Mary's Feminist Fiction Reading Group

Welcome to the wonderful Feminist Fiction Reading Group! A place to discover and enjoy a range of titles and themes lovingly hand picked by Mary. Woven together by feminist perspectives and critique, we will be discussing everything from unsung classics to contemporary literary fiction.

Our book for March is Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq. Haunting, brooding, exhilarating, and tender all at once, this scintillating debut explores the grittiest features of a small Arctic town and the electrifying proximity of the worlds of animals and of myth. Longlisted for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize and Winner of the 2019 Indigenous Voices Award for Published Prose in English, this will be a fascinating read and discussion.

Fact can be as strange as fiction. It can also be as dark, as violent, as rapturous. In the end, there may be no difference between them. An Inuk girl grows up in Nunavut, Canada, in the 1970s. She knows joy, and friendship, and parents' love. She knows boredom, and listlessness, and bullying. She knows the tedium of the everyday world, and the raw, amoral power of the ice and sky, the seductive energy of the animal world. When she becomes pregnant, she must navigate all this.

‘Tagaq’s surreal meld of poetry and prose transmutes the Arctic’s boundless beauty, intensity, and desolation into a wrenching contemporary mythology.’ The New Yorker

There’s no need to prepare or pressure to contribute at all - just bring your lovely self - but do feel free to mention a particular passage or character that you enjoyed during your reading.

Each entry place costs £5, fully redeemable as a voucher towards a copy of the book. We hope you’ll join us for some great conversation, and perhaps some themed baked goods!