Muslim women tell stories of rights, abuse, love and loss

 

Mint condition. PB. 402pp. Booktopia are selling this for $27.50 plus postage. Our special price including postage to anywhere in Australia is $25.

SOLD Indian women tell their stories of violence and love

 

SOLD

Rare book. Mint condition (apart from visible scratch on cover). PB. 272pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

India is one of the most dangerous places on the planet to be a woman – or so the international press keeps telling us. But behind the headlines, what is it really like to be a woman in India today?

Walk in the shoes of some of India’s finest women writers, and go on a journey into their intimate lives in Walking Towards Ourselves. From the film sets of Bollywood to a closeted marital home in a Tamil Nadu village; from the slick boardroom of an online dating app to a makeshift bamboo house in the post-cyclone Sundarbans; from a beauty parlour where skin bleaching is the norm, to a home for abandoned girls in Karnataka, walk with them.

Walk with them as they report from Mumbai’s streets alone at night, as they grapple with domestic violence, as they search for love through marriage brokers, as they learn to speak their minds, as they lay claim to their bodies, as they choose to be partnered or not, to become mothers or not, to make art, to make love, to make meaning of their lives.

Reaching across different strata of society, religion and language, this anthology creates a kaleidoscope of distinct and varied real-life stories. Told with startling honesty, piercing insight, moments of poetry, and flashes of humour, Walking Towards Ourselves explores what it means to be a woman in India in a time of intense and incredible change.

SOLD Memoir of a young woman from Somalia

 

SOLD

Mint condition. HB. 368pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

This is the extraordinary first-person account of a young woman's coming of age in Somalia and her struggles against the obligations and strictures of family and society.  

By the time she is nine, Aman has undergone a ritual circumcision ceremony; at eleven, her innocent romance with a white boy leads to a murder; at thirteen she is given away in an arranged marriage to a stranger.  

Aman eventually runs away to Mogadishu, where her beauty and rebellious spirit leads her to the decadent demimonde of white colonialists.  

Hers is a world in which women are both chattel and freewheeling entrepreneurs, subject to the caprices of male relatives, yet keenly aware of the loopholes that lead to freedom.  

Aman is an astonishing history, opening a window onto traditional Somali life and the universal quest for female self-awareness.

SOLD A Saudi woman gets behind the wheel to take on patriarchy

 

SOLD

PB. 295pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia. One more copy.

Manal al-Sharif was born in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. As a young girl she would burn her brother's boy band CDs in the oven because music was haram: forbidden by certain interpretations of Islamic law.

By her twenties she was a computer security engineer. But as she became older, the unequal way in which women are treated became too much to bear: she was branded a slut for talking to male colleagues at work; her school-age brother had to chaperone her on business trips and, while she kept a car in her garage, she was forbidden from driving down Saudi streets.

Her personal rebellion began the day she got behind the wheel of a car: an act that ultimately led to her arrest and imprisonment. Manal's Women2Drive campaign inspired other women to take action. Manal has been lauded by the Oslo Freedom Forum, described by Time Magazine as one of the most 100 most influential people in the world, and she was awarded the Vaclav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent.

Daring to Drive is an account of Manal al-Sharif's fight for equality in an unequal society. A visceral coming-of-age tale, it is also a celebration of resilience, the power of education and the strength of female solidarity in the face of hardship.

SOLD A feminist novel/memoir from Egypt

 

SOLD

Excellent condition. PB. 101pp. $18 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Rebelling against the constraints of family and society, a young Egyptian woman decides to study medicine, becoming the only woman in a class of men. 

Her encounters with the other students - as well as with male and female corpses in the autopsy room - intensify her search for identity. 

She realises that men are not gods, as her mother had taught her, that science cannot explain everything, and that she cannot be satisfied by living a life purely of the mind. 

After a brief and unhappy marriage, she throws herself into her work, becoming a successful and wealthy doctor. 

But at the same time, she becomes more aware of the injustice and hypocrisy in society. She comes to find fulfilment, not in isolation, but through her relationship with others.

Helen Reddy on Helen Reddy

 

Excellent condition. PB. 358pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

With her song ‘IAm Woman', Helen Reddy provided the feminist anthem of the 1970s. In this highly anticipated memoir, Helen reveals that she is much more than the entertainer who first graced the stage at the age of four.

Helen Reddy became the first Australian to win a Grammy, to have her own prime-time variety show on a US television network and to have three number-one hit singles in the same year. then, at the height of her career, Helen's world was shattered by the death of both her parents and also the news that she had a rare, incurable disease.

In this riveting, frank and ultimately brave memoir, Helen reveals the emotional highs and lows that have shaped her as an artist and as a complex woman with a rich inner life sustained by a strong spiritual faith.

SOLD Biography of a great Egyptian feminist

 

SOLD

Mint condition. PB. 304pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Walking through Fire: The Later Years of Nawal El Saadawi, In Her Own Words by Nawal El Saadawi

'Words should not seek to please, to hide the wounds in our bodies, or the shameful moments in our lives. They may hurt, give us pain, but they can also provoke us to question what we have accepted for thousands of years.'

Nawal El Saadawi is one of the greatest writers to come out of the Arab world. Born in a small Egyptian village in 1931, her life and writings have shown an extraordinary strength of character and a unique ability to create new worlds in the fight against oppression. Saadawi has been pilloried, censored, imprisoned and exiled for her refusal to accept the oppression imposed on women by gender and class. Still, she continues to write.

In A Daughter of Isis, Nawal El Saadawi painted a beautifully textured portrait of the childhood that moulded her into a novelist and fearless campaigner for freedom and the rights of women. Walking through Fire takes up the story of her extraordinary life. We read about her as a rural doctor, trying to help a young girl escape from a terrible fate imposed on her by a brutal male tyranny. We learn about her activism for female empowerment and the authorities that try to obstruct her. We travel with her into exile after her name is put on a fundamentalist death list. We witness her three marriages, each offering in their way love, companionship and shared struggle. And we gain an unprecedented insight into this most wonderful of creative minds.

'Stormy and vivid, characterized by great intellectual and emotional restlessness ... It seems certain that without powerful self-belief and faith in her own instincts, she would not have survived.'
Times Literary Supplement

'I think her life has been one long death threat. At a time when nobody else was talking, she spoke the unspeakable.'
Margaret Atwood, BBC Imagine

'This is what great art does. It closes the great chasms between us. With words, Saadawi peels away the artifice to reveal the beating heart beneath the surface. We come away from this book as we do from all her others, amazed at her cool courage, profound insight, and deep passion. Without her brave work an entire country would not be fully known.'
Rebecca Walker

'A moving repudiation of those who have made Egypt's history in the last century'
Washington Post Book World

'El Saadawi's poetic prose and searing details keep the pages alive with stories of triumph, dissent, death and disappointment'
San Francisco Chronicle

'Her honesty, strength, courage, and accomplishments are admirable and inspiring'
Library Journal

Nawal El Saadawi is an internationally renowned writer, novelist and fighter for women's rights both within Egypt and abroad. She holds honorary doctorates from, among others, the universities of York, Illinois at Chicago, St Andrews and Tromso as well as Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. Her many prizes and awards include the Premi Internacional Catalunya in 2003, the Council of Europe North-South Prize in 2004, the Women of the Year Award (UK) in 2011, the Sean MacBride Peace Prize (Ireland) in 2012, and the French National Order of Merit in 2013. Her books have been translated into over forty languages worldwide. They are taught in universities across the world.