Elizabeth Zott is a research scientist trying to make her way in a man’s world. It’s 1952, a time when women are expected to give up their careers to get married and have children. But Elizabeth isn’t content having her work sidelined – or, worse still, stolen – by her male colleagues at California’s Hastings Research Institute, so she resolves to keep working and never get married. When she falls in love with Calvin Evans, a Nobel-nominated chemist, she declines his marriage proposal but agrees to move in with him and get a dog.
Bonnie Garmus’s smart and funny feminist fable – a TV adaptation of which arrives this month on Apple TV+ starring Brie Larson – is read by the British actor Miranda Raison, who delights in Elizabeth’s pithy observations on the many ways women are undermined by men. An unconventional and charismatic heroine determined to live life on her terms, Elizabeth must find ever more ingenious ways to make a living and challenge the status quo.
Fast-forward to the early 60s and Calvin is dead, Elizabeth a single parent to their precocious daughter Madeline. She is also, improbably, a TV star. Having been fired from her research job for being pregnant and unmarried, she is now hosting a hugely successful cooking series, where she tutors housewives in home-cooking while introducing science and liberal politics by stealth. Moving between comedy and tragedy, Lessons in Chemistry is a powerful and entertaining portrait of a woman battling misogyny and visiting revenge on those who wish to silence her.
• Lessons in Chemistry is available via Penguin Audio, 11hr 56min
Further listening
Still Life
Sarah Winman, 4th Estate, 14hr 55min
A young soldier named Ulysses meets Evelyn, a sixtysomething art historian, by chance in a Tuscan bomb shelter during the second world war in this sweeping novel. Read by the author.
A Death in the Parish
The Reverend Richard Coles, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 8hr 25min
Coles reads the second book in his bestselling Canon Clement series, which brings a new vicar, and a ritualistic killing, to the cosy village of Champton St Mary.
