A challenging story of women’s struggle for equality.
When 16-year-old Lizzie Parsons starts to meet women involved in the suffragist cause, she has no idea of the dramatic changes that lie ahead. As the women’s rights campaign fights on, Lizzie must also face her own personal battle with a violent, abusive father.
Beautifully judged and sensitively written, this is a novel that speaks powerfully to a contemporary readership by placing domestic and sexual abuse, an issue as relevant now as in 1912, at the heart of the story. As Lizzie begins to realise, it is both deeds and words that will win for women.
Bernard Ashley’s great gift is to turn what seems to be low-key realism
into something much stronger and more resonant. It has something to
do with empathy, compassion, an undimmed thirst for democracy and justice
— Philip Pullman