Red clocks : a novel
Leni Zumas
FICTION Zumas, Leni
Fiction
Abortion is illegal in America, in-vitro fertilization is banned, and the Personhood Amendment grants rights of life, liberty, and property to every embryo. In a small Oregon fishing town Ro, a single high-school teacher, is trying to have a baby on her own. Susan is a frustrated mother of two, trapped in a crumbling marriage. Mattie finds herself pregnant with nowhere to turn. And Gin is the gifted, forest-dwelling herbalist, or "mender," who brings all their fates together when she's arrested and put on trial in a frenzied modern-day witch hunt.
Hazards of time travel
Joyce Carol Oates
FICTION Oates, Joyce
Fiction
A recklessly idealistic girl dares to test the perimeters of her tightly controlled, dystopian world of 2039 and is punished by being sent back in time to a region of North America — Wainscotia, Wisconsin—that existed eighty years before. Cast adrift in time in this idyllic Midwestern town she is set upon a course of “rehabilitation”—but cannot resist falling in love with a fellow exile and questioning the constrains of the Wainscotia world with results that are both devastating and liberating.
The power : a novel
Naomi Alderman
SCIENCE FICTION Alderman, Naomi
What would happen if women suddenly possessed a fierce new power? All over the world women are discovering they have. With a flick of the fingers they can inflict terrible pain - even death. Suddenly, every man on the planet finds they've lost control. And, with this small twist of nature, the world drastically resets. The day of the girls has arrived - but where will it end?
Vox
Christina Dalcher
FICTION Dalcher, Christina
Fiction
On the day the government decrees that women are no longer allowed more than one hundred words per day, Dr. Jean McClellan is in denial. This can't happen here. Not in America. Not to her. This is just the beginning. Soon women are not permitted to hold jobs. Girls are not taught to read or write. Females no longer have a voice. Before, the average person spoke sixteen thousand words each day, but now women have only one hundred to make themselves heard. For herself, her daughter, and every woman silenced, Jean will reclaim her voice.
Future home of the living god : a novel
Louise Erdrich
FICTION Erdrich, Louise
Fiction
The world as we know it is ending. Evolution has reversed itself, affecting every living creature on earth. Science cannot stop the world from running backwards, as woman after woman gives birth to infants that appear to be primitive species of humans. Twenty-six-year-old Cedar Hawk Songmaker is as disturbed and uncertain as the rest of America around her. But for Cedar, this change is profound and deeply personal. She is four months pregnant.
The water cure : a novel
Sophie Mackintosh
FICTION Mackintosh, Sophie
Fiction
On an isolated island, King has tenderly staked out a territory for his wife and three daughters, Grace, Lia, and Sky. Here women are protected from the chaos and violence of men on the mainland. The cult-like rituals and therapies they endure fortify them from the spreading toxicity of a degrading world. But when their father, the only man they've ever seen, disappears, they retreat further inward until the day two men and a boy wash ashore. Sexual tensions and sibling rivalries flare as the sisters confront the amorphous threat the strangers represent.
Gather the daughters : a novel
Jennie Melamed
SCIENCE FICTION Melamed, Jennie
Science Fiction
Just before the country was incinerated to wasteland, ten men and their families colonized an island off the coast. They built a radical society of ancestor worship, controlled breeding, and the strict rationing of knowledge and history. Only the Wanderers-- chosen male descendants of the original ten-- are allowed to cross to the wastelands. At the first sign of puberty, their daughters face their Summer of Fruition, a ritualistic season that drags them from adolescence to matrimony. One summer little Caitlin Jacob sees something so contradictory to the laws of the island that she must share it with the others.
When she woke
Hillary Jordan
SCIENCE FICTION Jordan, Hillary
Science Fiction
A re-imagining of The Scarlet Letter. In the future, abortion has become a crime as a series of events threatens the existence of the United States. One woman wakes up to discover that her skin color has been changed to red as punishment for having the procedure done. Now she must embark on a dangerous journey in order to find refuge from a hostile and threatening society.
The book of the unnamed midwife
Meg Elison
SCIENCE FICTION Elison, Meg
Science Fiction
In the wake of a fever that decimated the earth's population--killing women and children and making childbirth deadly for the mother and infant--the midwife must pick her way through the bones of the world she once knew to find her place in this dangerous new one. A few women like her survived, though they are scarce. Even fewer are safe from the clans of men, who, driven by fear, seek to control those remaining. But as the world continues to grapple with its terrible circumstances, she'll discover a role greater than chasing a pale imitation of independence.
Winner of the 2019 Oregon Book Award for Fiction
- Lyndey