(I recommend all the books listed below. Please note that I do not earn commission on any sales.)

Georgy Girl ~ Significant Sisters ~ Good Wives

Georgy burst upon the scene in 1965, an unlikely heroine: tall, awkward, and given to clowning, a virginal young woman on the outside of life looking in. It is her bitchy and promiscuous flatmate Meredith who is of the Sixties: a dolly bird, pretty and slender and throwing over all convention to live as she wants to. Georgy's subservient working-class parents work as servants to middle-aged James, a man who wants statuesque Georgy to be his mistress. She avoids making any answer and, desperate for love and sex, falls for Meredith's boyfriend Jos. When Meredith becomes pregnant and decides to keep the baby – after four previous abortions – Jos does the decent thing and marries her. He joins the girls in their seedy flat and after a while Georgy and Jos begin an affair. But is it Jos she wants – or the baby, abandoned by Meredith?

'A deliciously wry approach', Evening Standard. Easy to read and 'thoroughly likeable', approved the Tatler. But it was the film in 1966 that transmogrified Georgy into the rebellious icon that she ultimately became: a free-spirited girl of the Swinging Sixties, captured forever in the accompanying song from the Seekers.

Significant Sisters traces the lives of eight women who launched vital changes in law, education, the professions, politics, and more: Caroline Norton, Elizabeth Blackwell, Florence Nightingale, Emily Davies, Josephine Butler, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Sanger, and Emma Goldman. Each forged her own path and all fought bravely to make a real, lasting difference to women's lives in the decades to come.

‘Humane, humorous and perceptive.’ Evening Standard

‘Margaret Forster is alive to the debt we owe to such champions, who made our world so much more hospitable to women.’ Marina Warner, Sunday Times

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