FW x HACHETTE AUSTRALIA
WELCOME TO BOOK CLUB
Each month we’ll be reading a compelling book, that is guaranteed to spark great conversation.
Supported by
Is there anything better than a hot cup of tea and a really good book? Yep, there sure is. Getting together with mates to discuss the book afterwards.
The FW x Hachette Book Club is curated by the Future Women team and hosted by Jamila Rizvi and Astrid Edwards.
We gather together online to discuss, dissect, debate and delight in the title we’ve been reading.
From romantic tales to political turmoil, from identity and ideals to relationships and rescues, we discuss books that are making headlines and best seller lists.
Here’s how you can get involved:
1. Get your hands on a copy of the book and read it!
2. Join Jamila and Astrid for the virtual lunch time book club discussions, which are scheduled for the rest of the year. See below for dates and links to RSVP. The virtual events will be broadcast to everyone on Instagram Live.
3. You don't have to be a member to join in the conversation, so please tell your friends!
And if this many book discussions are still not enough, then Hachette and Future Women have got you covered.
Anonymous Was a Woman, our podcast about women in books, women who read books, and women who write books, is currently in its third season.
Also hosted by Jamila and Astrid, new episodes drop twice weekly. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, so that you never miss an episode.
FW COMMUNITY
What was your favourite book club read of the year?
“I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.”
― TAHEREH MAFI, best selling author
“Books may well be the only true magic.”
― ALICE HOFFMAN, American novelist
PAST READS
CHIDERA EGGERUE
WHAT A TIME TO BE ALONE
In What A Time To Be Alone, The Slumflower will be your life guru, confidante and best friend.
She’ll show you that being alone is not just okay: it’s just about the best freaking thing that’s ever happened to you. As she says, ‘You’re bad as hell and you were made with intention.’ It’s about time you realised.
Peppered with insightful Igbo proverbs from Chidera’s Nigerian mother and full of her own original artwork, What a Time to be Alone will help you navigate the modern world.
We can all decide our own fates and Chidera shows us how, using a three-part approach filled with sass, wisdom and charm. Learn how to celebrate YOU, Don't worry about THEM and Feel the togetherness in US.
FLORENCE GIVEN
WOMEN DON’T OWE YOU PRETTY
Women Don’t Owe You Pretty will tell you to…
love sex, hate sexism,
protect your goddamn energy,
life is short, dump them,
And that you owe men nothing, least of all pretty.
Florence Given’s debut book explores all progressive corners of the feminist conversation; from insecurity projection and refusing to find comfort in other women’s flaws, to deciding whether to date or dump them, all the way through to unpacking the male gaze and how it shapes our identity.
Women Don’t Owe You Pretty is an accessible leap into feminism. It will help you tackle and challenge the limiting narrative you have been bombarded with your whole life, and determine feminism on your own terms. After all, you are the love of your own life.
November 2021
DR YVES REES
ALL ABOUT YVES
Was I always trans, part boy beneath my skin, or was it that I landed in a place where 'girl' was a container so small it could break your bones?
I learn that a ready smile and sympathetic ear are the only props required to impersonate a woman. The performance becomes so familiar I almost forget that it's staged.
What happens when, aged 30, you understand you're transgender?
This was the question that confronted Yves Rees, a historian whose life was upended by gender transition in 2018. Then known as a woman called Anne, Yves was forced to grapple with the sudden knowledge that they were not, in fact, female at all.
But when you've lived a lie for so long, how do you discover who you really are? And how do you re-learn to live in the world as a different gender?
All About Yves tells their moving journey of re-becoming, at the same time laying bare the messiness of bodies, gender and identity. It shares the challenges and joys of being transgender in Australia today, and reveals how trans experiences like Yves' can teach all of us about what it means to be human.
October 2021
ALEXANDRA ANDREWS
WHO IS MAUD DIXON?
Florence Darrow wants to be a writer. Correction: Florence Darrow IS going to be a writer.
Fired from her first job in publishing, she jumps at the chance to be an assistant to the celebrated Maud Dixon, the anonymous best-selling novelist.
The arrangement comes with conditions – high secrecy, living in an isolated house in the countryside. Before long, the two of them are on a research trip to Morocco, to inspire Maud’s much-promised second novel.
Beach walks, red sunsets and long, whisky-filled evening discussions . . . win-win, surely?
Until Florence wakes up in hospital, having narrowly survived a car crash. How did it happen – and where is Maud Dixon, who was in the car with her?
‘Stylish and sharp, with wicked hairpin turns, Who is Maud Dixon is part Patricia Highsmith, part All About Eve and pure fun.’ – Maria Semple
September 2021
CLAIRE THOMAS
THE PERFORMANCE
As bushfires rage outside the city, three women watch a performance of a Beckett play.
Margot is a successful professor, preoccupied by her fraught relationship with her ailing husband. Ivy is a philanthropist with a troubled past, distracted by the snoring man beside her. Summer is a young theatre usher, anxious about the safety of her girlfriend in the fire zone.
