Henry James had said, “Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.” The Sunday Standard Summer Reading List brings you a mixed bag of words that would keep you as beautifully busy as Henry James. The world is celebrating 100 years of Marcel Proust. Known for her translations from the French, of Proust and Flaubert, and her short (and shortest) stories that blur the demarcation between narrative, philosophy and poetry, Lydia Davis was awarded the Man Booker Prize for 2013 last month. Though Jnanpith Awardee and well-known Kannada novelist and poet UR Ananthamurthy lost the Booker to Davis, the universal appeal in work helped the vernacular represent India. Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia has arrived in Indian consciousness as a “post modern Sufi Ghazal”. Its success has coincided with the Pakistani-American Ayad Akhtar winning the Pulitzer Prize for Disgraced. Author Amanda Knox recently said how reading Marilynne Robinson and Douglas Adams helped her in prison before she wrote Waiting to be Heard; Pulitzer Prize winner Adam Johnson read propaganda books to come up with The Orphan Master’s Son. Mark Billingham likes to stretch at the pool with the sensation of the year, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and there are more than 2 million people who are willing to do the same. Fiction writing on Holocaust gets a suspense makeover in Miles Corwin’s Midnight Alley and an emotional treatment to harrowing memories in two parallel stories in Jodi Picoult’s The Storyteller. The 50th anniversary of The Beatles round the corner; Newspaper Taxis: Poetry After the Beatles, is an anthology of poetic responses to the songs of the famous four. The big awaited releases focus on love and relationships like in Khaled Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed. We would recommend Five Star Billionaire By Tash Aw. Stephen King gets more horrifying with Joyland and takes you to an amusement park and a dying child. Margaret Atwood will be unpredictable in the last novel of the trilogy with MaddAddam scheduled for release in August. The much awaited release this year is Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland. Set in the 1960s and ’70s, it’s a tale of two Calcutta-born brothers, Subhash and Udayan. Meanwhile, croon to composer Ricky Ian Gordon Gordon’s My Life With Albertine inspired by Proust’s works while you read. As Oscar Wilde said “It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.” We know what you read this summer.
Fiction
Crime thrillers
Daddy’s Gone A Hunting
By Mary Higgins Clark
The ‘Queen of Suspense’ places the Connelly sisters in peril , when the family furniture firm founded by their grandfather burns down and a dark secret emerges.
The Mystery of Mercy Close
By Marian Keyes
PI Helen Walsh who is never afraid; she thinks fear is an invention of men. But she is broke and homeless when a loaded ex-boyfriend lands up, wanting to find missing rockstar Wayne Diffney. Her new sexy detective boyfriend Artie Devlin is all hands and helps in her investigation into the glamorous underworld of music.
The Leopard
By Jo Nesbo
Weather beaten by life, Swedish cop Harry Hole, craves an armoured heart and we could use one, too, and meets with a startling denouement of love gone wrong and a son lost .
Gone Girl
By Gillian Flynn.
The sensation of the year, this thriller about an ordinary murder with an extraordinary plot has sold more than 2 million copies.
Midnight Alley
By Miles Corwin
The deadly duo Kond of Blue, LAPD detective and former Israeli paratrooper Ash Levine has distinguished itself are thrown into a cauldron of drug dealers, Afghan war vets, Russian mafia and Middle Eastern archaeologists. As the chase raises the mercury ash, the child of a Holocaust survivor finds that he is the one being chased instead.
Wyatt
By Garry Disher
A veteran, unsent mental thief who is unfamiliar with technological advances in his chosen career is double crossed during a heist. He wants to serve the dish best eaten cold.
The Honey Guide
By Richard Crompton
With the 2007 Kenyan general election and protests over vote-rigging resulting in ethnic violence as its backdrop, to journalist Richard Crompton’s Nairobi-based novel The Honey Guide is considered an outstanding debut that has all the hallmarks of an efficient police procedural—the initial investigation is of a murdered prostitute. It’s also a vivid and sensitive depiction of an alarmingly explosive situation.
Black Irish
By Stephan Talty
A homicide detective returns home, where she confronts her own past while pursuing a brutal serial killer on a vengeful rampage. Despite a Harvard degree and a police detective’s badge, she still struggles to earn the respect and trust of those she’s sworn to protect.
