Ebook available (see below)
The Little Book of Northern Women is, as the title suggests, a collection of stories in which women from the north of England feature rather prominently. From the 1930s to the present day with a couple of stops in between, domineering matriarchs, put-upon daughters and stoic mothers carve out their lives with a supporting cast of sisters, aunts, and even the occasional husband. They are gentle, angry, strong, defiant, bemused. Some of the stories are light-hearted, others quite dark, and I sincerely hope that just because the central characters are all women, the package doesn’t seem unpalatable to male readers (my Telegraph Short Story Club compadre Kelvin Knight seemed to enjoy it – read his review).
In August 2013 I recorded Not Such a Cold Fish, the short-short story that ends the book (and the only one of the nine stories that had previously been published) – why not give it a listen?
These wordclouds of each story should whet your appetite:
How to obtain the ebook
You can download it as an epub or as a pdf under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence then pay what you like (yes, that includes paying nothing). If you do feel like contributing to my tea, biscuit and biro fund, use this Paypal button:
The default ebook format is epub mainly because I’ve got a Kobo, but there are lots of ways (many of them free, some of them easy) to change it to something more suitable. For instance I use calibre (free software) to manage ebooks and it can convert to your filetype of choice, or this extension for firefox lets you read it in the web-browser.
I’d love to know what any readers think of this collection – feel free to leave a comment below.
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