Thursday 7 June 2018

Hay Festival 100 Books

Oh. This List! Created by the Hay Festival to honour 100 years of women's suffrage in the UK. 

100 books by women published since 1918.

A Book of Mediterranean Food - Elizabeth David
A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing - Eimear McBride
A Place of Greater Safety - Hilary Mantel




Ain't I A Woman - Bell Hooks
Ariel - Sylvia Plath
At The Source - Gillian Clarke
Babette's Feast - Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)
Bad Behavior - Mary Gaitskill
The Bastard of Istanbul - Elif Shafak
Beloved - Toni Morrison
Bonjour Tristesse - Françoise Sagan
Brick Lane - Monica Ali
Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
Close Range Wyoming Stories - Annie Proulx
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
The Collected Dorothy Parker - Dorothy Parker
Dept. of Speculation - Jenny Offill
Everyday Sexism - Laura Bates
Falling Away - Alice Oswald
Frost in May - Antonia White
Gilead - Marilynne Robinson
Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - J.K. Rowling
Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution - Mona Eltahawy
Heartburn - Nora Ephron
Henry and June - Anaïs Nin
Home going - Yaa Gyasi
How to be a Woman - Caitlin Moran




How to Eat - Nigella Lawson
How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed - Slavonia Drakulic
I Captured the Castle - Dodie Smith
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou
Into That Darkness - Gitta Sereny
Like Water For Chocolate - Laura Esquivel
Lullaby - Leila Slimani (see my review)
Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont - Elizabeth Taylor
My Brilliant Friend - Elena Ferrante
Notes on a Scandal - Zoë Heller
Noughts + Crosses - Malorie Blackman
Orange Are Not The Only Fruit - Jeanette Winterson
Orlando - Virginia Woolf
Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi (currently reading)
Pippi Longstocking - Astrid Lindgren (see my review)
Possession - A.S. Byatt
Rachel's Holiday - Marian Keyes
Rebecca - Daphe du Maurier
Regeneration - Pat Barker
Selected Stories - Alice Munro
Small Island - Andrea Levy
Standing Female Nude - Carol Ann Duffy
Stranger On A Train - Patricia Highsmith
Testament of Youth - Vera Brittain
The Argonauts - Maggie Nelson




The Body in the Library - Agatha Christie
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
The Country Girls - Edna O'Brien
The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives - Carole Hillenbrand
The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank (see my review)
The Female Eunuch - Germaine Greer
The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan
The Fountain Overflows - Rebecca West
The Glass Castle - Jeanette Walls
The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
The Golden Notebook - Doris Lessing
The Gruffalo - Julia Donaldson, Axel Scheffler (illustrator)
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson
The House of Spirits - Isabelle Allende
The Human Condition - Hannah Arendt
The Illustrated Mum - Jacqueline Wilson (see my review)
The Land of Green Plums - Herta Müller
The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin
The Moonmins and the Great Flood - Tove Jansson
The Passion According to G.H. - Clarice Lispector
The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
The Pursuit of Love - Nancy Mitford
The Road Home - RoseTremain
The Second Sex - Simone de Beauvoir
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 - Sue Townsend
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Shock Doctrine - Naomi Klein
The View from the Ground - Martha Gellhorn
The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion
Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
Three Strong Women - Marie NDiaye
Tipping the Velvet - Sarah Waters
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Train to Nowhere - Anita Leslie
Under the Net - Iris Murdoch
Unless - Carol Shields
We Need To Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver
What I Loved - Siri Hustvedt




White Teeth - Zadie Smith
Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys
Wild Swans. Three Daughters of China - Jung Chang
Wise Children - Angela Carter
Women & Power. A Manifesto - Mary Beard

18.5/100


I find this a super interesting list. So many here that I want to read, so many that I've meant to read over the years. And yes that noise you hear is the creaking and groaning of my huge TBR growing even bigger.

I do wonder at the inclusion of such a very recent book as Lullaby. It's much too recent to be able to judge it's place on this list. I'm also not convinced at the value of books like Gone Girl being included here. 

July 2020 19.5/100