"When her family becomes impoverished after a disastrous financial speculation, Agnes Gray determines to find work as a governess in order to contribute to their meager income and assert her independence. But Agnes' enthusiasm is swiftly extinguished as she struggles first with the unmanageable Bloomfield children and then with the painful disdain of the haughty Murray family; the only kindness she receives comes from Mr Weston, the sober young curate....

Sweeping across centuries and into the Aleutian Islands of Alaska's Bering Sea, And She Was begins with a decision and a broken taboo when three starving Aleut mothers decide to take their fate into their own hands. Two hundred and fifty years later, by the time Brandy, a floundering, trashy, Latin-spewing cocktail waitress, steps ashore in the 1980s, Unalaska Island has absorbed their dark secret-a secret that is both salvation and shame. In a...

Twelve-year-old Francie grows up in 1930s Harlem.

"A previously unpublished novel of the reflections of a deeply scarred and reclusive woman from the cult icon Katherine Dunn, author of Geek Love"--

"Set in Brooklyn during the Depression and World War II, this is the story of a Selina Boyce, the daughter of Barbadian immigrants. She is caught between the struggles of her hard-working, ambitious mother, who wnats to "buy house" and educate her daughters, and her father, who longs to return to the land in Barbados. Selina seeks to define her own identity and values as she struggles to surmount the racism and poverty that surround her."--Page 4...

"Sisters from Trinidad, Violet and Lily have never had much in common. Stunning Lily arrives undocumented in New York and makes her way as a stripper. But Harvard-educated Violet is this close to the perfect assimilated life, thanks to a prestigious job, and her rich bougie fiance... Until she aids a woman in trouble, and is mistaken for a notorious strip-club mogul's mistress. When she's wrongly accused of helping him embezzle millions, Violet loses...

"The Living Is Easy, Dorothy West's first novel and one of only a handful of novels published by women during the Harlem Renaissance, tells the story of Cleo Judson, daughter of Southern sharecroppers, who is determined to integrate into Boston's black elite. Married to the "Black Banana King" Bart Judson, Cleo maneuvers her three sisters and their children-but not their husbands-into living with her, attempting to recreate her original family in...

Describes the forking paths of two women, one to success, the other to failure. One studies hard and makes something of herself, the other is a playgirl who relies on a rich husband. The women drift apart, but tragedy will reunite them, the rich one becoming homeless and entering a shelter where the other is a volunteer. A first novel.

"Celebrating the resilience of women as they navigate and transform what remains a man's world. In the city of Enugu in the 1970s, young Nwabulu dreams of becoming a typist as she endures her employers' endless chores. Although a housemaid since the age of ten, she is tall and beautiful and in love with a rich man's son. Educated and privileged, Julie is a modern woman. Living on her own, she is happy to collect the gold jewellery love-struck Eugene...

"A tale of American disinheritance told from the inside out," declared the Village Voice of this autobiographical novel. Written in 1929 by a dedicated social activist, it chronicles a woman's escape from grinding rural poverty into a predominantly male world of politics and revolution. "My aim in life was to study, not to follow a man around," asserts Marie Rogers, who struggles to establish her identity as an individual and as "a daughter of the...