March 2020: Selection of Librairie Bertrand for Women's Day

In honor of International Women's Day, Élise from Librairie Bertrand has put together a special selection of books that put women in the spotlight!

The Mirror And The Light - Hilary Mantel

This eagerly awaited book has been in the making for eight years. With this novel, Hilary Mantel brings a triumphant end to the trilogy she began with Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. She traces the final years of Thomas Cromwell, the boy from nowhere who climbs to the heights of power, offering a defining portrait of predator and prey, of a ferocious contest between present and past, between royal will and a common man’s vision: of a modern nation making itself through conflict, passion, and courage.

The Night Watchman - Louise Erdrich

This novel is based on the life of Erdrich’s grandfather, a night watchman who fought in the 1950s against Native dispossession. Louise Erdrich creates a fictional world populated with memorable characters who are forced to grapple with the worst and best impulses of human nature. Illuminating the loves and lives, the desires and ambitions of these characters with compassion, wit, and intelligence, this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humour, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.

The Girl with the Louding Voice - Abi Daré

Adunni is a fourteen-year-old Nigerian girl who wants an education. As the only daughter of a broke father, she is a valuable commodity, who is removed from school and sold as a third wife to an old man. When unspeakable tragedy swiftly strikes in her new home, she is secretly sold as a domestic servant to a wealthy household, where no one will talk about the strange disappearance of her predecessor. But Adunni won’t be silenced. She is determined to find her voice – in a whisper, in song, in broken English -until she can speak for herself.

Frying Plantain - Zalika Reid-Benta

Frying Plantain by Zalika Reid-Benta is a quiet yet decisive book that doesn’t gloss over the first and second generation immigrant experience in Canada. And instead of getting a disjointed look at these experiences through a raft of different characters, we follow one person, Kara Davis, as she grows from a young girl into a university student in the city of Toronto, Canada. Because of this focus on one character and her immediate surroundings, Frying Plantain reads much like a novel would; each story could easily act as a chapter.

Summer - Ali Smith

From the Man Booker short-listed author of Autumn, Winter, and Spring comes Summer, the highly anticipated fourth novel in her acclaimed Seasonal Quartet. Here is the exciting culmination of Ali Smith’s celebrated Seasonal Quartet, a series of stand-alone novels, separate but interconnected (as the seasons are), wide-ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories.