Girton College Gift Ideas for Book Lovers (2024)

Looking for a gift this festive season? Then look no further! We have compiled a list of fantastic books suitable for a broader audience, written by our very own Girton Fellows and Alumni!

Peter Abrahams, Clinical Atlas of Human Anatomy

This standard textbook / atlas of the entire human body is used by medical students, physiotherapists,surgeons and all health science students worldwide who study anatomy . Its special feature is that there are linkages in radiology and clinical medicine to over 500 cases of real patients with photgraphy showing pathology radiology and disease processes thus reinforcing the close link of anatomical science to the clinical world of medicine.

• Order via Amazon: Clinical Atlas of Human Anatomy c.£20

Carol Adlam, The Russian Detective

In this stunning reimagining of a nineteenth-century Russian crime thriller from the world of Dostoevsky, Carol Adlam presents Charlie Fox, stunt journalist, magician, liar and thief, who reluctantly returns to her hometown of Nowheregrad to investigate the murder of Elena Ruslanova, daughter of a fabulously wealthy glass manufacturer. 

In Nowheregrad Charlie finds herself caught up in a multi-layered story that is told through the richly varied visual devices of the time. With the unwitting assistance of her lover, Netochka, Charlie unravels the mystery of the Bobrov family, only to face the truth about herself. Exquisitely drawn and compellingly told, Adlam's complex, elegant narrative brings to life the lost legacies of early crime fiction and the first women journalists and detectives.

• Order via Penguin Books: The Russian Detective c.£20

Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam

A classic, pioneering account of the lives of women in Islamic history, republished for a new generation This pioneering study of the social and political lives of Muslim women has shaped a whole generation of scholarship. In it, Leila Ahmed explores the historical roots of contemporary debates, ambitiously surveying Islamic discourse on women from Arabia during the period in which Islam was founded to Iraq during the classical age to Egypt during the modern era. 

The book was reissued in 2021 as a Veritas paperback, with a new foreword by Kecia Ali situating the text in its scholarly context and explaining its enduring influence.

• Order via Yale University Press London: Women and Gender in Islam c.£16

Professor Anthony Bale, A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages

A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages: the World through Medieval Eyes (Penguin) takes the reader on a tour of the world as it was understood through medieval writers, travellers, pilgrims, spies, merchants, and missionaries. Anthony Bale is Professorial Fellow in English at Girton and Professor of Medieval & Renaissance English (1954) in the University of Cambridge. A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages was selected by Waterstones as one of the Best Paperbacks of 2024.

• Order via Bookshop: A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages c.£10

The Reverend Dr Charlie Bell, Unity

For years, there has been talk of the importance of unity without a clear theological narrative to underpin this, leading to competing claims of what this unity is for or defined by, and challenges posed to its possibility or desirability as a polity and as a theological idea. This book is a timely theological exploration of the concept of unity in the context of divisions, frictions, frustrations and arguments both within the Church of England, and the wider Anglican Communion. Resisting the urge to merely provide a cut-and-dry definition of unity, author Charlie Bell teases out the theological currents that run in this stream of thought, and ensure that we are refining our thinking, and doing justice to a topic that may appear to contain many opposing and contradictory elements. That unity is a call of Christ to His church is not in doubt – what that unity might look like in the reality of today’s ecclesial and cultural landscape is the question that this book seeks to answer.

• Order via SCM Press: Unity c.£20

Dr Matt Bothwell, The Invisible Universe (Why There's More to Reality than Meets the Eye)

Since the dawn of our species, people all over the world have gazed in awe at the night sky. But for all the beauty and wonder of the stars, when we look with just our eyes we are seeing and appreciating only a tiny fraction of the Universe. This book is a guide to the ninety-nine per cent of cosmic reality we can’t see – the Universe that is hidden, right in front of our eyes. It is also the endpoint of a scientific detective story thousands of years in the telling. It is a tour through our Invisible Universe.

• Order via Oneworld Publications: The Invisible Universe c.£11

For children: Astrophysics for Supervillains

Learn how to destroy the universe with the power of astrophysics in this fun and factual space book for kids. "Could you crash the Moon into the Earth? If the Sun explodes, would we all get vaporised? What’s the weather like on Mercury?” Discover the answers to these questions and many more at the Supervillain Academy: the magnificently morbid school for young villains in training. A factual and full-of-fun astronomy book for young big thinkers and budding scientists.

