Monsters reveal how societies define and punish deviance. Wintering’s widows make me think about the women I know who are strong and wise in ways neither recognised nor endorsed by the mainstream.
Alexander Howard stumbled on spymaster John Le Carré soon after relishing a James Bond film. And he was instantly hooked on George Smiley, Le Carré’s unglamorous bureaucrat-detective – an unlikely hero.
Maggie O Farrell’s homage to The Yellow Wallpaper inhabits a ‘difficult’ young woman who survives tragedy in colonial India and is incarcerated by her family for refusing gender and social norms.