The 10 Best Books of 2009
(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-12-10 10:47
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A SHORT HISTORY OF WOMEN
By Kate Walbert
Scribner, $24.
The 15 lean, concentrated chapters in this exquisitely written novel alternate among the lives of a British suffragist and a handful of her Anglo-American descendants. The theme is feminism, but Walbert is keenly alert to male preoccupations and the impressions they leave on the lives of her female cast. Walbert’s prose, cool and intelligent, captures the many ways we silence and are silenced, the ways we see and hear as we struggle to grasp hold of meaning.