• Order via DK Books: Astrophysics for Supervillains c.£8

Juliet Campbell CMG, Playing Britannia: How I Became Her Excellency

Juliet's lively memoir draws on diaries and letters to her parents, which are full of observation, analysis and colourful – often comic – detail. A picture emerges of a woman focussed not only on her career, but on friends, family and the people among whom she found herself, and of a life of hard work leavened with a great deal of fun.

Professor Dame Athene Donald, Not Just for the Boys

Not Just For the Boys looks back at how society has historically excluded women from the scientific sphere and discourse, what progress has been made, and how more is still needed. Athene Donald, herself a distinguished physicist, explores societal expectations during both childhood and working life using evidence of the systemic disadvantages women operate under, from the developing science of how our brains are--and more importantly aren't--gendered, to social science evidence around attitudes towards girls and women doing science.

• Order via Amazon: Not Just for the Boys c.£14

Dr Seb Falk, The Light Ages

An illuminating guide to the scientific and technological achievements of the Middle Ages through the life of a crusading astronomer-monk. It was a Book of the Year in The Times, Daily Telegraph, TLS, BBC History Magazine and Tablet. The Times called it “As fascinating as it is exquisitely written.” “unambiguously and successfully an antidote to the cliché of the ‘Dark Ages’” said Literary Review.
 

• Order via Bookshop: The Light Ages c.£13

The Hon. Julia Gillard AC, My Story

Here, in her own words, Julia Gillard reveals what life was really like as Australia’s first female prime minister. "I was prime minister for three years and three days. Three years and three days of resilience. Three years and three days of changing the nation. Three years and three days for you to judge."

The Evening Standard said "[This] should be required reading for anyone who says feminism’s work is done."

• Order via Penguin Books: My Story c.£13

The Reverend Dr Malcolm Guite, Sounding Heaven and Earth

The back page column of the Church Times, famously occupied for many years by Ronald Blythe, continues to be a breath of fresh air in the hands of poet and priest Malcolm Guite.

His acute observations of the local, the everyday, moments of conversation and life’s simple pleasures are doorways into a bigger reality of a world suffused with the meaning and beauty that lies beneath surface appearances.

His lucid, perceptive and imaginative musings follow a similar pattern to the sonnets for which he is so renowned. In his own words, he treats these 500 word essays ‘a little in the spirit of the sonnet, with a sense of development, of a ‘turn’ or volta part way through, and a sense that the end revisits and re-reads the opening’.

These draw together everyday events and encounters, landscape, journeys, poetry, stories, memory and a sense of the sacred, and fuses them to create richly satisfying portraits of the familiar that at the same time opens the way to an enchanted world.

• Order via Canterbury Press: Sounding Heaven and Earth c.£11

The Rt Hon. The Baroness Hale of Richmond, Spiderwoman

Wise, warm and inspiring, Spider Woman shows how the law shapes our world and supports us in crisis. It is the story of how Lady Hale found that she could overcome the odds, which shows that anyone from similar beginnings will find that they can cope too.

As President of the Supreme Court, Lady Hale won global attention in finding the 2019 prorogation of Parliament to be unlawful. Yet that dramatic moment was merely the pinnacle of a career throughout which she was hailed as a pioneering reformer.

• Order via Penguin Books: Spiderwoman c.£11

Professor John Hendry, Emily Davies and the Mid-Victorian Women's Movement

In the liberal 1860s a rapidly growing women’s movement captured the imagination of England. They campaigned for the vote, for property rights, for girls’ schools and for admission to the universities and professions. At the centre of everything, including the creation of Girton College, was Emily Davies. This book uses her life and experience as a window into the growth and evolution of the movement.

• Order via Blackwells: Emily Davies and the Mid-Victorian Movement c.£33

Seán Hewitt, Rapture's Road

In this remarkable second collection, Seán Hewitt describes a journey haunted by love, loss and estrangement - from one of the Sunday Times 30 under 30 in Ireland. 

As the mind wanders and becomes spectral, these poems forge their own unique path through the landscape. The road Hewitt takes us on is a sleepwalk into the nightwoods, a dream-state where nature is by turns regenerated and broken, and where the split self of the speaker is interrupted by a series of ghosts, memories and encounters. 

Following the reciprocal relationship between queer sexuality and the natural world that he explored in Tongues of Fire, the poet conjures us here into a trance: a deep delirium of hypnotic, hectic rapture where everything is called into question, until a union is finally achieved – a union in nature, with nature. 