As the performance unfolds, so does each woman’s story. By the time the curtain falls, they will all have a new understanding of the world beyond the stage.
“An enigmatic, elegant and assured novel that explores the power of art in revealing us to ourselves.” – Charlotte Wood, author of The Weekend
July 2021
NADIA OWUSU
AFTERSHOCKS
Nadia Owusu is a woman of many languages, homelands and identities. She grew up in Rome, Dar-es-Salaam, Addis Ababa, Kumasi, Kampala and London.
For every new place there was a new language, a new identity and a new home. At times she has felt stateless, motherless and identity-less. At others, she has had multiple identities at war within her. It’s no wonder she started to feel fault lines in her sense of self. It’s no wonder those fault lines eventually ruptured.
Aftershocks is the intimate story behind the news of immigration and division dominating contemporary politics. Nadia Owusu’s astonishingly moving and incredibly timely memoir is a nuanced portrait of globalisation from the inside in a fractured world in crisis.
June
GINA WILKINSON
WHEN THE APRICOTS BLOOM
At night, in Huda’s fragrant garden, a breeze sweeps in from the desert encircling Baghdad, rustling the leaves of her apricot trees and carrying warning of visitors at her gate. Huda, a secretary at the Australian embassy, lives in fear of the secret police, who have ordered her to befriend Ally, the deputy ambassador’s wife. Huda’s former friend Rania, an artist, enjoyed a privileged upbringing as the daughter of a sheikh. Now her family’s wealth is gone, and Rania is battling to keep her child safe and a roof over their heads.
As the women’s lives intersect, their hidden pasts spill into the present. Facing possible betrayal at every turn, all three must trust in a fragile, newfound loyalty, even as they discover how much they are willing to sacrifice to protect their families.
April
CHERIE JONES
HOW THE ONE-ARMED SISTER SWEEPS THE HOUSE
Lala is eight months pregnant when her waters break unexpectedly during the night. Her husband is nowhere to be found, so she flees the house in search of him. Adan has been out doing a burglary that has gone horribly wrong, and now he’s killed a white man.
Mira Whalen has only recently married Peter, the husband who now lies dead in their bed. He loved her, and she loved him. But last night they had a row, and she wishes they hadn’t. Just as she wishes that she hadn’t confronted her husband’s murderer and pulled the stocking off his face. As now he knows exactly who she is.
This is the story of two marriages, and a beautiful island paradise where, beyond the white sand beaches, lies poverty, menacing violence and a desire among women to speak out and survive.
March
RACHEL CLARKE
BREATHTAKING
Breathtaking depicts life, death, hope, fear, medicine at its most impotent and also at its finest, the courage of patients in enormous adversity, the stress of being torn between helping those patients and endangering your spouse and children, the long fretful nights ruminating over whether the PPE you wear fits the science or the size of the government stockpile. Faltering, fumbling, tenacious, undaunted, this is medicine in the time of coronavirus.
As a palliative care doctor, Rachel Clarke found herself spending less time in the hospice and more in the hospital. Unable to convey the intensity of her days on the wards to friends and family, by night, she wrote about what she and her colleagues were going through. Breathtaking is her inside story of how the health service responded. However, what she had thought was an unrelenting stream of death and darkness was in fact illuminated by pinpricks of light.
February
BRIT BENNETT
THE VANISHING HALF
From the author of the New York Times bestseller of The Mothers, a powerful new novel about the parallel lives of estranged twin sisters.
The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Ten years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past.
Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing.
January
TARA JUNE WINCH
THE YIELD
Today's young women are told we can be anything, so we search for a love to back us, not hold us back. We want the Prince Harry and Meghan Markle kind of love, not Prince William and Kate. Yet, while we unapologetically own our careers and lives and Bumble accounts, we're still unsure whether men truly accept-let alone desire-the women we have become. We are told to lean in at work, but wait for him to call. To ask for the pay rise, but not his number. We are ambitious at work but confused in love.
“Sheryl Sandberg was right: the single most important career decision a woman makes is her choice of life partner. Brooks ignites that conversation for a new generation.” — Jamila Rizvi
December
EMILY J. BROOKS
THE FIRST MOVE
Today's young women are told we can be anything, so we search for a love to back us, not hold us back. We want the Prince Harry and Meghan Markle kind of love, not Prince William and Kate. Yet, while we unapologetically own our careers and lives and Bumble accounts, we're still unsure whether men truly accept-let alone desire-the women we have become. We are told to lean in at work, but wait for him to call. To ask for the pay rise, but not his number. We are ambitious at work but confused in love.
“Sheryl Sandberg was right: the single most important career decision a woman makes is her choice of life partner. Brooks ignites that conversation for a new generation.” — Jamila Rizvi
November
FUTURE WOMEN
UNTOLD RESILIENCE
A new book from Future Women due October 2020.
History celebrates the brave wins and noble losses of men, but rarely pays mind to the - sometimes quieter - intelligent determination of women who went before.
