Ruth Rendell. Aka Baroness Rendell of Babergh. How many crime writers are there good enough they got a baronetcy for it? Not too damn many. She also writes under a pseudonym, Barbara Vine. She’s known for the Inspector Wexford series, and for many one-offs that feature crazy people. Psychopaths and sociopaths. She’s known for her sharp insight into human (and inhuman) nature, and writes crazy people really, really well. A Judgement in Stone? Brrr. A Demon in My View? Brrr. Tree of Hands? Very uncomfortable look at mothers and daughters.
Anita and Kiran Desai. Anita Desai was born in India to a German mother and a Bengali father. So far she has written nearly two dozen books, and won many awards for them. She currently teaches humanities at MIT. Her daughter Kiran Desai is getting nicely started as a writer, having won a National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award and a Man-Booker Award.
P.D. James. Looky here, another life baronetcy! Baroness James of Holland Park, OBE, FRSA, FRSL. Must look very impressive on her business cards. Adam Dalgliesh is her series detective. You might have heard of one of her one-off novels: Children of Men. Yes, that Children of Men.
Anna Funder. Someone new. An Australian, born in 1966. Her first book, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, was released in 2003 and won a big award. Of the Stasi, the secret police, she says: “Its job was to know everything about everyone, using any means it chose. It knew who your visitors were, it knew whom you telephoned, and it knew if your wife slept around.” Her first novel, All That I Am, will be released early in 2012, and has already won contracts to be published in 16 countries. Based on real events, it follows two young women who work with the resistance in Berlin-within-the-wall.
Mary Roach. A writer who covers a fascinating range of topics. Originally a freelance reporter, she now mostly writes book-length non-fiction. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife. Her website http://www.maryroach.net/ is hilarious, but watch out for the cockroach (heh) (get it?). She is a tireless science populariser, both through her books and the articles she still writes, and wins awards for.
Barbara Tuchman. Often on the receiving end of snippiness from ‘real’ historians, Tuchman was a very real historian who chose to write as a populariser, so, yay her. Perhaps best known for The Guns of August, about the run-up to WWI, I remember her most fondly for The March of Folly, a title that crosses my mind often. It’s about the never-ending gobsmackin’ folly of governments through the ages and across the planet.
Betty Friedan. Because of, duh, her work in women’s rights. The Feminine Mystique, her first book, helped nail down the second-wave feminist movement and begin to shape its definition. She worked for abortion rights, and had to cancel two speaking engagements due to death threats.
Joan Didion. Slouching Towards Bethlehem took a warts-and-all look at California in the 60s, pushing the flowers aside to show what life was really like in the Haight. The book is still in print after 43 years, which is no mean feat. This is one brave woman. The Year of Magical Thinking (2007) tells of her husband’s sudden death in 2003 from a massive heart attack. Blue Nights (to be released 1 November this year) addresses her daughter’s long illness and eventual death in 2005.
Jo Beverley. She writes historical fiction, aka bodice-rippers. Not just any bodice-rippers, though. Her books are edgy, just barely fitting into the genre boundaries. Looking for a guilty pleasure with bite, and a lot of naughty business? Here y’go. An Unwilling Bride and My Lady Notorious are only two of her titles you can chose from, and get hooked on.
Lisa Randall. Another populariser. This time she’s a leading particle physicist and cosmologist. Her latest title is Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World. The New York Times reviewed it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/books/review/knocking-on-heavens-door-by-lisa-randall-book-review.html?_r=1&ref=books. Before that she wrote Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions, of which Publishers Weekly said, “Randall brings much of the excitement of her field to life as she describes her quest to understand the structure of the universe.” Go. Read. It’s good for your brains.
