JFSJ1 Archives - Duckworth Books

The Escape from Kabul

A gripping story of rescue, survival and female solidarity.

In the twenty years since 2001, Afghan women obtained legal degrees, became judges and set out to transform their country – tackling corruption, and reducing horrifying levels of violence against women and children. These educated and powerful women led the mission to build a modern democracy. However, when Western forces withdrew in August 2021, the women judges of Afghanistan and their families faced mortal danger.

The Escape from Kabul is the never-before-told story of the escape of nearly 200 women and their families, thanks to a network of professional friends, female judges and lawyers from around the world, who refused to abandon them to the Taliban.

A searing insight into the challenges of safely building a new life overseas and also the captive fate of women in Afghanistan.

‘Anyone concerned about the fragility of rights or the isolation of those living under repression should read this book’ Martha Minow, author of When Should Law Forgive?

Becoming a Matriarch

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER IN CANADA
A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
A CBC BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR
CO-WINNER OF THE 2024 GEORGE RYGA AWARD FOR SOCIAL AWARENESS IN LITERATURE
WINNER OF THE 2024 JIM DEVA PRIZE FOR WRITING THAT PROVOKES
FINALIST FOR THE 2024 GOVERNOR GENERAL’S LITERARY AWARD FOR NONFICTION

All her life, Helen Knott has been surrounded by strong women. She has looked to the women in her family and the larger Indigenous community for guidance, absorbed their stories and admired their independence. But Helen’s path hasn’t been easy and when her mother and grandmother died within six months of each other, she drew upon lessons from her ancestors and the land to discover her inner power and refashion her future.

Exploring their struggles and her own with young motherhood, daughterhood, grief and sobriety, Knott offers an inspiring meditation on how we repair ourselves in the face of tragedy, trauma and injustice; on what it is to be a woman – and become a matriarch.

Firebrands

In twenty-five witty and vibrant biographical essays, Firebrands introduces us to the brilliant and complex women writers that every discerning reader should know about

From Murasaki Shikibu, the Japanese author of one of the world’s earliest novels, and Christine de Pizan, a poet in the royal court of medieval France, to Harriet Jacobs, who drew the world’s attention to the horrors of slavery through her own experience, Firebrands explores the lives and works of twenty-five extraordinary women writers.

Joanna Scutts guides the reader through the centuries and across the world, hailing the fascinating lives and astonishing literary achievements of these women who dared to write against the odds. Brilliantly researched and fiercely uncompromising, Firebrands is a reminder to all of us to question what – and who – is considered part of the canon.

Hotbed

New York City, 1912: in downtown Greenwich Village, a group of women gathered, all with a plan to change the world.

This was the first meeting of ‘Heterodoxy’, a secret social club. Its members were passionate advocates of women’s suffrage, labour rights, equal marriage and free love. They were socialites and socialists; reformers and revolutionaries; artists, writers and scientists. Hotbed is the never-before-told story of the club whose audacious ideas and unruly acts transformed an international feminist agenda into a modern way of life.

For readers who loved Mo Moulton’s Mutual Admiration Society and Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting.

Tiger Woman

Dancer, singer, gang member, cocaine addict and artist’s favourite: Betty May – aka the Tiger Woman – was a woman like no other.

Born into abject poverty in Limehouse, Betty May used her striking looks and fierce street nous to become an unlikely bohemian celebrity sensation between the wars. A model and muse for artists and writers including Augustus John, Jacob Epstein, Jacob Kramer and David Garnett, May elbowed her way to the top of London’s social scene in a succession of outrageous and dramatic fights, flights, marriages and misadventures that also took her to France, Italy, Canada and the USA.

Tiger Woman is her incredible story in her own words, as vivid and extraordinary as the day it was first told.

The Secret Diary of a New Mum (aged 43 1/4)

The touching, honest and laugh-out-loud account of what it’s like to become a first-time mum after 40

Whatever your age, becoming a mum for the first time brings excitement, anxiety and numerous challenges. But how do you cope when, to top it all off, you discover you are almost old enough to be the mother of everyone else in your birth prep group? As one in five babies is born to a mum over 35, and the number of women over 40 giving birth has doubled, The Secret Diary of a New Mum (Aged 43 1/4) is Cari Rosen’s timely and hilarious account of becoming a first-time mother in her 40s.

