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The latest books are not playing around. This month’s new releases are searing and serious stories of women’s suffering, wrath and progress. They include a nonfiction exploration of the laws governing spousal consent, a work of fiction about the complicated relationships among women in a family, and the life story of Canada’s foremost feminist novelist.
‘Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts’ by Margaret Atwood
This memoir from the Canadian author of “The Handmaid’s Tale” spans almost 600 pages and “more than most literary memoirs, is a vessel of wrath,” said Dwight Garner at The New York Times. Luckily, “wrath is interesting.”
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The book covers everything from Atwood’s upbringing to her relationship with longtime partner Graeme Gibson to her intense connection with both the natural world and her own dark side. It also delves into the life-altering publication of Atwood’s novel “The Handmaid's Tale” (1985), which also became a hit TV series, about a dystopian America in which women are owned and used as breeding chattel. The acclaimed book “consolidated her power as a writer and drew a line under her deep-seated interests in gender, patriarchy and power.” (out now, $35, Amazon; Doubleday)
‘Cursed Daughters’ by Oyinkan Braithwaite
This is the second novel from Nigerian-British author Oyinkan Braithwaite, whose first book, “My Sister, the Serial Killer” (2018), was a “taut debut about sisterhood, jealousy and murder,” said Chelsea Leu at The Guardian. “Cursed Daughters” similarly deals in familial discord and female rivalry, following a young woman named Eniiyi who is suspected of being the reincarnation of her dead cousin and who must also contend with an alleged generational curse that leaves women in the Falodun family abandoned.
As with her first novel, Braithwaite’s second shares a “lingering fascination with the dark secrets that might bind the women of a family together,” said Leu, although the “true family curse may just be these women’s inability to reckon with their past.” (out now, $29, Amazon; Doubleday)
‘Some Bright Nowhere’ by Ann Packer
Ann Packer's first work in a decade was recently announced as Oprah's 120th book club pick. The novel tells the story of a long-married couple who are preparing to part eternally as one of them succumbs to a terminal illness; in addition, the wife has requested that her best friends, instead of her husband, care for her during the final weeks of her life.
The book will spark discussion about the “obligations of marriage and the difference between male and female friendships,” said Oprah to Oprah Daily. It also asks among the “most significant of questions: How do you want to spend your last days?” (out now, $23, Amazon; HarperCollins)
‘The White Hot’ by Quiara Alegría Hudes
The debut novel from memoirist and Pulitzer-winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes (“In the Heights”) takes its name “from waves of all-consuming rage,” said Joumana Khatib at The New York Times Book Review. April, a young mother raising her daughter Noelle in a high-stress intergenerational environment, finds herself spiraling with an anger she refers to as ‘the white hot,’ an inner voice that eventually tells her to simply leave her life behind as an act of self-preservation.
So April gets on a bus and goes. The novel takes the form of a letter that April leaves Noelle to explain her absence. “Mothers who leave their children are the third rail of splintered family narratives, and ‘The White Hot’ has the effect of pressing your hand to a barbed live wire,” said Khatib. (out now, $26, Amazon; One World)
‘Without Consent’ by Sarah Weinman
“Without Consent” chronicles the long legal battle to make marital rape a crime in the United States, starting with the country’s first trial of its kind back in 1978. Although women’s rights have expanded and improved in many ways over the last 50 years, Weinman’s book “points out” that “progress against a patriarchal and often misogynistic system has been agonizingly slow,” said Kate Tuttle at The Boston Globe.
“I was shocked how little, overall, has been written about spousal rape and the specific case, Oregon v. Rideout, at the book’s heart — that has become all too timely today,” said Weinman on social media. There is still no federal law against marital rape, and there are “numerous exceptions and qualifications needed in many states to prove such assaults occurred,” said Rachel Louise Snyder at The New York Times. (out now, $32, Amazon; Ecco)
