Hannah Drayton's only relief from her stifling husband was Thursday nights. A meeting with David, an assistant to a publisher, changed her life. Soon she began to think of him as her Thursday friend.

Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She has only one function: to breed. If she deviates, she will, like dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repressive state cannot obliterate desire - neither Offred's nor that of the two men on which her future hangs.

Hear from users of Islamic Tinder, a disenchanted Maulana working as a TV chat show host and a plastic surgeon blackmailed by MI6. Follow the career of an actress with Middle-Eastern heritage whose dreams of playing a ghostbuster spiral into repeat castings as a jihadi bride. Among stories of honour killings and ill-fated love in besieged locations, we also find heart-warming connections and powerful challenges to the status quo. From Algiers to Brighton,...

Organised by subject matter, and covering a wide range of topics from politics, work and war, to childhood, love and sexual passion. '800 Years of Women's Letter' reveals the depth, breadth and diversity of women's lives through the ages. Here Holoise writes to Abelad of her undying devotion, Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woofl correspond about life and writing, and Queen Victoria complains to Robert Peel about the neglect of Buckingham Palace....

Helen Garner has kept a diary for almost all her life. But until now, those exercise books filled with her thoughts, observations, frustrations and joys have been locked away, out of bounds, in a laundry cupboard. Finally, Garner has opened her diaries and invited readers into the world behind her novels and works of non-fiction. Yellow Notebook: Diaries Volume I spans a decade beginning in the late 1970s just after the publication of her first novel,...

At once the disturbing, ultimately consoling story of one family's loss and a searing portrait of life at the dawn of the 21st century, 'Unless' is a daring novel from the master of extraordinary fictions about so-called 'ordinary' lives.

Once We Were Sisters is the story of Maxine and Sheila Kohler. Growing up in the suffocating gentility of 1950s South Africa, the girls plan grand lives for themselves that will bring them out of the long shadow cast by their father's death and their overbearing mother's bullying. Maxine is just shy of her 40th birthday when her husband, a brilliant and respected surgeon, drives their car off the road and kills her. Devastated, Sheila returns to...