BOOK OF THE WEEK

FROM the bestselling author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry this centres on an expedition to find the golden beetle of New Caledonia.

Set in the stultified 1950s, Miss Benson’s Beetle considers female friendship in the unlikeliest of situations. Miss Benson, a frumpy, middle-aged domestic science teacher hiding a lifetime’s worth of emotional scars from herself, is provoked into reviving a childhood dream, to find the golden beetle.

She advertises for an assistant and Enid Pretty steps up. They have nothing in common, but through a series of adventures, a redemptive bond is created. However, danger is never far away and to survive, they must find their best selves.

While a little uneven in tone, you’ll find yourself willing the pair to succeed, escape the chains of their previous lives, and find their true self worth.

THE PULL OF THE STARS by Emma Donoghue, published by Picador, £16.99 (ebook £8.99) ★★★★★

EMMA DONOGHUE wrote this startling novel before coronavirus – but it is so prescient. The Pull Of The Stars takes place across three days in 1918, where on a makeshift, understaffed maternity ward in Dublin, Nurse Julia Power is supporting women through labour, while Spanish Flu goes about its insidious, fatal work.

Eerie comparisons with Covid aside, Julia’s observations on the

MY DARLING FROM THE LIONS

by Rachel Long, Picador, £10.99 (ebook £4.99). Available August 6 ★★★★★

THE debut collection from poet Rachel Long. Founder of the Octavia Poetry Collective for Womxn of Colour, Long focuses on women’s experiences, race and heritage, all intertwined in the recurring motif of hair and wigs, used in the title of one of the odds pregnant women in poverty face, and the havoc wreaked on their bodies from having too many children, too young, is devastating and fascinating.

She deftly weaves together politics, policy, war, feminism, violence and the minutiae of bed pans and sterilising instruments, while dealing with dismissive male doctors and birthing babies. A powerful, persistent, highly detailed and incredibly moving book that speaks through time. Donoghue is a marvel of a writer.

collection’s three sections – A Lineage of Wigs.

The collection also covers relationships, religion, family and school. Long’s use of dialect is one of her strongest points (“Gross, init, but I weren’t about to say no to 300 quid”), while one of the most effective poems, 8, uses form to indicate a skipping and speeding memory of abuse. by Eugenia Cheng, Profile Books, £16.99 (ebook £6.17) ★★★★★ THIS book temporarily removes gender from the equation, thus sidestepping gender-based discrimination.

It is useful in shifting the debate in a way that allows a comparison of characteristics associated with male or female, while avoiding the need to constantly qualify any statements with ‘not all women’ or ‘not all men’. As the author states, this is a re-framing of the debate, inspired by category theory.

Her major shift is in creating the terms ‘congressive’ and ‘ingressive’ as shorthand for traits that might roughly be summarised as ‘caring and sharing’, as opposed to ‘competitive and individualistic’.

In the end, Chen’s solutions seem to rely on individuals without power being more assertive, and those with it, acting in more inclusive ways; rather than on any structural change.