Out now in paperback

HOW WAS IT FOR YOU? by Virginia Nicholson

(Penguin £9.99, 512 pp) A PHOTOGRAPH in this book shows a grimfaced, elderly woman setting fire to a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover outside an Edinburgh bookshop.

A later image captures gleeful young women in 1968, flinging their bras into a bin. The pictures sum up the social revolution that began with the Lady Chatterley obscenity trial in 1960 and concluded with the rise of the Women’s Liberation Movement.

In a decade, women’s lives changed beyond recognition. Hard-won rights that we now take for granted — contraception, divorce, equal pay — ushered in a brave new world, which came laced with hedonism.

Music, love, fashion, drugs — a psychedelic array of new experiences was on offer. Drawing on interviews with women who grew up in the 1960s, Virginia Nicholson chronicles the decade in a vivid and moving account of an era of radical change.

ADVENTURES OF THE YORKSHIRE SHEPHERDESS by Amanda Owen

(Pan £8.99, 320 pp) WITH one husband, nine children, 1,000 sheep, assorted dogs, horses, hens and cows, and a busy media career, Amanda Owen would seem not to have a single spare moment.

But the latest instalment of her life as a Swaledale sheep farmer finds Amanda and her husband, Clive, undertaking the renovation of a rundown farmhouse near their tenant farm of Ravenseat.

When Amanda discovers she is five months pregnant, Clive concedes that she shouldn’t go up a stepladder to paint the ceilings: ‘Thee do t’skirting boards instead,’ he suggests.

Nancy is born in an ambulance on the way to hospital, but Amanda remains unstoppable, recording the ingenuity of her son who repurposed one of her bras to repair a bird’s nest.

With its fizzing energy and celebration of nature and community, this is perfect comfort reading for uncertain times.

WHERE THE HORNBEAM GROWS by Beth Lynch

(W&N £8.99, 288 pp) WHEN Beth Lynch’s husband took a job in Switzerland, life changed at bewildering speed.

Since childhood, her sense of home had been entwined with gardens, but now she was moving to a gardenless flat in Zurich, where the locals proved churlish and the list of rules was forbidding. A supermarket employee once screamed at her for putting her milk carton in the wrong recycling bin.

A move to a cottage with a garden in the picturesquely wooded Jura region promised hope. But while the garden flourished, there too the neighbours were unfriendly and the sense of being truly at home was elusive.

A lyrical celebration of growing and belonging, this is a thoughtful meditation on the importance of putting down roots.