#Vote100Books: 7 novels by women that deserve your attention

24 May 2018

To mark 100 years since some women in Britain first got the vote, the Hay Festival has assembled a public-voted list of 100 books written by women in the past century. As the list is revealed, BBC Arts spotlights seven titles that deserve to be on everyone's reading list.

Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel opens in Ghana in the 18th Century with two half sisters whose lives diverge down very different paths: Effia is married to a slave trader, while Esi is sold into slavery and transported from West Africa to America.

The ambitious novel travels from the Gold Coast to the slave plantations of Mississippi and the dive bars of Harlem, introducing a new descendant with each chapter. The consequences of the sisters’ fates resonates throughout the bloodline right up to the present day.

Homegoing's title comes from the belief that death allowed an enslaved person’s spirit to travel back to Africa. The book scrutinises the role of West Africa in the slave trade, exploring the trans-Atlantic legacy of those who were taken and those who remained.

Le Guin is described by Penguin as the “queen of science fiction”. Her 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness is set on Winter, a frozen planet populated by genderless beings. Its occupants live in brutally harsh conditions, and take on male or female characteristics once a month when they are in heat. Anyone can become pregnant.

The novel combines science fiction with a classic journey narrative, exploring isolation and exile as two individuals, male visitor from Earth Genly Ai and Winter occupant Estravan, undertake a painfully slow 800-mile journey across the frozen landscape.

Le Guin called Darkness a “thought experiment” in sexual politics. It was the first book written by a female author to win Best Novel at the Hugo Awards, the prestigious literary awards for science fiction.

Leïla Slimani’s Lullaby, translated from the French by Sam Taylor, is an unflinching psychological thriller about a professional couple who hire a (seemingly perfect) nanny to look after their two young children and manage their home.

Infanticide takes place in the shocking opening paragraphs, before the book flashes back to the events leading up to the crime. It interrogates moral, social and economic deprivation in Paris and explores society's attitudes to motherhood and identity.

Leïla Slimani knew her book would invite controversy, stating that she was tackling two taboos: child murder and the place of the mother today. In 1916 it won the Prix Goncourt, a French literary prize awarded to the author of "the best and most imaginative prose work of the year".

Persepolis is an autobiography depicting Marjane Satrapi’s childhood in Iran. Satrapi experienced the overthrow of the Shah’s regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution and the brutal effects of the Iran-Iraq War, all in less than a decade.

The graphic novel blends the personal – her family history, her experiences of changing to a gender-segregated school and wearing a veil – with the wider political issues of her homeland, told using simple and stark black and white images.

Drawing on her life in Tehran from age six until she turned 14, Persepolis offers a child’s perspective of living through war, religious upheaval and revolution. It sets out to both challenge the Western view of modern Iran and to represent the Iranians who suffered under various repressive regimes.

Strangers on a Train is a novel often eclipsed by its silver screen adaption, Alfred Hitchcock’s highly successful film of the same name. Highsmith’s debut novel is the story of two men, Guy Haines and Charles Bruno, who meet by chance. Bruno suggests an extreme solution to his travel companion’s relationship problem – he will murder Haines' wife, if he returns the favour and murders Bruno's father.

When his wife is discovered dead, Haines knows Bruno is the guilty party. The pair become locked in a thrilling game of cat-and-mouse as Bruno insists that Haines upholds his part of the bargain. Highsmith creates a dark, shocking and suspenseful work of noir fiction that artfully displays a fascination with the evil lurking behind the mundane.

Wide Sargasso Sea is a prequel and response to a novel often itself found on lists of great works, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Rhys explores the story of Mr Rochester’s first wife, Bertha, referred to in Brontë’s classic as “the madwoman in the attic”.

The book humanises Bertha (whose real name, Antoinette, is changed by the unnamed Mr Rochester) and gives voice to her experience of life in the West Indies and her forced marriage to the Englishman, in a time and space where patriarchal laws made her and the women around her entirely dependent on men.

The novel draws attention to the colonialism and slave trade by which both Mr Rochester and Antoinette became wealthy, and explores the tensions of race, colour and status in 1830s Jamaica. It is scattered with foreboding as to the fate that awaits Antoinette in England at the hands of a husband who exploits her physically, emotionally and psychologically.

Wild Swans is an epic family memoir that tracks the staggeringly different lives of three generations of women living in a rapidly changing China.

Jung Chang’s grandmother, when still a teenager, was given as a concubine to a warlord General. Her mother, daughter of the warlord, was active in the communist movement during the Chinese Civil War and became, along with her husband, a high-ranking official in the Communist Party. Chang herself grew up in the privileged circles of China’s Communist elite but experienced the horrors of the Cultural Revolution first hand when her parents were denounced and she was exiled.

Wild Swans uses the personal stories of one family to vividly illustrate the social and political turmoil of a country. It has been translated into 40 languages but remains banned in China.