Looking Forward to 2020

Rosalind Miles' The Women's History of the World was a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller and translated into almost forty languages.

Now it is time for a new women's history - for more famous, infamous and little-known rebels.

We begin with the French Revolution when women took on the fraternite of man, then it's off to America to round up the rebels fighting side by side for freedom with their men, before heading back to Britain to witness the courage of the suffragettes. From Australia to Iceland, from India to China and from many other countries, we track women who - often at a very high cost to themselves - have stood up to age-old cruelties and injustices. Recording the important milestones in the long march of women towards equality through a colourful pageant of astonishing women, we chart the birth of modern womanhood. Women in sport, women in business, women in religion, women in politics and women in power - all female life is there.

We end in the present day thrilled with what women have done - and can and will do.

Rebel Women is as brave and as brilliant as its renegades, viragos and heroines.

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2020

LONGLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2021

A BARACK OBAMA BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020

'The boldest debut of the year . . . It is refreshing to discover a new author of such grand scale, singular focus and blistering vision' Observer

America. In the twilight of the Gold Rush, two siblings cross a landscape with a gun in their hands and the body of their father on their backs . . .

Ba dies in the night, Ma is already gone. Lucy and Sam, twelve and eleven, are suddenly alone and on the run. With their father's body on their backs, they roam an unforgiving landscape dotted with giant buffalo bones and tiger paw prints, searching for a place to give him a proper burial.

How Much of These Hills is Gold is a sweeping adventure tale, an unforgettable sibling story and a remarkable novel about a family bound and divided by its memories.

'The 19th-century American West is the setting for C Pam Zhang's impressive debut. Rickety wagons, gambling dens, dusty towns and dodgy outlaws stalk its pages . . . How Much of These Hills is Gold breaks the mould [as a] revisionist immigrant fable of the making of the West . . . a daring and haunting epic' Sunday Times

'A truly gifted writer' Sebastian Barry, two-time Costa Book of the Year winner

'Pure gold' Emma Donoghue, Booker-shortlisted author of Room

'Dazzling' Daisy Johnson, Booker-shortlisted author of Everything Under

A GWYNETH PALTROW BOOK CLUB PICK

'Bright, funny, satirical and relevant. . . . A new talent to watch!' MARGARET ATWOOD (via Twitter)

'Bang-on brilliant' MIRIAM TOEWS

This brilliant and bitingly funny novel-in-stories, set in and around a single crumbling apartment building in Soviet-era Ukraine, heralds the arrival of a major new talent.

'A comic triumph' GLOBE AND MAIL

A cast of unforgettable characters--citizens of the small industrial town of Kirovka--populate Maria Reva's ingeniously entwined tales that span the chaotic years leading up to and immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. Weaving the strands of the narrative together is an unforgettable, chameleon-like young woman named Zaya: an orphan turned beauty-pageant crasher who survives the extraordinary circumstances of her childhood through a compelling combination of ferocity, intelligence, stubbornness and wit.

Inspired by her own family's history, Reva's Good Citizens Need Not Fear takes us from paranoia to tenderness and back again, exploring what it is to be an individual amid the roiling forces of history.

'Luminous' YANN MARTEL

'Outstanding' ANTHONY DOERR

'Maria Reva's enthralling debut of interlinked short stories achieves the double effect of timelessness and timeliness' KAPKA KASSABOVA, GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE DAY