A threnody for what is lost, a dance of apocalypse and rebirth, Rapture’s Road draws us through what is hidden, secret, often forbidden, to a state of ecstasy. It leads into the humid night, through lethal love and grief, and glimpses, at the end of the journey, a place of tenderness and reawakening.

• Order via Penguin Books: Rapture's Road c.£13

Wendy Holden, The Princess

The moving new novel about the young Diana. Diana believes in love. Growing up amid the fallout of her parents' bitter divorce, she takes refuge in romantic novels. She dreams of being rescued by a handsome prince. Prince Charles loves his freedom. He's in no rush to wed, but his family have other ideas. Charles must marry for the future of the Crown. The right girl needs to be found, and fast. She must be young, aristocratic and free of past liaisons. The teenage Diana Spencer is just about the only candidate. Her desperation to be loved dovetails with royal desperation for a bride. But the route to the altar is full of hidden obstacles and people with their own agendas. When she steps from the golden carriage on her wedding day, has Diana's romantic dream come true? Or is it already over?

• Order via Wendy Holden | The Princess c.£15

Sir Stephen Hough, Enough

Stephen Hough is indisputably one of the world’s leading pianists, winning global acclaim and numerous awards. 

Enough recounts his unconventional coming-of-age story, from his beginnings in an unmusical home in Cheshire to the main stage of the Carnegie Hall in New York, aged just twenty-one. 

‘Hough writes like a dream, with an almost Alan Bennett-like eye and ear for the sights and sounds of childhood.’ Dan Cairns, Sunday Times 

‘A memoir that is by turn audacious, harrowing, joyous, moving and funny . . . Hough [has a] brilliant ear for language, for rhythm, for silence.’ Harriet Smith, Gramophone ‘

An endearingly humorous, entrancingly lyrical writer.’ Peter Conrad, Observer 

‘Most memoirs give me far more than I want to know – this is the rare sort that left me urgently demanding a second volume, a third, a fourth. I loved it.’ Philip Pullman

• Order via Faber: Enough c.£11

Liliana Janik, The Archaeology of Seeing: Science and Interpretation, the Past and Contemporary Visual Art

The Archaeology of Seeing provides readers with a new and provocative understanding of material culture through exploring visual narratives captured in cave and rock art, sculpture, paintings, and more. 

The engaging argument draws on current thinking in archaeology, on how we can interpret the behaviour of people in the past through their use of material culture, and how this affects our understanding of how we create and see art in the present. Exploring themes of gender, identity, and story-telling in visual material culture, this book forces a radical reassessment of how the ability to see makes us and our ancestors human; as such, it will interest lovers of both art and archaeology. 

Illustrated with examples from around the world, from the earliest art from hundreds of thousands of years ago, to the contemporary art scene, including street art and advertising, Janik cogently argues that the human capacity for art, which we share with our most ancient ancestors and cousins, is rooted in our common neurophysiology. The ways in which our brains allow us to see is a common heritage that shapes the creative process; what changes, according to time and place, are the cultural contexts in which art is produced and consumed. The book argues for an innovative understanding of art through the interplay between the way the human brain works and the culturally specific creation and interpretation of meaning, making an important contribution to the debate on art/archaeology.

Order via Amazon: The Archaeology of Seeing c.£36

Amy Jeffs, Saints

A mesmerising volume from the Waterstones Book of the Year nominated author of Storyland, Saints delves deep into the history of Britain's past through the tales that captured the medieval imagination. 

A sweeping new legendary of miracles, magic, human frailty and heroic strength. Illustrated with over thirty original paper cutouts by the author. 

Saints’ legends suffused medieval European culture. Their heroes’ suffering and wonderworking shaped landscapes, rituals and folk beliefs. Their tales spoke of men raised by wolves, women communing with flocks of birds and severed heads calling from between bristling paws. 

In Saints, Amy Jeffs retells legends born of the medieval cult of saints. She draws on ‘official’ lives, vernacular romances, artworks and obscene poetry, all spanning from the fourth to the sixteenth centuries. The legends’ heroes originate from as far east as Turkey and North Africa and as far west as Britain and Ireland. Saints includes such enduring super saints as Brigid, George, Patrick and Michael, as well as some whose legends are less well known (Scoithín, Euphrosyne and Ia) or else couched in prejudice (William of Norwich). 

