Bold Works by Bold Women
We publish fiction, non-fiction, and poetry for adults. We are agnostic on length, form and genre while caring deeply about quality, diversity and relevance. We believe those who write from the margins, out of step with trend and who defy classification, have most to share. Hence, the covers of our books are red: the colour of vibrancy, danger and courage.
Every author’s work carries their fingerprint - the DNA of their life experience, trace elements of their worldview. Every reader adds their fingerprint to the pages making each story their own.
Featured Publications
Made to Measure
Imagine scientists constantly measure your life — and they all predict failure
As a lifetime member of a human development study, Walt Colson regularly donates his statistics to science: everything from dental plaque to tax returns. He knows it’s a worthy cause, a bit like jury service, only someone keeps checking his ears, but the study isn’t doing him any favours.
Now in his mid-thirties, and with a failing career, Walt learns his life predictors aren't just average, they're scientifically dire. Using this science to reengineer his life and achieve personal success, things quickly unravel. After a public humiliation, Walt loses everything, including his family. Finally seeking help, in the most unlikely of places, has Walt left it too late? Told with heartwarming humour Made to Measure considers what happens when a small life is overwhelmed by big questions.
Choose your format and discover more.
“Uplifting, hilarious and quietly profound”
Dark Star
Dark Star is a first novel of impressive calibre (Time Magazine, 1929)
Born under a dark star, Nancy Pringle, never knew her father’s identity, and was abandoned by her mother. The novel follows Nancy as she navigates adolescence and adulthood, while encountering society’s marginalised in her search both for her father and her self.
Under Lorna Moon’s forensic gaze, small community life's conventions and hypocrisies are examined in minute and wry detail. And through Nancy’s growing understanding of her own desire, Moon is able to analyse female sexuality at a time when to do so was revolutionary. ‘It is revolting to me’, Moon wrote in a letter, ‘that in a civilised world a woman’s virtue rests entirely upon her hymen.’* With Dark Star, Moon works through her outrage.
Choose your format and discover more.
“It is the inside of a woman written from the inside”
Mistress Pieces
An experimental exploration of madness and love
The crash of her husband’s foot through the bedroom door shatters the narrator. Each broken part of the body and mind takes on a voice, expressing itself through ‘Mistress Pieces’, words scrawled on walls and odd scraps of paper, in search of healing damage ‘half a century in the making’. Framed within a queer love story, Mistress Pieces celebrates madness and its influence on contemporary political and personal relationships, encouraging us to embrace chaos as we seek a new paradigm for living.
Choose your format and discover more.
“Raw, uplifting and refusing definition”
The Rest is Silence
What happened to the most famous missing person in British History
The Rest is Silence follows the story of Muriel Mead, an introspective schoolgirl who disappears from a village lane on the eve of World War II.
Was she a victim or simply a young woman determined to live on her own terms?
Told across companion narratives, The Rest is Silence presents the radically different accounts of two women bound to Muriel by memory, longing, and loss. As each narrator searches for answers, their stories reveal not a neat singular truth but a fractured mosaic—coloured by their own convictions about choice, possibility, and the nature of knowing.
The Rest is Silence offers a thoughtfully crafted meditation about the stories we tell, the silences we keep, and what it means to live out of step with the mainstream.
Choose your format and discover more.
“I read the book in two sittings, and weeks on I’m still thinking about it.”
Forthcoming Publications
Displaced
When you are left with conflict without and within
A collection of reprinted short stories from a well-known American author, focusing on issues of war and displacement.
Title and author to be revealed soon.
“Themes of memory, the power of language, and the complexities of relationships.”
Resilience
A woman confronted by the harsh reality of an empty promise
A prize-winning novel written by a nobel nominee, about the resilience of women. Translated into English for the first time in seventy years.
Title and author to be revealed soon.