Showing 25–36 of 116 resultsSorted by latest
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£20.00
Dame Harriet Walter, renowned for her wonderful portrayals in ‘Succession’ and ‘Killing Eve’, among others, is one of Britain’s most esteemed Shakespearean actors. Now, having played most of Shakespeare’s female characters, audaciously, she lets them speak their minds. With new parts for 30 Shakespearean women, written in ‘Shakespearean’ verse and prose, Harriet Walter goes between the lines of the plays to let us hear what she imagines – sometimes playfully and sometimes searchingly – these women were really thinking. Here’s what Gertrude longed to say; why Lady MacBeth felt she should be King; how Juliet’s nurse bemoaned her loss; why Ariel is anxious about freedom and what Cleopatra’s handmaidens really thought of her.
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£12.99
‘Black Angels’ tells the true story of 300 black nurses who helped prevent a public health crisis in New York. In 1929, when white nurses staged a walk out at Staten Island’s 2000-bed TB sanatorium, health officials made the decision to sanction a national call for ‘coloured nurses’. Lured by the promise of good pay, education, housing, and the opportunity to work in a hospital free of quotas and segregated wards, ‘Black Angels’ from all over the country boarded trains and buses to enter wards. This book tells a ‘triumphant story’, bringing together medicine, politics, racial strife, women’s rights, and cutting-edge science.
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£25.00
When Pamela Churchill Harriman died in 1997, the obituaries that followed were scathing – and often downright sexist. Written off as a social climber, her glamorous social life and infamous erotic adventures overshadowed her true legacy. Much of what she did behind the scenes to shape the twentieth century, on both sides of the Atlantic, remained invisible. That is, until now: with a wealth of fresh research, Sonia Purnell unveils for the first time the full, spectacular story of how Harriman left an indelible mark on the world today. There is practically no-one in twentieth-century politics, culture and fashion whose lives she did not touch.
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£18.99
Friendship has never been more talked about. Some of this has to do with the internet (the perils of WhatsApp groups, and of ghosting), and some, with the realisation that loneliness in our society is increasing. Friendship is being written about, and researched, seriously, by therapists and scientists alike. We all now know of the importance of friendship. But it’s hard to get inside friendship: its particular intensity; its singular ease; the way it can wax and wane; its ability to cause uncommon pain. This is the territory of novels and letters, poems and graphic novels – which is where ‘The Virago Book of Friendship’ steps in. Celebratory, but also explanatory and wide in scope – from the Bible to Yellowface, from school friends to the loss of friends in old age – this book includes Jane Austen, Toni Morrison, Vivian Gornick, Helen Garner, Dolly Alderton – among nearly one hundred others.
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£20.00
A cook and tractor repairman, Buddy was known as Budweiser to his army pals because he’s a wise guy. But underneath that surface, he is a true self-educated intellectual and a classic seeker: looking for religion, looking for meaning, looking for love. His odyssey takes him from his hometown of Lexington, Kentucky to Memphis, Tennessee, as he recalls his love affairs in post-war France and encounters a dazzling array of almost mythical characters: circus barkers, topiary trimmers, landladies who provide shelter and plenty of advice for their all-Black clientele, proto feminists, bigots, and – most unforgettably – the Unicorn Woman herself.
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£9.99
When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr Byrne, her best friend James helps her devise a plan to seduce him. But what begins as a harmless crush soon pushes their friendship to its limits. Over the course of a year they will find their lives ever more entwined with the Byrnes’ and be faced with impossible choices and a lie that can’t be taken back.
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£9.99
It’s 1913 and a young, carefree and recklessly innocent girl, Mina, goes out into the forest on the edge of the Baltic sea and meets a gang of rowdy young men with revolution on their minds. It sounds like a fairy tale but it’s life. The adventure leads to flight, emigration and a new land, a new language and the pursuit of idealism or happiness – in Liverpool. But what of the stories from the old country; how do they shape and form the next generations who have heard the well-worn tales? From the flour mills of Latvia to Liverpool suburbia to post-war Soho, ‘The Story of the Forest’ is about myths and memory and about how families adapt in order to survive.
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£10.99
From the time Lauren first laced up her running shoes to dominate boys in her neighbourhood, through puberty when half of all girls abandon sports for good, into the NCAA where young women routinely starve and hurt themselves, and into elite running where she had to be ‘fast and fuckable’ to fit into the Nike machine, Lauren felt she was bumping into a system that was not made for her. She realised, as many women now have, that something is deeply off with the sports experience and that it’s high time to rebuild it without men at its centre. Lauren Fleshman – one of the fastest American women runners – explores scientific and social research while telling her own story in a bold, energetic voice. This is a time for female athletes, so it’s the time to understand their bodies and knock down the barriers that hold them back.
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£10.99
Vero has grown up in Rome with her eccentric family: an omnipresent mother who is devoted to her own anxiety, a father ruled by hygienic and architectural obsessions, and a precocious genius brother at the centre of their attention. As she becomes an adult, Vero’s need to strike out on her own leads her into bizarre and comical situations: she tries (and fails) to run away to Paris at the age of fifteen; she moves into an unwitting older boyfriend’s house after they have been together for less than a week; and she sets up a fraudulent (and wildly successful) street clothing stall to raise funds to go to Mexico. Most of all, she falls in love – repeatedly, dramatically, and often with the most unlikely and inappropriate of candidates.
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£10.99
In the Ukrainian city of Poltava stands a building known as the Rooster House, an elegant mansion with two voluptuous red roosters flanking the door. It doesn’t look horrifying. And yet, when Victoria was a girl growing up in the 1980s, her great-grandmother would take pains to avoid walking past it. In 2014, while the Russian state was annexing Crimea, Victoria visited her grandmother in Bereh, the hamlet near Poltava that was a haven in her childhood. Just before the trip she came across her great-grandfather’s diary, one page scored deep with the single line: ‘Brother Nikodim, vanished in the 1930s fighting for a free Ukraine.’ She had never heard of this uncle and no one – especially her grandmother – seemed willing to tell her about him. Victoria became obsessed with recovering his story, and returned to her birth country again and again in pursuit of it.
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£10.99
In this blazing cauldron of a book, the boldest writers of our day take up words and their pens, celebrating 50 years of Virago.
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£16.99
Three strangers are thrown together in one Manhattan apartment: a solitary writer; a Gen Z college drop-out; and a spirited parrot named Eureka. ‘The Vulnerables’ reveals what happens when strangers are willing to open their hearts to each other and how far even small acts of caring can go to ease another’s distress.