General
How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
By Mohsin Hamid
The book is set in Pakistan, in a place that resembles Hamid’s hometown. It is an uplifting story of a man’s journey from that of an impoverished rural boy to a corporate tycoon. Hamid introduces us to the life of a hero who is the youngest of three children in a poor family. He experiences a series of tragedies that make him take his destiny into his own hands.
The Rainbow Troops
By Andrea Hirata
A debut novel by the Indonesian writer is based on his primary school education and the overwhelming desire and motivation to learn no matter how poor the resources.
The Infatuations
By Javier Marias
Every day, María Dolz stops for breakfast at the same café. And every day she enjoys watching a handsome couple who follow the same routine. Then one day they aren’t there, and she feels obscurely bereft. It is only later, when she comes across a newspaper photograph of the man, lying stabbed in the street, his shirt half off, that she discovers who the couple are.
Scenes from Early Life
By Philip Hensher
The novel takes you to Dacca circa 1970, in what was known as East Pakistan which was, back then, one of that country’s two wings, flung from the other part and inflamed by political upheavel. As tanks roll into neighbourhood, the lawyer and his wife are quarrelling over chilies.
The Storyteller
By Jodi Picoult
The author blends two parallel stories from the darkest hours of the Holocaust. The link between these two stories is Sage Singer, a young, non-practicing Jewish woman in a small New Hampshire town. The two stories, that of the German boy who became a participant in mass genocide; and her own grandmother’s harrowing memories of family members dying from starvation, juxtapose each other.
The Unseen
By Nanni Balestrini
For a brief explosive period in the mid-1970s, the young and the unemployed of Italy’s cities joined the workers in an unexpectedly militant movement known simply as Autonomy (Autonomia). Its “politics of refusal” united its opponents behind draconian measures more severe than any seen since the war .
Lionel Asbo: State of England
By Martin Amis
Amis was initially hated for this book. While some feel his work is an attack on London, it’s a pean to London at the same time. The young hero, Desmond Pepperdine, mixed-race 15-year-old resident of Diston Town sleeps with his nan. The father must not find out. He doesn’t find out, until more than 200 odd pages and Des becomes powerful and rich.
Short stories
The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story
By Anne Enright (Ed)
Anne Enright has brought together a collection of Irish stories by authors born in the 20th century—from Mary Lavin and Frank O’Connor to Claire Keegan and Kevin Barry.
Dear Life
By Alice Munro
Autobiographical, Munro’s collection of stories is set in small town Canada where she grew up and lays bare her sharp fiction like never before.
Graphic novels
Building Stories
By Chris Ware
This work suggests how memory’s revisions of the past change the meaning of life. In Chris Ware’s work, the comic isn’t essentially comedy. It is like a search for joy hidden in the experience of an otherwise ordinary life.
Paradise
By Amir and Khalil
Set in the aftermath of Iran’s elections of 2009, Zahra’s Paradise is a fictional story of Mehdi, a young protestor who has disappeared.
Poetry
Newspaper Taxis: Poetry After the Beatles
Beatles 50th anniversaries will come thick and fast until the end of the decade. This anthology of poetic responses to the songs features work by Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy, Philip Larkin, Roger McGough and many.
Stag’s Leap
by Sharon Olds
The poems in Stag’s Leap were written after the breakup of Ms Olds’s 30-year marriage in 1997. Olds, promised her children that she wouldn’t publish the poems in a book for several years. She recently won the Pulitzer for her work.
Children's books
The Puffin Book of Folktales
By Many
The book takes kids to an exciting underwater world with Panna. Watch little blue bird Podna fight a mighty king for his little brown Podni. This 10-anniversary special edition brings 10 heartwarming folktales by Ruskin Bond, Sudha Murty, Paro Anand and others.
The Secret Garden
By Frances Hodgson Burnett
A wild mix of mystery and gothic underpinnings, this delightful story reads like a child-friendly version of Jane Eyre. It also happens to contain the most unlikable, spoiled protagonist you’ve ever met (at the beginning, anyway).
