Books with category Women’s Fiction
Displaying books 49-53 of 53 in total

The Gate to Women's Country

1990

by Sheri S. Tepper

Tepper's finest novel to date is set in a post-holocaust feminist dystopia that offers only two political alternatives: a repressive polygamist sect that is slowly self-destructing through inbreeding and the matriarchal dictatorship called Women's Country.

Here, in a desperate effort to prevent another world war, the women have segregated most men into closed military garrisons and have taken on themselves every other function of government, industry, agriculture, science, and learning. The resulting manifold responsibilities are seen through the life of Stavia, from a dreaming 10-year-old to maturity as doctor, mother, and member of the Marthatown Women's Council.

As in Tepper's Awakeners series books, the rigid social systems are tempered by the voices of individual experience and, here, by an imaginative reworking of The Trojan Woman that runs through the text. A rewarding and challenging novel that is to be valued for its provocative ideas.

Excellent Women

1988

by Barbara Pym

Excellent Women is one of Barbara Pym's richest and most amusing high comedies. At its center is Mildred Lathbury, a clergyman’s daughter and a mild-mannered spinster in 1950s England. She is one of those "excellent women," the smart, supportive, repressed women who men take for granted.

As Mildred gets embroiled in the lives of her new neighbors—anthropologist Helena Napier and her handsome, dashing husband, Rocky, and Julian Malory, the vicar next door—the novel presents a series of snapshots of human life as actually, and pluckily, lived in a vanishing world of manners and repressed desires.

This hilarious comedy of manners by the shrewdly observant British novelist is often compared to Jane Austen, offering a poignant and witty exploration of post-war England.

Lives of Girls and Women

1974

by Alice Munro

Lives of Girls and Women is the only novel from the award-winning author Alice Munro, known for her remarkable storytelling in The Love of a Good Woman. This insightful and honest book is autobiographical in form but not in fact, chronicling a young girl's journey to adulthood in rural Ontario during the 1940s.

Del Jordan lives at the end of the Flats Road on her father's fox farm, where her companions include an eccentric bachelor family friend and her rough younger brother. As she begins spending more time in town, Del is surrounded by women: her mother, an agnostic and opinionated encyclopedia saleswoman; her mother's boarder, the lusty Fern Dogherty; and her best friend, Naomi, with whom she shares both the frustrations and joys of adolescence.

Through these unwitting mentors and her own encounters with sex, birth, and death, Del explores the dark and bright sides of womanhood. Throughout, she remains a wise, witty observer and recorder of truths in small-town life. The result is a powerful, moving, and humorous demonstration of Alice Munro's unparalleled awareness of the lives of girls and women.

Malina

Malina tells the story of lives painfully intertwined: the unnamed narrator, haunted by nightmarish memories of her father, lives with the androgynous Malina, an initially remote and dispassionate man who ultimately becomes an ominous influence. Plunging toward its riveting finale, Malina brutally lays bare the struggle for love and the limits of discourse between women and men.

Mr. Perfect

What would make the perfect man? That's the deliciously racy topic that Jaine Bright and her three girlfriends are pondering one night at their favorite after-hours hot spot: Mr. Perfect.

Would he be tall, dark, and handsome? Caring and warmhearted -- or will just muscular do? As their conversation heats up, they concoct a tongue-in-cheek checklist that becomes an overnight sensation, spreading like wildfire at work and sizzling along e-mail lines.

But what began as a joke among friends turns deadly serious when one of the four women is murdered.... Turning to her neighbor, an unpredictable police detective, for help, Jaine must unmask a killer to save her friends -- and herself. Now, knowing whom to trust and whom to love is a matter of survival -- as the dream of Mr. Perfect becomes a chilling nightmare.

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