This book make a small contribution to setting that skewed presentation of history right. Of paying homage to the remarkable experiences of women, who sought no medals, who gave no aggrandising speeches - the women who put their heads down, and got the job done.
We cannot wait for you to meet them.
October
JESS HILL
SEE WHAT YOU MADE ME DO
Domestic abuse is a national emergency: one in four Australian women has experienced violence from a man she was intimate with. But too often we ask the wrong question: why didn’t she leave? We should be asking: why did he do it? Investigative journalist Jess Hill puts perpetrators – and the systems that enable them – in the spotlight.
“The shared stories of coercion and control, the way in which Hill draws out the intimate and the personal to provide a picture of what happens in our country today should be compulsory reading for politicians at every level.’ —Jenna Price, Sydney Morning Herald
September
CANDICE CARTY-WILLIAMS
QUEENIE
Queenie Jenkins can't cut a break. Well, apart from one from her long term boyfriend, Tom. That's definitely just a break though. Definitely not a break up. Stuck between a boss who doesn't seem to see her, a family who don't seem to listen (if it's not Jesus or water rates, they're not interested), and trying to fit in two worlds that don't really understand her, it's no wonder she's struggling.
“Candice Carty-Williams is a fantastic new writer who has written a deliciously funny, characterful, topical, and thrilling novel for our times." — Bernardine Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, Other
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August
CURTIS SITTENFELD
RODHAM
In 1971, Hillary Rodham is a young woman full of promise. And then she meets Bill Clinton. In the real world, Hillary followed Bill back to Arkansas, and he proposed several times; although she said no more than once, as we all know, she eventually accepted and became Hillary Clinton. But in Curtis Sittenfeld’s powerfully imagined tour-de-force of fiction, Hillary takes a different road.
“By fanning out alternate narratives . . . [Rodham] asks us to imagine a different world. . . . And from there, what a short —excruciating, hopeful—leap it is to: Everything could be different.”— NPR
July
DR AILEEN MORETON-ROBINSON
TALKIN’ UP TO THE WHITE WOMAN
Dr Aileen Moreton-Robinson "talks up" in this provocative interrogation of feminism in representation and practice. As a Geonpul woman and an academic, she provides a unique cultural standpoint and a compelling analysis of the whiteness of Australian feminism and its effect on Indigenous women.Through an extensive range of articles by non-white scholars and activists, she demonstrates the ways whiteness dominates from a position of power and privilege as an invisible and unchallenged practice.
First published twenty years ago, new editions prove the continued relevance of this classic work as a critique of the whiteness of western feminism.
June
KILEY REID
SUCH A FUN AGE
Alix Chamberlain is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains’ toddler one night, walking the aisles of their local high-end supermarket. The store’s security guard, seeing a young black woman out late with a white child, accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar.
“Readers who enjoy coming-of-age stories that tackle serious issues with a touch of wit will find this a worthy alternative to a wild night out.” — Ms. Magazine
May
ANITA HEISS
GROWING UP ABORIGINAL IN AUSTRALIA
What is it like to grow up Aboriginal in Australia? This anthology, compiled by award-winning author Anita Heiss, showcases many diverse voices, experiences and stories in order to answer that question.
“Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia is a mosaic, it's more than 50 tiles – short personal essays with unique patterns, shapes, colours and textures – coming together to form a powerful portrait of resilience.” — The Saturday Paper
April
ABI DARÉ
THE GIRL WITH THE LOUDING VOICE
Adunni is a fourteen-year-old Nigerian girl who knows what she wants: an education. This, her mother has told her, is the only way to get a “louding voice”—the ability to speak for herself and decide her own future. But instead, Adunni’s father sells her to become the third wife of a local man who is eager for her to bear him a son and heir.
“Heartbreaking and inspiring… A moving story of what it means to fight for the right to live the life you choose.” — Kirkus
March
CLARE BOWDITCH
YOUR OWN KIND OF GIRL
Clare Bowditch has always had a knack for telling stories. Through her music and performing, this beloved Australian artist has touched hundreds of thousands of lives. But what of the stories she used to tell herself? That 'real life' only begins once you're thin or beautiful, that good things only happen to other people.
“The words that kept coming to me over and over again as I read this book were authenticity and decency. Clare Bowditch made me feel how wonderful and difficult and amazing it is to be a human.” — Leigh Sales
February
CHARLOTTE WOOD
THE WEEKEND
Four older women have a lifelong friendship of the best kind: loving, practical, frank and steadfast. But when Sylvie dies, the ground shifts dangerously for the remaining three. Can they survive together without her?
“Here’s my verdict: wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. This is Wood’s greatest novel yet.” — Stephen Romel, The Australian
January
CHANEL MILLER
KNOW MY NAME
She was known to the world as Emily Doe when she stunned millions with a letter. Brock Turner had been sentenced to just six months in county jail after he was found sexually assaulting her on Stanford’s campus. Now she reclaims her identity by telling her story of trauma, transcendence, and the power of words.
“Miller is a gifted storyteller… Know her name, know her voice.” — The New Yorker
