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15+ Banned Books By Women

October 2, 2026 / Sheree / 0 Comments

It’s been a while since I’ve put together a reading list for Banned Books Week (4-10 October this year), and a whole lot of books have been newly banned or challenged in that time. An increasing number of them are books by women, usually those that deal with gender politics and resisting the patriarchy. Here are 15+ banned books by women.

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

The Hate U Give - Angie Thomas - Book Laid on Wooden Table - Keeping Up With The Penguins

Blurb: “In The Hate U Give, sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Protesters are taking to the streets in Khalil’s name. Some cops and the local drug lord try to intimidate Starr and her family. What everyone wants to know is: what really went down that night? And the only person alive who can answer that is Starr. But what Starr does—or does not—say could upend her community. It could also endanger her life.” Read my full review of The Hate U Give here.

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou - Book Laid on Wooden Table - Keeping Up With The Penguins

Blurb: “Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local “powhitetrash.” At eight years old and back at her mother’s side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age—and must live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns that love towards herself, the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors will allow her to be free rather than imprisoned. Poetic and powerful, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings will touch hearts and change minds for as long as people read.” Read my full review of I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings here.

Beloved by Toni Morrison

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Blurb: “Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.” Read my full review of Beloved here.

More banned books by Toni Morrison: The Bluest Eye

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

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Blurb: “In Margaret Atwood’s dystopian future, environmental disasters and declining birthrates have led to a Second American Civil War. The result is the rise of the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian regime that enforces rigid social roles and enslaves the few remaining fertile women. Offred is one of these, a Handmaid bound to produce children for one of Gilead’s commanders. Deprived of her husband, her child, her freedom, and even her own name, Offred clings to her memories and her will to survive. At once a scathing satire, an ominous warning, and a tour de force of narrative suspense, The Handmaid’s Tale is a modern classic.” Read my full review of The Handmaid’s Tale here.

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee - Book laid on a wooden table - Keeping Up With The Penguins

Blurb: “One of the most cherished stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than fifty million copies worldwide, and was voted one of the best novels of the twentieth century by librarians across the country. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and savage inequities through the eyes of a young girl, Scout Finch, as her father, Atticus—a crusading local lawyer—risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime.” Read my full review of To Kill A Mockingbird here.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

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Blurb: “One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century, Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the writing of Zora Neale Hurston. Out of print for almost thirty years—due largely to initial audiences’ rejection of its strong black female protagonist—Hurston’s classic has since its 1978 reissue become perhaps the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American literature.” Read my full review of Their Eyes Were Watching God here.

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

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Blurb: “A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early-twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance, and silence. Through a series of letters spanning nearly thirty years, first from Celie to God, then from the sisters to each other, the novel draws readers into a rich and memorable portrayal of Black women—their pain and struggle, companionship and growth, resilience and bravery.” Read my full review of The Color Purple here.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins - book laid on wooden table - Keeping Up With The Penguins

Blurb: “In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the districts in line by forcing them all to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in The Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV. Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen regards it as a death sentence when she steps forward to take her sister’s place in the Games. But Katniss has been close to dead before-and survival, for her, is second nature.” Read my full review of The Hunger Games here.

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

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Blurb: “Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the Fun Home. It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve. In her hands, personal history becomes a work of amazing subtlety and power, a unique coming-of-age story written with controlled force and enlivened with humor, rich literary allusion, and heartbreaking detail. How does a daughter resolve the legacy of mystery left by the man she called her father?”

A Court Of Thorns And Roses by Sarah J Maas

A Court Of Thorns And Roses - Sarah J Maas - Keeping Up With The Penguins

Blurb: “When nineteen-year-old huntress Feyre kills a wolf in the woods, a terrifying creature arrives to demand retribution. Dragged to a treacherous magical land she knows about only from legends, Feyre discovers that her captor is not truly a beast, but one of the lethal, immortal faeries who once ruled her world. At least, he’s not a beast all the time. As she adapts to her new home, her feelings for the faerie, Tamlin, transform from icy hostility into a fiery passion that burns through every lie she’s been told about the beautiful, dangerous world of the Fae. A Court Of Thorns And Roses is a seductive, breathtaking book that blends romance, adventure, and faerie lore into an unforgettable read.” Read my full review of A Court Of Thorns And Roses here.

My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult

My Sister's Keeper - Jodi Picoult - Book Laid on Wooden Table - Keeping Up With The Penguins

Blurb: “Anna is not sick, but she might as well be. By age thirteen, she has undergone countless surgeries, transfusions, and shots so that her older sister, Kate, can somehow fight the leukemia that has plagued her since childhood. The product of preimplantation genetic diagnosis, Anna was conceived as a bone marrow match for Kate—a life and a role that she has never challenged…until now. My Sister’s Keeper examines what it means to be a good parent, a good sister, a good person. Is it morally correct to do whatever it takes to save a child’s life, even if that means infringing upon the rights of another?” Read my full review of My Sister’s Keeper here.

The Miseducation Of Cameron Post by Emily M. Danforth

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Blurb: “The Miseducation Of Cameron Post is a stunning and provocative literary debut. When Cameron Post’s parents die suddenly in a car crash, her shocking first thought is relief. Relief they’ll never know that, hours earlier, she had been kissing a girl. But that relief doesn’t last, and Cam is forced to move in with her conservative aunt Ruth and her well-intentioned but hopelessly old-fashioned grandmother. She knows that from this point on, her life will forever be different. Survival in Miles City, Montana, means blending in and leaving well enough alone, and Cam becomes an expert at both. Then Coley Talor moves to town.” Read my full review of The Miseducation Of Cameron Post here.

Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld

Prep - Curtis Sittenfeld - Keeping Up With The Penguins

Blurb: “In Prep, Lee Fiora is an intelligent, observant fourteen-year-old when her father drops her off in front of her dorm at the prestigious Ault School in Massachusetts. She leaves her animated, affectionate family in South Bend, Indiana, at least in part because of the boarding school’s glossy brochure, in which boys in sweaters chat in front of old brick buildings, girls in kilts hold lacrosse sticks on pristinely mown athletic fields, and everyone sings hymns in chapel. As Lee soon learns, Ault is a cloistered world of jaded, attractive teenagers who spend summers on Nantucket and speak in their own clever shorthand. Both intimidated and fascinated by her classmates, Lee becomes a shrewd observer of—and, ultimately, a participant in—their rituals and mores.”

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks - Rebecca Skloot - Keeping Up With The Penguins

Blurb: “Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine: The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, which are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave. The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.” Read my full review of The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks here.

Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell

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Blurb: “This is the tale of Scarlett O’Hara, the spoiled, manipulative daughter of a wealthy plantation owner, who arrives at young womanhood just in time to see the Civil War forever change her way of life. A sweeping story of tangled passion and courage, Margaret Mitchell brings to life the unforgettable characters that have captivated readers for decades. Widely considered an American classic, Gone With the Wind explores the depth of human passions with an intensity as bold as its setting in the red hills of Georgia. A superb piece of storytelling, it vividly depicts the drama of the Civil War and Reconstruction.”

Invisible Women – Caroline Criado Perez

September 29, 2026 / Sheree / 0 Comments

When feminist advocate Caroline Criado Perez campaigned for a notable woman’s profile to be included on British banknotes, she received an avalanche of abuse and threats, including one telling complaint from a man: “but women are everywhere now!”. He’s not wrong, in the sense that women make up more than half of the world’s population – women are everywhere, now and always have been – but as Perez outlines in her 2019 book Invisible Women, they are often “missing” from the critical design, policy, and funding decisions that shape our lives.

Get Invisible Women here
(Help make this woman more visible by making a purchase through an affiliate link! You’ll be supporting this site with a small commission at no extra cost.)

(By the way, Perez was successful in her campaign – Jane Austen has been printed on the British £10 note since 2017.)

Invisible Women explores the origins and impacts of what Perez calls the “gender data gap”. Data sets, big and small, are used to decide everything, from how big a phone screen should be to what medicines are approved for distribution. The thing is that data about women are often excluded from these sets, or not collected at all (rarely due to explicit malice or bias, more often for reasons of convenience or nescience). This leads to the all-too-predictable conclusion: we are living in a man’s world.

This exclusion has consequences, ranging from minor inconvenience to fatality. Invisible Women uses a broad range of case studies, across health, transport, technology, politics, and world events, to demonstrate the tangible impact of the arguably esoteric field of statistics and data analysis. Women might be “everywhere now”, but they are still more likely to die in car crashes because test dummies are modelled off the average male body. They are more likely to die in natural disasters because warning systems and evacuation procedures are designed by and for men, without consideration of women’s specific needs. They are more likely to feel cold at work, because temperature regulation guidelines for offices are based on male metabolic data from the mid-20th century. They are more likely to get inaccurate readings from their FitBits because the technology wasn’t developed to account for steps taken during housework or while pushing a pram.

A lot of the information Perez covers in Invisible Women won’t be new-news to fellow female readers. We already know that we do the lion’s share of domestic labour, and that we are disproportionately victimised by male violence. Still, it’s validating to have these experiences printed in black and white, backed up by rigorous research (where it exists). Sure, that makes Invisible Women a fairly stats-heavy book, but I don’t know what else you could expect from a book about data bias.

I guess it’s somewhat ironic that a book about exclusion and underrepresentation itself excludes and underrepresents a significant population. Perez has very little to say about the experiences of trans, non-binary, and intersex people in Invisible Women, aside from a brief allusion to them in the opening chapter. While this alone is enough to get her cancelled in a lot of leftie echo chambers, I go back and forth on my feelings about it.

On the one hand, trans women are women, and any work of feminist theory is incomplete without them. The experiences of trans, non-binary, and intersex people are informative, in the same way that the experiences of cis-women are. On the other hand, Perez explicitly sets out to deal with the issue of data bias on a macro level, and the population of cis-women is simply much larger than the population of trans, non-binary, and intersex people (50+% compared to 1-2%, respectively). Plus, the issue of exclusion of trans, non-binary, and intersex people from data analysis (and the myriad ways this negatively impacts the lives of people in these communities) is deserving of a whole book of its own. Subsuming it into an already-chockers book about the experiences of cis-women would do it a great disservice – and probably get Perez roasted for writing about a community of which she is not a part, anyway.

So, I guess I feel a bit “yes, and” about it: yes, the gender data gap is real and has a real impact on cis-women, and it also affects other people who aren’t cis-males and they deserve consideration (even though they weren’t specifically included in Invisible Women).

Read Invisible Women on audiobook via Libro.fm here.

Hollow Bones – Jodi Picoult

September 27, 2026 / Sheree / 0 Comments

Jodi Picoult is famous for her topical novels, but I’m not sure even she could have predicted just how timely her latest, Hollow Bones, would be. The story revolves around 9/11 and post-partum psychosis, two subjects that have dominated headlines in the U.S. for the past month. I was thrilled to dive in when my friends at Macmillan Australia sent me a copy for review.

Hollow Bones starts in the (very) present day, September 2026, with emergency response coordinator Molly Fitzgerald reflecting on the loss of her mother. She was just two months old when Eloise went to a doctor’s appointment at the World Trade Center, and never returned. Molly grew up in the shadow of that tragedy, but she turned out okay. She loves her job, she’s happily married, and she’s just found out she’s pregnant.

And there’s a fun little Easter egg for fans of Picoult’s earlier novel, My Sister’s Keeper: Molly’s husband is Jesse, the older brother from that story, and the books take place in the same universe.

Part One of Hollow Bones ends with the mother of all twists, then the story skips back to 2001. Over the course of the rest of the story, the truth is unravelled.

Hollow Bones has long chapters, but they truly fly by. It’s an incredibly tense and moving story, guaranteed to evoke all kinds of emotions. As per Picoult’s Author’s Note, it’s a story about the intersection of public and private tragedy. (Don’t skip the Author’s Note by the way, as Picoult is very generous and insightful in describing how the various elements of this book came together.)

I will concede that Picoult overshoots slightly in the final act, with a couple of Twists that don’t feel entirely necessary in an otherwise vital and timely read. Still, I thoroughly enjoyed reading Hollow Bones, and it gave me a lot to think about.

Read Hollow Bones on audiobook via Libro.fm here. (affiliate link)

21 Books That Will Have You Hooked From The First Chapter

September 25, 2026 / Sheree / 0 Comments

Is there anything better than a book that has you hooked from the very first chapter? I love an explosive opening, one that makes me reel back in my seat and begs me to read on. These books fit the bill perfectly.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

The Secret History - Donna Tartt - Book Laid on Wooden Table - Keeping Up With The Penguins

The Secret History is a campus novel, set at a fictional(ish) elite liberal arts college in New England, and the Prologue is a masterpiece of literary fiction. In it, Donna Tartt reveals that Bunny, one of the college’s students, is dead, but the full circumstances of his death are only hinted at in the vaguest terms. It’s a hell of an opener, and it compels you to read on immediately. What follows is a kind of inverted detective story, where the events around Bunny’s murder are laid out in chronological order, with tantalising clues about what’s to come sprinkled throughout the narrative. Read my full review of The Secret History here.

Fleishman Is In Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Fleishman Is In Trouble - Taffy Brodesser-Akner - Keeping Up With The Penguins

At first glance, Fleishman Is In Trouble looks like your stock-standard New York divorce novel. A privileged couple – he’s a doctor, she’s a talent agent/manager – sniping at each other and using their kids like battering rams in the dissolution of their marriage. But by the end of the first chapter, you’ll realise that this is something different, something special. Read my full review of Fleishman Is In Trouble here.

The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty

The Husband's Secret - Liane Moriarty - Book Laid on Wooden Table - Keeping Up With The Penguins

The Husband’s Secret has one heck of a premise! A woman finds an envelope, written in her husband’s hand, and it says (*ominous music*): “For my wife, only to be opened in the event of my death”. But her husband is still very much alive, and he won’t tell her what’s inside. In fact, he rushes home from an international business trip to make absolutely sure she hasn’t opened it. I think it goes without saying that, given that this is how the story begins, the opening chapter is an absolute cracker. Read my full review of The Husband’s Secret here.

The Nothing Man by Catherine Ryan Howard

The Nothing Man - Catherine Ryan Howard - Keeping Up With The Penguins

The Nothing Man takes its name from the moniker given to the man who assaulted and murdered a series of people in the early 2000s, in their Cork homes. They called him that because the Gardaí had “nothing” on him. This isn’t a whodunnit, though. You know from the very first chapter that Jim is The Nothing Man. Nowadays, Jim is working as a security guard in a supermarket. When the story begins, he’s just learned that a book has come out about his (as yet unsolved) crimes – he spots a woman purchasing a copy from a display at his work. It’s a memoir by the sole survivor of The Nothing Man’s last attack. Read my full review of The Nothing Man here.

Big Lies In A Small Town by Diane Chamberlain

Big Lies In A Small Town - Diane Chamberlain - Book on Wooden Table - Keeping Up With The Penguins

Big Lies In A Small Town centers around a Depression-era mural: the woman commissioned to paint it (who disappeared under mysterious circumstances), and the woman charged with restoring it for installation, nearly eight decades later. The story is fictional, but the town of Edenton and the themes Diane Chamberlain explores (race, privilege, and opportunity) are very real. Read my full review of Big Lies In A Small Town here.

The Favourites by Layne Fargo

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The Favourites has big I, Tonya vibes, right from the first chapter. Katarina Shaw and Heath Rocha have nothing going for them but steely determination, and their bid to make the Winter Olympics team (on not much more than a shoestring and a dream) is plagued by scandal. This epic love story meets underdog tale an insanely gripping read, even for those of us who know absolutely nothing about ice skating or high-level competitive sport. Read my full review of The Favourites here.

Before I Go To Sleep by S.J. Watson

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The narrator of Before I Go To Sleep, Christine, has a strange kind of acquired memory loss. Every night, while she sleeps, her memory re-sets. Every morning, when she wakes up, Ben has to explain to her that she’s his wife, what has happened to her, and how she came to be married to him. That all sounds lovely, but here’s the thing: can Christine trust Ben’s answers? In the first chapter, we meet Christine, Ben, and a Dr Nash who is trying to help Christine without Ben’s knowledge. The good doctor gives Christine her journal to read and hopefully jog some of her memories out of storage. On the very first page, Christine has written: DON’T TRUST BEN. Isn’t that tantalising? Read my full review of Before I Go To Sleep here.

The Fiancee Farce by Alexandria Bellefleur

The Fiancee Farce - Alexandria Bellefleur - Keeping Up With The Penguins

The Fiancee Farce should come with a warning: the first chapter is off-the-hook, totally-and-completely bonkers. It goes from 0 to 100 on the very first page, you’ll be thrown back in your seat. Tansy has been “dating” a pretend girlfriend – romance book cover model, Gemma West – for six months. It’s a ruse she perpetuates to get out of dinner with her snobby step-family. She’s attending a wedding with said step-family when, lo and behold, Gemma comes strutting in. Tansy thinks she’s busted, but without even the slightest heads up, Gemma goes along with it. It turns out, Gemma has her own reasons for needing a fake relationship as cover. Read my full review of The Fiancee Farce here.

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

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The opening line of The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter is a corker: “In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together.” In fact, the whole first chapter will knock your socks off. As the first sentence suggests, it focuses on two close friends, John Singer and Spiros Antonapolous. They are both deaf, and communicate primarily via sign language; their disability isolates them from the rest of their community in the small mill town where they live, but they are satisfied with each other’s company. Unfortunately, Spiros’s mental health declines rapidly. This is devastating to Singer, who loses the only person with whom he can communicate with ease. Read my full review of The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter here.

The Other Side Of Beautiful by Kim Lock

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The Other Side Of Beautiful opens with a really tight first chapter, one that will grab you and not let go: agoraphobic Mercy watches her house burn down, forcing her out into the world that she’s been avoiding for years. She finds herself in a camper van, with her ever-faithful sausage dog Wasabi (my absolute hands-down favourite character) by her side, driving the length of Australia, from Adelaide to Darwin. Read my full review of The Other Side Of Beautiful here.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

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The first chapter of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is exquisitely crafted: word built, exposition clear (but not patronising to the reader), and the hook baited. You can’t help but dive in! The Learned Society of York’s “theoretical magicians” (i.e., old white men who study the history of magic, even though they can’t perform it) is stunned to learn that Mr Norrell – curator of the world’s largest personal library of magic books and books about magic (they’re different) – can actually perform it. Norrell compels them to disband their silly gabfest club, and goes about quietly studying and practicing magic all on his own. Strange, on the other hand, decides on a whim to simply Be A Magician. Read my full review of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell here.

Death In Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh

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Death In Her Hands has a killer first chapter: “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body,”. These words are found, written neatly on a piece of note paper, by a 72 year old woman out walking her dog. The thing is, there’s no body. Magda is nowhere in evidence. There’s no blood or weapon or sign of a struggle – just the note, on the ground, weighed down by some rocks. Read my full review of Death In Her Hands here.

The One-Hundred-Year Old Man Who Climbed Out The Window And Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson

The One Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out The Window And Disappeared - Jonas Jonasson - Book Laid on Wooden Table - Keeping Up With The Penguins

The One-Hundred-Year Old Man Who Climbed Out The Window And Disappeared starts with Allan Karlsson sitting in his retirement home, contemplating the impending celebration of his one-hundredth birthday. Frustrated by the prohibition policy of the home, he decides (bugger it!) he’ll jump out the window. He walks in his slippers to the nearest bus station. There, he meets a hoodlum who’s bursting for the loo, but can’t squeeze himself into the cubicle with his giant suitcase in tow. The young man asks Allan to hold the case for a minute while he relieves himself, but the centenarian carpes the heck out of the diem! He jumps onto a bus, suitcase in tow, and leaves the hoodlum looking confused. Read my full review of The One-Hundred-Year Old Man Who Climbed Out The Window And Disappeared here.

We Have Always Lived In The Castle by Shirley Jackson

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I’m hardly the first to say this, but it must be said all the same: We Have Always Lived In The Castle has one of the all-time great first chapters. It’s been called “the best opening paragraph of any novel”, with “coercive” language that makes it “impossible” for the reader not to go on reading. The setting and conceit of the novel are ominous on their own, but Merricat’s narration turns it up to eleven. Read my full review of We Have Always Lived In The Castle here.

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

The Vegetarian - Han Kang - Keeping Up With The Penguins

Once in a while, when you’re lucky, you pick up a book with a first chapter that will catch your eye and drag it down the page. Take The Vegetarian: “Before my wife turned vegetarian, I’d always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way.” Isn’t that just… *chef’s kiss*? It promises a fascinating story to come. This is a beautiful, unsettling novel in three acts about rebellion and taboo, violence and eroticism, and the twisting metamorphosis of a soul, and it gets off to a really strong start. Read my full review of The Vegetarian here.

The Chain by Adrian McKinty

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The Chain has one of those first chapters that will pull you in, before you even finish reading the first page. Picture this: a woman receives a phone call, advising her that her daughter has been kidnapped while waiting for the school bus. Terrifying, of course. She has to pay a ransom, but she also has to kidnap another person’s child, in order to secure her daughter’s safe return. Isn’t that twisted? Read my full review of The Chain here.

The Likeness by Tana French

The Likeness - Tana French - Keeping Up With The Penguins

The Likeness begins in 2005, in Dublin, where detective Cassie Maddox is trying to find her balance after a major trauma on a previous case with the Dublin Murder Squad. Cassie gets a frantic call from her detective boyfriend, begging her to come out to a crime scene. A dog walker has discovered a girl’s dead body – sadly, nothing unusual about that. What is unusual, however, is the young woman looks exactly like Cassie. Not only do they look eerily similar, but it turns out the dead girl was living under an alias that Cassie had used in a previous case while working undercover. Read my full review of The Likeness here.

The Martian by Andy Weir

The Martian - Andy Weir - book laid on wooden table - Keeping Up With The Penguins

In the first chapter of The Martian, American astronaut Mark Watney finds himself abandoned on Mars. His crew had to take the drastic step of an emergency evacuation, six days into their month-long mission, due to a dust storm. Watney got blown off course en route to the shuttle, and – believing him to be dead – they left him behind. Whoops! Once everyone at NASA back on Earth figures out he’s alive, shit really hits the fan. But never fear: Watney is a (remarkably unflappable) botanist and engineer. Read my full review of The Martian here.

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

Everything I Never Told You - Celeste Ng - Keeping Up With The Penguins

Everything I Never Told You begins in 1977. The Lee family appears to be average in every way – working father, stay-at-home mother, three kids and a comfortable home in Ohio. Except that their middle child, Lydia, is dead… and they don’t know it, yet. That sounds like a spoiler, but it isn’t. It’s in the blurb, it’s in the first sentence, and Lydia’s body has been found by the end of the first chapter. Lydia’s death forces everyone in the Lee family to reevaluate their lives, and reveals some hard home truths. As an investigation plays out in the background, they realise they didn’t know Lydia – or each other – as well as they thought. Read my full review of Everything I Never Told You here.

My Sister, The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

My Sister The Serial Killer - Oyinkan Braithwaite - Keeping Up With The Penguins

My Sister, The Serial Killer gives you exactly what it says on the tin: the story of Korede and her sister, Ayoola, who has the unfortunate habit of killing her boyfriends. Korede is literally the person Ayoola calls to help her hide a body (c’mon, we’ve all got one). The story begins with Korede cleaning up the blood spatters of the third man that Ayoola has “dispatched”, and immediately you get the sense that this situation can’t continue indefinitely. Read my full review of My Sister, The Serial Killer here.

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

“You better not never tell nobody but God.” Chills, right? It’s a powerful start to the first chapter of a powerful book: Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. It sets the stage for a story told largely through letters to God, from a black woman named Celie. When she starts writing these letters, she is just fourteen years old, and yet she has already seen and experienced a lifetime’s worth of hardship. Read my full review of The Color Purple here.

My Husband – Maud Ventura

September 22, 2026 / Sheree / 0 Comments

Do you ever read a book that makes you feel good about your life and your relationships in an… unexpected way? That’s the experience I had reading My Husband, a surprising debut novel by Maud Ventura (translated into English from the original French by Emma Ramadan).

The narrator of My Husband is a wife, mother, part-time teacher, and freelance translator. She has been married for thirteen years, and she is still madly in love with her husband – to put it mildly.

Their family is wealthy, they live on “the nicest house in the street”, and they have no real problems or traumas to speak of (which makes this book somewhat unique for a psychodrama) – except that the narrator’s obsessive love for her husband is all-consuming.

It might sound nice from the outside, but the narrator’s infatuation is revealed to be borderline pathological (though its relationship to her frequent experiences of synesthesia is never made entirely clear). She observes her husband so closely that everything is magnified. Every passing compliment, and every slight (real or imagined), takes on outsize significance in her inner world. When he tells her he loves her in the middle of the night unprompted, she is in raptures. When he pulls his hand away from hers and doesn’t put it back, she is devastated. Her close scrutiny makes her entirely unreliable as a narrator. It’s impossible for readers of My Husband to determine whether her husband is kind, cruel, or… just a guy.

The narrator’s obsession with her husband bleeds into all other aspects of her life, too. She resents her children, because they detract from the time and energy she and her husband would devote solely to each other. She is suspicious of her female friends, lest they become the subjects of any extramarital desire on her husband’s part. Even a friendly waitress at a local restaurant can’t escape becoming the focus of the narrator’s paranoia.

Ventura waits until the very last moment to finally break the tension that has been building since the opening chapter. My Husband begins on a Sunday, with the titular husband quietly mentioning to the narrator that they need to talk later. The story then skips back to the preceding Monday. Over the course of the week, the possibilities of what he could possibly want to talk about expand like vistas on the page. Is it the other men that the narrator sleeps with to prove how much she loves her husband? Is it an apology for the unfortunate Clementine Incident at a dinner party with friends? Has he found the secret notebooks in which she scribbles his marital crimes and their associated punishments, or the one where she notes all the relationship tips she finds in Cosmo? Is he leaving her? The sudden reveal is quickly followed by an Epilogue that really twists the knife of this narrative (honestly, I wondered if the story might have been more interesting and pensive without it).

My Husband is a very French novel about the toxicity of ‘great love’, and what happens when infatuation grows unchecked. And I must say, it made me feel well-adjusted by comparison.

Read My Husband on audiobook via Libro.fm here. (affiliate link)