Matilda
By Roald Dahl
Most authors’ last novels are their weakest. In the case of Dahl, this tale of a book-loving girl with horrendous parents, a kid-hating principal and supernatural powers turned out to be one of his best.
Evergreen classics
The Shining
By Stephen King
Its long awaited sequel Doctor Sleep will be out this summer. This classic horror novel is about Danny Torrance who sees ghosts and visions. Danny does not tell his parents about his visions because he senses that the caretaking job is important to his father and the family’s future.
The Way of All Flesh
By Samuel Butler
It turned the tide in literature. Its satire savages Victorian bourgeois values as personified by generations of the Pontifex family. Giving a view of Butler’s upbringing in a God-fearing Christian family, this funny depiction of hypocrisy in 19th century domestic life makes this work a classic.
Shantaram
By Gregory David Roberts
A cult classic, a man’s journey from the darkness of a prison to his life in the streets of Mumbai. One cannot find out whether the book is based on actual facts or is a work of fiction or is a mixture of both, one thing for sure is that Shantaram is a must read book for every book lover.
Swann’s Way
ByMarcel Proust
He tells two stories, the first revolves around Marcel, the younger narrator, and his experiences in the town Combray. The second one relates you to the love affair between Swann and Odette. Some readers find it a hard novel to understand. You won’t know Proust until you read this work.
Non-Fiction
Biographies
Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography
Volume One: Not for Turning
By Charles Moore
An authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher, , Not for Turning, the first volume of former Telegraph editor Charles Moore’s work supercedes all earlier books written about her. Released immediately after her death, it gives a clear eyed insight into her early life.
Waiting to be Heard
By Amanda Knox
Amanda Knox spent four years in a foreign prison for a crime she says she did not commit. In the fall of 2007, the 20-year-old college left Seattle to study abroad in Italy, but her life was shattered when her roommate was murdered in their apartment. Amanda was convicted and imprisoned. But in 2011, an appeals court overturned the decision and vacated the murder charge.
Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand
By William J Mann
In this book Mann illuminates Barbra Streisand before she became the icon. He pays tribute to one of the world’s most beloved performers. Read about her life as a 17 year old Brooklyn kid who had plenty of talent but had no connections in the industry.
General
The Possessed
By Elif Batuman
A captivating book about books and the world’s well known authors, this work is filled is about the existential angst among their fans, the awkward encounters with authors’ descendants, and a quirky literary history that leads to mysteries.
Sincerity
By R. Jay Magill Jr.
Magill tells the beguiling story of sincerity’s theological past, its current emotional resonance, and the deep impact it has had on the Western soul.
The Wives
By Alexandra Popoff
The six literary wives in the book, Anna Dostoevsky, Sophia Tolstoy, Véra Nabokov, Elena Bulgakov, Nadezhda Mandelstam, and Natalya Solzhenitsyn were muses, intellectual companions, and indispensable aids to Russia’s most celebrated writers. Popoff draws from the women’s autobiographical writings and other key Russian sources to reveal the women’s contributions to world literature.
Iron Curtain
By Anne Applebaum
Iron Curtain describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. The book describes how political parties, the church, the media, young people’s organizations—the institutions of civil society on every level—were eviscerated, how the secret police services were organized, how ethnic cleansing was carried out—and how some people were forced to collaborate while others managed to resist.
Art
Memoirs by Habib Tanvir
By Mahmood Farooqui
Habib Tanvir is one of Asia’s most important and gifted theatre directors. In these memoirs, touching on both the private and the public aspects of his life with startling candour, he takes us on a journey from his childhood in Raipur to the Bombay film world of the 1940s and thence to Indian People’s Theatre Association, offering an invaluable window into 20th-century India. The ease of Mahmood Farooqui’s translation matches the lively cadence of Tanvir’s prose.
Master of Arts: A life in Dance
By Tulsi Badrinath
VP Dhananjayan was one of the first men to make a successful career as a Bharata Natyam dancer. In the late sixties, when he made this choice, Bharata Natyam—the classic dance form that Rukmini Devi helped evolve from the dance of the devadasis—was almost exclusively the domain of women.
