One Woman Show
Christine Coulson
Particular Books, £20, pp208
Before becoming an author, Coulson worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, writing wall-mounted labels to accompany exhibits. It required a concision and attention to detail that she puts to good use in this spry novel, chronicling the century-spanning story of a society dame almost entirely through wall labels. It’s an apt experiment, given that Kitty Whitaker is raised to become a bauble in some future husband’s vitrine – a destiny disrupted by war and her own eccentricities. One Woman Show doesn’t wholly deliver as a commentary on art’s interplay with ownership and power but it’s compulsive nevertheless – unexpectedly poignant, too.
Normal Women: 900 Years of Making History
Philippa Gregory
William Collins, £25, pp688
Gregory has always put women centre stage in her historical fiction but this new nonfiction work strives to restore them to their rightful place in history, and in so doing radically reframe our national story. To an impressive extent, it succeeds. Brisk and direct in the telling (there are more penises than English women in Bayeux tapestry, she notes), it covers 900 years, expanding our sense of “normal women” by conjuring up a sisterhood of weavers, nuns and housewives, jousters, highwaywomen and ship-builders. Nearing present day, however, we’re reminded that with full equality elusive still, this is not yet a tale of triumph.
Inciting Joy: Essays
Ross Gay
Coronet, £9.99, pp256 (paperback)
Prize-winning American poet Gay returns to the essay form in this personal, pleasurably rambling collection. Its title alludes to twin inquiries that guide him throughout: what can we do to make joy more available to us, to incite it, and what does that joy incite in us in turn? If that’s suggestive of some spurious self-help manual, know that he has a poet’s sensibilities – his is a joy that acknowledges and is even deepened by sorrow. And so we find him celebrating skateboarding but also caring for his dying father, gardening then confronting racism, all rendered in prose that’s both punchy and compassionate.
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