Incisible Women

In Asmara, Eritrea, Yonas Kelati is born into a world of turmoil. At the same time, on the same day, Jude Munroe takes her first breath in London, England. Blacklisted in his war-ravaged country, Yonas has no option but to flee his home. After a terrible journey, he arrives on a bleak English coast. By a twist of fate, Yonas’ asylum case lands on Jude’s desk. Opening the file, she finds a patchwork of witness statements from those who met Yonas along his journey: a lifetime the same length of hers, reduced to a few scraps of paper.

Surviving a lifetime of her father's secrets, schemes, and whispers of veiled conspiracies, Maggie Malone has always felt invisible to him, and to the world that could never understand her. And now she must trace the steps of her ghost-father to find out who wanted him dead.

In an age of social media and selfies, of pixel-perfect pictures and surgically enhanced celebrities, the pressure to change our bodies can often seem overwhelming. We are told we should conceal the signs of ageing and get our bodies back after pregnancy. We ought to perfect our complexions, build our biceps, trim our waistlines. More than ever before, we should contort our physical selves to prejudiced standards of beauty and acceptability. In this thought-provoking work, acclaimed political philosopher Clare Chambers argues that the unmodified body is a key principle of equality.

In 1988 two girls with identical names and the same love of ballet meet for the first time. They seem destined to be best friends forever and to become professional dancers. Years later, however, they have both been dealt so many cruel and unexpected blows that they walk away from each other into very different futures - one enters a convent, the other becomes a minor celebrity. Will these new 'invisible' lives be the ones they were meant to live, or will they find that kind of salvation only when they are reunited 20 years later?

We are all likely - at some point in our lives - to face the prospect of caring for another, whether it's a parent, child or partner. It is estimated that there are seven million people in the UK caring for loved ones. And yet these are the unpaid, unsung people whose number is rising all the time. In Tender: The Imperfect Art of Caring, Penny Wincer combines her own experiences as a carer with the experiences of others to offer real and transformative tools and insights for navigating a situation that many of us are either facing or will face at some time.

In a boom town dominated by a man-eating lake, Renee and Danny Chance start a new life in his grandfather’s cabin. Renee struggles to keep her head above water until she is drawn into the orbit of two beautifully notorious bar-singer cousins, and all three women are called to test the bonds of blood and loyalty. A polyphonic fable riddled with tall tales, Glory explores what it means to be a woman in North-Central BC by flooding the shores of the human heart.

Farhana Qazi draws on her background as a pioneering counterterrorism professional and a devout Muslim to offer an insider’s view of what drives girls and women to join radical Islamic movements and how we can keep them from making this terrible choice.