Travel
Walking Home: A Poet’s Journey
By Simon Armitage
In summer 2010, Simon Armitage decided to walk the Pennine Way. Travelling as a ‘modern troubadour’ without a penny in his pocket, he stopped along the way to give poetry readings in village halls, churches, pubs and living rooms.
Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meaning
By Jonathan Raban
Riding over the physical distance of 1,000 miles of difficult and treacherous water, which Raban navigates solo in a 35-foot sailboat, he traverses the immeasurable divide between the Northwest’s Indians and its first European explorers. The author offers discourses on art and philosophy, alongside a personal narrative of the hardships of travelling on the sea, life and its experiences.
Where the Peacocks Sing: A Palace, a Prince, and the Search for Home
By Alison Singh Gee
This book takes the readers on a cross-cultural journey from the manicured gardens of Beverly Hills, to the bustling streets of Hong Kong and finally to the rural Indian countryside as Alison comes to terms with her complicated new family, leaves the modern world behind, and learns the true meaning of home.
Popular science
Breasts
By Florence Williams
Symbols of eroticism and nurturance across generations, the breasts have been the focus of study of male opnion makers and thinkers all over the world. Citing Rachel Carson’s 1962 classic Silent Spring, which narrated the impact of industrial chemicals —notably, the pesticide DDT—on animal life, Williams, writes looks at how environmental and lifestyle ills make breasts menacing and potentially lethal and breast milk poisonous.
How Children Succeed
By Paul Tough
Many of us believe success depends on cognitive skills and intelligence that gets measured on IQ. tests. Tough challenges this notion and looks at the character hypothesis and builds for us a notion that noncognitive skills like persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit and self-confidence, are more crucial than brainpower to achieving success.
Historical
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West
By Dee Brown
A meticulously documented account of the systematic destruction of the American Indian during the second half of the 19th century, it’s a controversial book since its first print in 1971.
Netaji in Europe
By Jan Kuhlmann
It is the first-ever comprehensive account of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose’s activities in Europe. It pieces together information from official records, diaries and military archives in Germany, Italy, Britain and India to give a comprehensive account of the daily negotiations between Bose, and foreign offices, diplomats and double agents, during the Second World War.
Paris Reborn: Napoléon III, Baron Haussmann, and the Quest to Build a Modern City
By Stephane Kirkland
Traditionally known as a dirty, congested and dangerous city, 19th Century Paris, France was transformed in an extraordinary period from 1848 to 1870, when the government launched a huge campaign to build streets, squares, parks, churches and public buildings. It’s a must read for people who want to know how Paris became what it is today.
The Grey Album
By Kevin Young
The well-known poet blends essay, cultural criticism and poetry to illustrate the African American habit of lying—storytelling, telling tales, fibbing, improvising, “jazzing.” The book also focusses on the centrality of black people, the American experience and the America dream.
Sports
Sachin: Cricketer of the Century By Vimal Kumar
Part of India’s World Cup-winning squad and the team that took India to its no. 1 Test ranking, Sachin Tendulkar has blazed his way through the cricketing world for more than two decades, tearing through matches and records alike. This book takes you on a journey from stellar innings to stellar innings, surveying the batting genius’s brilliant career through the eyes of people like Adam Gilchrist, Matthew Hayden, Nasser Hussain and Courtney Walsh to Waqar Younis, Sanath Jayasuriya, Kapil Dev, Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid.
Inked in India
The Lowland
By Jhumpa Lahiri
Subhash and Udayan were inseparable in childhood and yet, as the years pass—as U.S tanks roll into Vietnam – their brotherly bond can do nothing to forestall the tragedy that will upend their lives. Epic in its canvas and intimate in its portrayal of lives undone and forged anew, The Lowland is a deeply felt novel of family ties that entangle and fray in ways unforeseen and unrevealed. With all the hallmarks of Jhumpa Lahiri’s achingly poignant style, this is an exquisitely empathetic example of story-telling.
The Reluctant fundamentalist
By Mira Nair
Based on the bestselling novel by Mohsin Hamid, internationally acclaimed director Mira Nair offers the reader an exclusive behind-the-scenes look into the creation of her most ambitious film yet: The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The book comprises an array of images as well as short essays by those involved in the film-making process.