The commentaries following the stories offer a history of each saint and, together, map onto the passing year: from St Mungo in January to St Thomas Becket in December. 

Jeffs guides her readers from images high on the walls of medieval churches, through surviving treasures of the elite and into the shifting silt of the Thames, where lie the lowly image-bearing badges once treasured by pilgrims. She opens manuscripts that hold wondrous stories of the lives and deaths of wayfaring monks, oak-felling missionaries and mighty martyrs. With tales of demons and dragons, with the stubborn skull of a giant, with stories of sleepers in a concealed Greek cave, Saints will show that these legends should be placed alongside myth, folklore and fairytale as a heritage belonging to us all.

• Order via Waterstones: Saints: A New legendary of heroes, humans and magic c.£26

Dr Arik Kershenbaum, Why Animals Talk

Why Animals Talk is a scientific journey through the untamed world of animal communication. From the majestic howls of wolves and the enchanting chatter of parrots to the melodic clicks of dolphins and the spirited grunts of chimpanzees, these diverse and seemingly bizarre expressions are far from mere noise. In fact, they hold secrets that we are just beginning to decipher. 

For example, wolves – just like humans – possess unique accents that distinguish their howls; gibbons have different alarm-calls for leopards and snakes, and sing romantic duets with their partners; and dolphins not only give themselves names but respond excitedly to recordings of the whistles of long-lost companions. 

Chapter by chapter and animal by animal, Kershenbaum draws on his extensive research and observations of animals in the wild to explain the science behind why animals are communicating. Also revealing profound insights into our own language and why it is different, In doing so, Why Animals Talks tells the comprehensive story of communication and how it works across the entire animal kingdom. 

Intrepid zoologist Dr Arik Kershenbaum is the world-leading expert in animal vocal communication, and has roamed the wilds of Europe, North America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia for over a decade, working to decipher it. He is a College Associate Professor and fellow at Girton College, University of Cambridge, and has published more than thirty academic publications. His previous book, The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy, was a Times/Sunday Times Book of the Year and was published in eleven languages.

• Order via Penguin Books: Why Animals Talk c.£20

Gwyneth Lewis, Nightshade Mother

In this extraordinary memoir, Gwyneth Lewis, the inaugural National Poet of Wales, recounts her toxic upbringing at the hands of her controlling, coercive mother. It is a book that Gwyneth has been preparing to write all her life, keeping diaries since childhood. In these journals, she interrogates the emotionally abusive relationship she experienced, in great pain but determined to find a way through. 

Nightshade Mother is a book that Gwyneth co-writes with her younger self, an unexpected and life-saving dialogue through time. Metaphors of haunting intensity help her confront what happened to her; quotations from art and literature guide and steady her. This is a book about the power of art, language and, ultimately, about homecoming over a lifetime of exile from herself. It is a profoundly moving and beautiful work; questing, forgiving and loving in its approach.

• Order via University of Wales Press: Nightshade Mother c.£19

Imogen Lloyd Webber, The Intelligent Conversationalist

Have you ever been at a cocktail party when all of a sudden you feel like an outsider in the conversation because you have absolutely no idea what the person is talking about? You're standing around with a glass of wine and someone starts talking about how the stock market did that day leading to the career highs of Ben Bernanke and the best way to short a stock. You stand there completely silent because you know nothing about the stock market, let alone the history of economics. You're being pushed to the outside edge of the pack and there's no way to reach gracefully for your iPhone and Google. Fear not: Imogen Lloyd Webber is on a mission to make everyone as conversationally nimble as she has learned to be as a cable news pundit. Her solution: get a few cheat sheets and study up. Remember cheat sheets, those slips of paper filled with facts? As Imogen might say "Google is good, but a cheat sheet is forever..." In eight cheat sheets, Imogen takes you through the facts that come up in most conversations: the English language, math/economics, religion, history, politics, geography, biology and culture. From the history of money to who signed The Magna Carta, Imogen shows you how to get back in a conversation, win any argument and most importantly, how to pivot out of a tough conversational bind. Imogen Lloyd Webber's The Intelligent Conversationalist will help you talk with anyone about anything anytime.

• Order via Amazon: The Intelligent Conversationalist c.£14

Hisham Matar, My Friends

Khaled and Mustafa meet at university in Edinburgh: two Libyan eighteen-year-olds expecting to return home after their studies. In a moment of recklessness and courage, they travel to London to join a demonstration in front of the Libyan embassy. When government officials open fire on protestors in broad daylight, both friends are wounded, and their lives forever changed. 

