Dear JOhn,

It’s time for your latest round up of recommendations from our staff and supporters that act as a megaphone to women's rights.

This month we are doing something a bit different in honor of International Literacy Day and our partnership with Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, the highly anticipated sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale which comes out this Tuesday, September 10th.

Waterstones Bookstore, in London, will host a sold out midnight launch event for The Testaments featuring a variety of authors and activists. You can catch up on the featured authors' literature in this newsletter and tune into our social channels on Monday 9 September as we go live at Waterstones! Enjoy - and make sure you pre-order a copy of The Testaments!

Fiction

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
When the van door slammed on Offred's future at the end of The Handmaid's Tale, readers had no way of telling what lay ahead for her—freedom, prison or death. With The Testaments, the wait is over. Margaret Atwood's sequel picks up the story more than fifteen years after Offred stepped into the unknown, with the explosive testaments of three female narrators from Gilead.
#GreatFiction #TheHandmaidsTale

Coraline by Neil Gaiman 
When Coraline steps through a door to find another house strangely similar to her own (only better), things seem marvelous. But there's another mother there, and another father, and they want her to stay and be their little girl. They want to change her and never let her go. Coraline will have to fight with all her wit and courage if she is to save herself and return to her ordinary life.  
#GreatFiction

The End of Alice by A.M. Homes
Only a work of such searing, meticulously controlled brilliance could provoke such a wide range of visceral responses. Here is the incredible story of an imprisoned pedophile who is drawn into an erotically charged correspondence with a nineteen-year-old suburban coed. As the two reveal—and revel in—their obsessive desires, Homes creates in The End of Alice a novel that is part romance, part horror story, at once unnerving and seductive.
#GreatFiction

Do You Dream of Terra-Two? by Temi Oh 
When an Earth-like planet is discovered, a team of six teens, along with three veteran astronauts, embark on a twenty-year trip to set up a planet for human colonization—but find that space is more deadly than they ever could have imagined.
#SciFi #NewAuthor

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
Winner of the Whitbread Prize for best first fiction, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a coming-out novel from Winterson. The narrator, Jeanette, cuts her teeth on the knowledge that she is one of God’s elect, but as this budding evangelical comes of age, and comes to terms with her preference for her own sex, the peculiar balance of her God-fearing household crumbles.
#LGBTQ #YoungAdult

She Must Be Mad by Charly Cox
She Must be Mad explores coming-of-age: the pain and beauty of love, the relief and the agony of turning from girl to woman, the isolation of an untethered mind and the power and subjugation of the body.
#Feminism #MentalHealth

10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World by Elif Shafak 
For Leila, each minute after her death brings a sensuous memory: the taste of spiced goat stew, sacrificed by her father to celebrate the long-awaited birth of a son; the sight of bubbling vats of lemon and sugar which the women use to wax their legs while the men attend mosque; the scent of cardamom coffee that Leila shares with a handsome student in the brothel where she works. Each memory, too, recalls the friends she made at each key moment in her life - friends who are now desperately trying to find her.   
#GreatFiction

Books to Inspire Action

Invisible Women – a world designed for men by Caroline Criado Perez
In this book, Caroline Criado Perez looks into structures of everyday sexism through a lens of data analysis and constructions built around male perspectives. Criado Perez gives examples ranging from how office space temperatures are calculated in the context of a working man’s body temperature to technology product design geared towards men.
#GenderGap

Do Something: Activism for Everyone by Kajal Odedra
People power works and is changing the world around us. This is a user's guide to activism by one of the UK's biggest names in grass-roots campaigning. Illustrated with lessons from the real world, it is a guide to creating change for anyone who has ever asked themselves 'why hasn't anyone done something about that?'
#Activism

How to Make a Difference: the Definitive Guide from the World’s Most Effective Activists by Kate Robertson & Ella Robertson
This is a practical roadmap to modern day activism created by the brilliant minds behind the world's biggest campaigns including Colin Kaepernick, Emma Watson, Sir Bob Geldof, Fatima Bhutto, Black Lives Matter, Cher, Matt Damon, Rakesh Kapoor and Gina Miller; collectively they combine the latest models of thinking, real life experiences, radical techniques and advice in order to help incentivize everyone and anyone who has ever wondered, how can I help?
#Activism #OneYoungWorld

Be the Change: a Toolkit for the Activist in You by Gina Martin
In June 2017, a man took a photo up Gina Martin's skirt at a music festival. The police told her that this was not a sexual offence; the man would not be charged. The law had let Gina down, and her first reaction was resignation. It's too big, too scary, too complicated for someone like me to challenge this. But something inside her had snapped. Gina was tired of accepting sexual harassment as a fact of life. Eighteen months later, she had changed the law and made upskirting a criminal offence. Now, Gina wants to empower you with the tools and courage to challenge injustice and fight for change.
#Activism #UK

Podcasts

The Guilty Feminist by Deborah Frances-White
Join comedian Deborah Frances-White for her comedy podcast, recorded in front of a live audience. Each week Deborah and her special guests discuss topics "all 21st century feminists agree on" while confessing their insecurities, hypocrisies and fears that underlie their lofty principles.
#Feminism

In solidarity,

Bryna Subherwal

Advocacy Campaign Manager