Sita’s Ascent
By Vayu Naidu
Sita has been sent to Valmiki’s ashram, at Rama’s command never to return. This novel is her story. It is also the story of Lakshmana, crushed by guilt on Sita’s abduction; of Soorpanakka, shocked at Ravana’s being struck by love, alien to the rakshasas’ code; and of Rama’s turmoil when confronted by public gossip about Sita, his beloved wife. Through the remembrances of these and other characters, Sita comes alive as a figure of womanhood.
War Journey
By Malaravan N Malathy
A short diary was recovered from Malaravan’s kit after he was killed in action in 1992, when barely 20. He recounts his unit’s journey to Maankulam, the island’s granary, to fight a critical battle where they routed the Lankan military. The LTTE’s planning and tactics, the camaraderie of the young Tigers, and the actual combat are minutely chronicled. Malaravan brings out the beauty of the Tamil forest and countryside and the humanity and support of the common people for them, despite their suffering under army rule.
Oleander Girl
By Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Orphaned at birth, 17-year old Korobi Roy has enoyed a privileged childhood with her adoring grandparents in Kolkata. But she is troubled by the silence that surrounds her parents’ death and clings to her only inheritance from them: the unfinished love note she found hidden in her mother’s book of poetry.
The big releases
And the Mountains Echoed
By Khaled Hosseini
The author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns has written a new novel about how we love, how we take care of one another, and how the choices we make resonate through generations.
Inferno
By Dan Brown
A mystery thriller novel by American writer Dan Brown and the fourth book in his Robert Langdon series, it once again features Robert Langdon, professor of Religious Symbology at Harvard. Langdon was the central character in The Da Vinci Code. The novel returns to the world of 14th century medieval Italy.
Sisterland
By Curtis Sittenfeld
From an early age, Kate and her identical twin sister, Violet, knew that they were unlike everyone else. Kate and Vi were born with peculiar “senses”—innate psychic abilities concerning future events and other people’s secrets. Though Vi embraced her visions, Kate did her best to hide them. An earthquake changes their lives.
Joyland
By Stephen King
He loves crime, he loves mysteries, and he loves ghosts. King is out with a new novel. Joyland takes place in a small-town North Carolina amusement park, where college student Devin Jones arrives at the park to work as a carny for the summer, but he ends up confronting the legacy of a vicious murder and the fate of a dying child.
Forty-one False Starts: Essays on Writers and Artists
By Janet Malcom
In a brilliant collection of essays Janet Malcolm delves into the preoccupation with artists and their work. She trains her eye on a variety of other subjects, including Edward Weston‘s nudes, the German photographer Thomas Struth, Edith Wharton, the Gossip Girl novels, and the false starts on her own autobiography.
Five Star Billionaire
By Tash Aw
In his third novel, Aw writes about Malaysian immigrants to contemporary Shanghai, featuring an ensemble cast who hail from diverse backgrounds; their stories are interwoven, and counterpointed with the lives they left behind.
Night Film
By Marisha Pessl
It’s a psychological thriller driven by revenge and curiosity. On a damp October night, beautiful young Ashley Cordova is found dead in an abandoned warehouse in lower Manhattan. Though her death is ruled a suicide, veteran investigative journalist Scott McGrath suspects otherwise.
MaddAddam
By Margaret Atwood
After Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, the long-awaited final novel in her apocalyptic MaddAddam trilogy will be published in August.
The Victoria System
By Eric Reinhardt
David Kolski never sleeps with the same woman twice—apart from his wife. He meets Victoria. Head of people at a multinational company, by day she is a ruthless executive. By night she likes good wine, luxurious hotel rooms, and abandoning herself to her boundless sexual fantasies. David is soon addicted.
Fiction Carnival
By Rawi Hage
There are two types of taxi drivers in the Carnival city —the spiders and the flies. The spiders sit and stew in their cars, waiting for the calls to come to them. But the flies are wanderers —they roam the streets, looking for the raised flags of hands.