Over the years that follow, Khaled, Mustafa and their friend Hosam, a writer, are bound together by their shared history. If friendship is a space to inhabit, theirs becomes small and inhospitable when a revolution in Libya forces them to choose between the lives they have created in London and the lives they left behind.

• Order via Penguin Books: My Friends c.£10

Dr James Riley, Well Beings

James Riley, author of the cult hit The Bad Trip: Dark Omens, New Worlds and the End of the Sixties, returns with another incisive and thought-provoking cultural history, turning his trenchant eye to the wellness industry that emerged in the 1970s. 

Concepts such as wellness and self-care may feel like distinctly twenty-first century ideas, but they first gained traction as part of the New Age health movements that began to flourish in the wake of the 1960s. Riley dives into this strange and hypnotic world of panoramic coastal retreats and darkened floatation tanks, blending a page-turning narrative with illuminating explorations of the era's music, film, art and literature. 

Well Beings delves deep into the mind of the seventies – its popular culture, its radical philosophies, its approach to health and its sense of social crisis. It tells the story of what was sought, what was found and how these explorations helped the 'Me Decade' find itself. In so doing, it questions what good health means today and reveals what the seventies can teach us about the strange art of being well.

• Order via Waterstones: Well Beings c.£25

Jane Robinson, Trailblazer

You have probably not heard of Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon but you certainly should have done. 

Name any 'modern' human rights movement, and she was a pioneer: feminism, equal opportunities, diversity, inclusion, mental health awareness, Black Lives Matter. While her name has been omitted from too many history books, it was Barbara that opened the doors for more famous names to walk through. And her influence owed as much to who she was as to what she did: people loved her for her robust sense of humour, cheerfulness and indiscriminate acts of kindness. 

This is a celebration of the life of the founder of Britain's suffrage movement: campaigner for equal opportunity in the workplace, the law, at home and beyond. Co-founder of Girton, the first university college for women, a committed activist for human rights, fervently anti-slavery, she was also one of Victorian England's finest female painters. 

Jane Robinson's brilliant new book shines a light on a remarkable woman who lived on her own terms and to whom we owe a huge debt.

• Order via Penguin Books: Trailblazer c.£25

Dr Caroline Shenton, National Treasures. Saving the Nation’s Art in World War 

The astonishing, ingenious and sometimes hilarious story - reminiscent of an Ealing Comedy - of how London's museums, galleries and archives packed up the country’s greatest cultural treasures in 1939 and, in a race against time, dispatched them throughout the country on a series of top-secret wartime adventures. Written by Girton’s Secretary to Council, Caroline Shenton, and shortlisted for the HWA Non-Fiction Crown in 2022. ‘Geeks triumph over the forces of darkness…nothing could have given me greater pleasure’ – Lucy Worsley.

• Order via Bookshop: National Treasures c.£11

Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern (Co-Editor), Crises in Time: Ethnographic Horizons in Amazonia and Melanesia 

This book considers some of the ways in which time appears – and seemingly does it work – through moments of crisis. What can different concepts of time and diverse temporal frameworks tell us about how crises are configured and apprehended? 

First-hand research is central to the fashioning of ethnography through fieldwork, yet always brings with it a specific time horizon. Recognizing that the ethnographer’s present is not always the best vantage point from which to grasp contemporary issues offers a fresh entry into current debates on how both past and future stimulate social action, and thus reveal its temporal multiplicities. These essays turn to present-day Amazonia and Melanesia to examine in detail the production and reproduction of specific crises and the time horizons they mobilize. 

The ethnographic themes explored include the transformation of crises prophesized in the past and their implications for the future; what it means to explore perceptions of crisis from the aftermath of recent armed conflict; the multifaceted nature of future horizons precipitated by changing economic policies, when these have bodily as well as social impact; and the amelioration of governmental crisis through initiatives that rely on specific temporal understandings of effective change. Such trajectories are set variously against backgrounds of continuing colonialism, environmental calamity, overt hostility, the absent or over-present state and perceptions of moral degradation. 

Further analytic reflections examine the ways crisis holds the imagination through subsisting in time; configure international temporal frameworks through depictions of the climate crisis as the ‘tragedy of the horizon’; and highlight a perspective from which to compare the diverse temporal frameworks presented in the preceding chapters.