Whether it’s deftly side-stepping questions about your age and baby number two, weeping as younger counterparts ping back into their size ten jeans within thirty seconds of giving birth, or your doctor suddenly referring to you as geriatric, Cari approaches the shared experiences of an ever-increasing number of mothers with insight, humour and honesty.

The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit

A SUNDAY TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

Winner of the Rubery Book Award 2020 (Non Fiction)

Edith Nesbit is considered the inventor of the children’s adventure story and her brilliant children’s books influenced bestselling authors including C.S. Lewis, P. L. Travers, J.K. Rowling, and Jacqueline Wilson, to name but a few. But who was the person behind the best loved classics The Railway Children and Five Children and It? Her once-happy childhood was eclipsed by the chronic illness and early death of her sister. In adulthood, she found herself at the centre of a love triangle between her husband and her close friend. She raised their children as her own.

Yet despite these troubling circumstances Nesbit was playful, contradictory and creative. She hosted legendary parties at her idiosyncratic Well Hall home and was described by George Bernard Shaw – one of several lovers – as ‘audaciously unconventional’. She was also an outspoken Marxist and founding member of the Fabian Society. Through Nesbit’s letters and deep archival research, Eleanor Fitzsimons reveals her as a prolific activist and writer on socialism. Nesbit railed against inequity, social injustice and state-sponsored oppression and incorporated her avant-garde ideas into her writing, influencing a generation of children – an aspect of her legacy examined here for the first time.

Eleanor Fitzsimons, acclaimed biographer and prize winning author of Wilde’s Women, has written the most authoritative biography in more than three decades. Here, she brings to light the extraordinary life story of an icon, creating a portrait of a woman in whom pragmatism and idealism worked side-by-side to produce a singular mind and literary talent.

Queen of Spies

The only biography of Britain’s celebrated female spy – now fully updated with previously classified materials.

From being raised in a Tanzanian shack, to attaining MI6’s most senior operational rank, Daphne Park led a highly unusual life. Drawing on first-hand accounts of intelligence workers close to agent Park, Hayes reveals how she rose in a male-dominated world to become Britain’s Cold War spy master.

With intimate, nail-biting details Queen of Spies captures both the paranoia and on-the-ground realities of intelligence work from the Second World War to the Cold War, and the life of Britain’s celebrated female spy.

Beyond the Secret Garden

The definitive and revealing biography of the author of The Secret Garden.

Frances Hodgson Burnett’s favourite theme in her fiction was the reversal of fortune, and she herself knew extremes of poverty and wealth. Born in Manchester in 1849, she emigrated with her family to Tennessee because of the financial problems caused by the cotton famine. From a young age she published her stories to help the family make ends meet. Only after she married did she publish Little Lord Fauntleroy that shot her into literary stardom.

On the surface, Frances’ life was extremely successful: hosting regular literary salons in her home and travelling frequently between properties in the UK and America. But behind the colourful personal and social life, she was a complex and contradictory character. She lost both parents by her twenty-first birthday, Henry James called her "the most heavenly of women" although avoided her; prominent people admired her and there were many friendships as well as an ill-advised marriage to a much younger man that ended in heartache. Her success was punctuated by periods of depression, in one instance brought on by the tragic loss of her eldest son to consumption.

Ann Thwaite creates a sympathetic but balanced and eye-opening biography of the woman who has enchanted numerous generations of children.

The Iris Trilogy

Dame Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) was one of the greatest British novelists and philosophers of the twentieth century. She read philosophy at Oxford where she met and later married John Bayley, a literary critic and fellow novelist. So began a forty-year, intense and unconventional but happy marriage, detailed in the classic bestselling memoir Iris. Despite Iris’ extramarital affairs with men and women throughout their long marriage – which John always suspected – their bond was unbreakable, and his memoir beautifully captures their child-like moments of bliss: walking in forests, swimming together in streams, and sharing hot cups of coffee on crisp mornings.

These are touching but poignant stories with the knowledge that Iris and her grand intellect would eventually succumb to Alzheimer’s disease. John would care for her singlehandedly for five years, the last of which he writes about in Iris and the Friends that also describes her peaceful passing. Finally, he reflects on his bereavement and the void that is left when a soulmate departs in A Widower’s House. All three books are told by the person who knew Iris best, with gentle humour – at times unbearably moving – in his portrayal of a remarkable woman.

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