Book cafes
Ashvita Bistro (Chennai)
Sit facing the brick wall and watch the chef plucking cherry tomatoes and basil from the Bistro’s terrace garden as you flip through your favourite read.
Kunzum Travel Cafe (New Delhi)
As and more often you read at Kunzum, you are likely to bump into the author in yourself. Keep your eyes running between the lines, your ears wandering to music and your senses lost in the brew and cookies.
Comics Cafe (Bangalore)
The growing population of comic and graphic novel writers inspired Meibo Ono to set up the café which has over 1500 American, Indian and Japanese comics from all over the world. Barge in.
The Ants Cafe & Store (Bangalore)
If you are looking for a nice quite cafe to be with books on your Kindle, the Ants Cafe at Indira Nagar is a perfect place. Keep the baked beans, pancakes and scrambled eggs, and coffees handy. Calories? No Worries.
Lamakaan (Hyderabad)
Think beyond coffee. Settle under the trees, or lounge on a chair in a corner with a kadak chai, lassi and a glass of lemonade in to go with your favourite book of poems or fiction. You are set for at least three hours of satisfactory reading.
My Top 5
Amish Tripathi, Author
1. Land of the Seven Rivers
By Sanjeev Sanyal
Sanjeev Sanyal explores India and looks at how the country’s history was shaped by, among other things, its rivers, mountains and cities.
2. India: A Sacred Geography
By Diana Eck
The book takes the reader on an extraordinary trip through the beliefs and history of India.
3)The End of Faith By Sam Harris
It examines our willingness to suspend reason in favour of
religious beliefs.
4) On Hinduism By Wendy Doniger
Comprising a series of connected essays, it enlarges the understanding of Hindusism.
5) The Mahabharat translations
By Bibek Debroy
He makes the Mahabharata, its shlokas and plots marvellously accessible to contemporary readers.
Sudeep Sen , Author and Poet
1. Photographing India By Sunil Janah: the masterly works are historic, rooted, severe, poignant and poetic, all at the same time
2. As Sweet As Honey By Indira Ganesan and 3. Dirty Love By Sampurna Chattarji
Both are well written, though stylistically they are completely different in tonality, texture, and content. If Ganesan’s is luscious, then Chattarji’s is hard-edged
4. A Village in Bengal By Chirodeep Chaudhuri: contains memory, longing and a vibrantly living past.
5. Dancescapes By
Shobha Deepak Singh: a lavish and well- curated production.
Anjun Hasan, Author
The Ministry of Hurt Sentiments
By Altaf Tyrewalla
It celebrates the dystopia that is modern-day Mumbai.
The Mirror of Beauty By
Shamshur Rehman Faruqi
It is the English language translation of his Urdu novel Kai Chaand Thhay Sar-e Aasman.
Gold Boy, Emerald Girl By
Yiyun Li: Fiction mingles with history, politics, and folklore magnificently.
The Enigma of Arrival By
VS Naipaul: It’s Naipaul’s journey—perhaps his most autobiographical work.
Is ‘Indian Civilisation’ a Myth? By Sanjay Subrahmanyam: It demolishes notion of the wonder that was India.
Jaishree Mishra, Author
1.In the Orchard, the Swallows’ By Peter Hobbs
An Englishman who lives in Canada takes on the story of a young Pakistani man recently released from prison.
2. Wolf Hall By Hilary Mantel
How does Mantel write such brilliant books so quickly?
3. The Sense of an Ending By Julian Barnes
He uses unreliable narrators with success like never before.
Atonement By Ian MacEwan
An all-time favourite ever since it was published.
God of Small Things By Arundhati Roy: This was a book I fell in love with as I was reading it and I never tire of returning to it.
Tanushree Podder, Author
1. Bring Up the Bodies By Hilary Mantel
It is the story of a terrifying moment of history in the 16th century.
2. Manuscript Found in Accra by By Paulo Coelho: The mysterious man Copt addresses the fears of Jeruselum’s people.
3. Narcopolis By Jeet Thayil
It charts Mumbai’s evolution across three decades.
4. Proof of Heaven By Eben Alexander: A riveting book on near death experiences.
5. Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead By Sheryl Sandberg: On the complex situations surrounding the lives of working women.