. It went on to become an international bestseller, translated into more than twelve languages, and a landmark in the history of the women’s movement. Positing that sexual liberation is the key to women’s liberation, Greer looks at the inherent and unalterable biological differences between men and women as well as at the profound psychological differences that result from social conditioning. Drawing on history, literature, biology, and popular culture, Greer’s searing examination of women’s oppression is a vital, passionately argued social commentary that is both an important historical record of where we’ve been and a shockingly relevant treatise on what still remains to be achieved.
I know these books are all by white women authors and their limitations may make them less appealing. However, I do know these books were still hugely influential and affected the course of history.
Personally, I think it’s worthwhile to read these landmark books to understand how they affected society and see how things have changed over the years. I know it can be frustrating to read some of these books from a 21st century perspective as the intersectionality gaps seem huge.
Nevertheless, there is still useful information and arguments in these books that can help us understand the evolution of women’s movements and where we need to go in the future.
History can be a great teacher, as we can learn from our past mistakes and move towards a better future. Looking back, it’s not surprising to see how limited the audiences were for some of these books, but we can also make sure we don’t regress back to that state.