• Order via Waterstones: Crises in Time: Ethnographic Horizons in Amazonia and Melanesia c.£25

Sandi Toksvig, Friends of Dorothy

After much searching, the happily married young couple, Amber and Stevie think they have found the perfect spot in Grimaldi Square. Despite the rundown pub across the way, the overgrown garden and a decidedly nosy neighbour, number 4 is the house of their dreams. Stevie, a woman who has never left anything to chance, has planned everything so nothing can spoil their happiness. But … upstairs in their new home, seated on an old red sofa is the woman they bought the place from — eighty-year-old foul-mouthed, straight-talking, wise-cracking Dorothy – who has decided that she’s not going anywhere. It turns out that Dorothy will be only the first in a line of life-changing surprises. Friends of Dorothy is a touching, funny novel about a family that is not biological, but logical; a story close to Sandi Toksvig’s heart.

• Order via Waterstones: Friends of Dorothy c.£19

Dr Helen Van Noorden (Editor), The Lawrence Room at Girton College

The Lawrence Room at Girton College was published to coincide with Girton's 150th Anniversary. It was made possible by the generous donation of Graham Hambling to mark his retirement from College service, this beautifully illustrated book is about our eclectic College museum. 

Edited by Classics Fellow, Helen Van Noorden with the Lawrence Room Committee, the chapters, authored by longstanding members of the University, showcase both well-known and lesser-known treasures in the collection and illuminate the development of the museum and aspects of the history of Girton College and the surrounding area. 

We hope it encourages you to visit and help us to continue learning about our objects!

• Order via Shopify: The Lawrence Room at Girton College c. £20

Errollyn Wallen, Becoming a Composer

I am a composer. A composer of classical music. Quite honestly I am not quite sure how that happened to a girl born in Belize and brought up in Tottenham . . . It is clear that composing found me. It crept up on me and wouldn’t let me out of its grasp. 

Now a leading international composer and a singer-songwriter, Errollyn Wallen is as much at home in jazz and pop as in the classical world. Part memoir, Becoming a Composer offers an intriguing glimpse into the mind and motivation of a composer and covers aspects of Wallen’s sometimes troubled childhood, and her experiences of growing up as a black composer in the UK. It includes a collection of observations, diaries following the progress of new works and essays and seeks to shed light on the way a composer sees and hears the world.

• Order via Faber: Becoming a Composer c.£18

Ruth Whippman, BoyMum

Combining painfully honest memoir, cultural analysis, and reporting, BoyMom is a humorous and heartbreaking deep dive into the complexities of raising boys in our fraught political moment. "Rapist, school-shooter, incel, man-child, interrupter, mansplainer, boob-starer, birthday forgetter, frat boy, dude-bro, homophobe, self-important stoner, emotional-labor abstainer, non-wiper of kitchen counters. Trying to raise good sons suddenly felt like a hopeless task." 

As the culture wars rage, and masculinity has been politicized from all sides, feminist writer and mother of three boys Ruth Whippman finds herself conflicted and scared. While the right pushes a dangerous vision of fantasy manhood, her feminist peers often dismiss boys as little more than entitled predators-in-waiting. Meanwhile her home life feels like a daily confrontation with the triumph of nature over nurture. 

With young men in the grip of a loneliness epidemic and dying by suicide at a rate of nearly four times their female peers, Whippman asks: How do we raise our sons to have a healthy sense of self without turning them into privileged assholes? How can we find a feminism that holds boys to a higher standard but still treats them with empathy? And what do we do when our boys won't cooperate with our plans? 

Whippman digs into the impossibly contradictory pressures boys now face; and the harmful blind spots of male socialization that are leaving boys isolated, emotionally repressed, and adrift. Feminist gonzo-style, she spends months interviewing incels, reports on a conference for boys accused of sexual assault; crashes at a residential therapy center for young men in Utah, talks to a wide range of psychologists and other experts, and gets boys of all backgrounds to open up about sex, consent, porn, body image, mental health, cancel culture, screens, friendship and loneliness. Along the way, she finds her simple certainties about male privilege seriously challenged. 

With wit, honesty, and a refusal to settle for easy answers, BoyMom charts a new path to give boys a healthier, more expansive, and fulfilling story about their own lives.

• Order via Quercus Books: BoyMum c.£16

• A full list of publications by our Fellows can be found on our webpages.