Tipping the Velvet is a 1998 debut novel by Welsh novelist Sarah Waters. A historical novel set in England during the 1890s, it tells a coming-of-age story about a young woman named Nan who falls in love with a male impersonator, follows her to London, and finds various ways to support herself as she journeys through the city. The picaresque plot elements have prompted scholars and reviewers to compare it to similar British urban adventure stories written by Charles Dickens and Daniel Defoe.
Sarah Ann Waters is a Welsh novelist. She is best known for her novels set in Victorian society and featuring lesbian protagonists, such as Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith.
Karen Joy Fowler is an American author of science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction. Her work often centers on the nineteenth century, the lives of women, and social alienation.
The Night Watch is a dark, 2006 historical fiction novel by Sarah Waters. It was shortlisted for both the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the 2006 Orange Prize. The novel, which is told backward through third-person narrative, takes place in 1940s London during and after World War II. The storyline follows the fragmented lives and the strange interconnections between Kay, Helen and Julia, three lesbians; Viv, a straight woman; and Duncan, her brother, whose sexuality is ambiguous. The war, with its never-ending night watches, serves as a horrifying backdrop and metaphor of the morbidity that surrounds life and love.
Desert of the Heart is a 1964 novel written by Jane Rule. The story was adapted into the 1985 film Desert Hearts, directed by Donna Deitch. The book was originally published in hardback by Macmillan Canada. It was one of the very few novels addressing lesbianism that was published in hardback form; most books during this period with female homosexuality as a topic were considered lesbian pulp fiction until 1969.
The Secret Scripture is a 2008 novel written by Irish writer Sebastian Barry.
The Troubled Man is a crime fiction novel by Swedish author Henning Mankell, featuring police inspector Kurt Wallander. It is the twelfth and final novel in the Wallander series. The pace of The Troubled Man is significantly slower than the previous Wallander stories, with several chapters between murders.
Wolf Hall is a 2009 historical novel by English author Hilary Mantel, published by Fourth Estate, named after the Seymour family's seat of Wolfhall, or Wulfhall, in Wiltshire. Set in the period from 1500 to 1535, Wolf Hall is a sympathetic fictionalised biography documenting the rapid rise to power of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII through to the death of Sir Thomas More. The novel won both the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2012, The Observer named it as one of "The 10 best historical novels".
The Little Stranger is a 2009 gothic novel written by Sarah Waters. It is a ghost story set in a dilapidated mansion in Warwickshire, England in the 1940s. Departing from her earlier themes of lesbian and gay fiction, Waters' fifth novel features a male narrator, a country doctor who makes friends with an old gentry family of declining fortunes who own a very old estate that is crumbling around them. The stress of reconciling the state of their finances with the familial responsibility of keeping the estate coincides with perplexing events which may or may not be of supernatural origin, culminating in tragedy.
On Canaan's Side is a 2011 novel written by Irish playwright and novelist Sebastian Barry.
There But For The is a 2011 novel by Scottish author Ali Smith, first published in the UK by Hamish Hamilton and in the US by Pantheon, and set in 2009 and 2010 in Greenwich, London. It was cited by both The Guardian book review and the Publishers Weekly as one of the best books of the year. and was also longlisted for the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction.
Bring Up the Bodies is an historical novel by Hilary Mantel, sequel to the award-winning Wolf Hall (2009), and part of a trilogy charting the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell, the powerful minister in the court of King Henry VIII. It won the 2012 Man Booker Prize and the 2012 Costa Book of the Year. The final novel in the trilogy is The Mirror & the Light (2020).
The Testament of Mary is a short novel by Irish writer Colm Tóibín. The book was published on 13 November 2012 by Scribner's.
Dear Life is a short story collection by Canadian writer Alice Munro, published in 2012 by McClelland and Stewart.
Flight Behavior is a 2012 novel by Barbara Kingsolver. It is her seventh novel, a New York Times bestseller, and was declared "Best book of the year" by the Washington Post and USA Today.
The Luminaries is a 2013 novel by Eleanor Catton. Set in New Zealand's South Island in 1866, the novel follows Walter Moody, a prospector who travels to the West Coast settlement of Hokitika to make his fortune on the goldfields. Instead, he stumbles into a tense meeting between twelve local men, and is drawn into a complex mystery involving a series of unsolved crimes. The novel's complex structure is based on the system of Western astrology, with each of the twelve local men representing one of the twelve signs of the zodiac, and with another set of characters representing planets in the solar system.
H is for Hawk is a 2014 memoir by British author Helen Macdonald. It won the Samuel Johnson Prize and Costa Book of the Year award, among other honours.
How to Be Both is a 2014 novel by Scottish author Ali Smith, first published by Hamish Hamilton. It was shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize and the 2015 Folio Prize. It won the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize, the Novel Award in the 2014 Costa Book Awards and the 2015 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.
Outline is a novel by Rachel Cusk, the first in a trilogy known as The Outline trilogy, which also contains the novels Transit and Kudos. It was chosen by The New York Times critics as one of the 15 remarkable books by women that are "shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century." The New Yorker has called the novel "autobiographical fiction."
Nora Webster is a historical novel by Colm Tóibín, published October 7, 2014 by Scribner. The story is set in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, Ireland, and in Brooklyn, New York in the middle of the 20th century.
