Furies: Stories of the wicked, wild and untamed - feminist tales from 15 bestselling, award-winning authors

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I’ve just mentioned a few of the highlights in this collection, but really it’s an exemplary anthology, full of riches. Wench and Hussy deny women’s rights to free sexuality; Spitfire and She-Devil try to force them into quietness and acceptance; Muckraker and Harridan imply nastiness. For this celebratory work, Virago have drawn on an impressive array of authors to explore the topic of damaging words.

The Furies: mythological snake-haired goddesses of vengeance, pursuers of those who have committed unavenged crimes. Other stories take on the Wench, Hussy and Tygress – the latter in a lovely piece by Claire Kohda, whose narrator’s beloved mother is a tiger who would “always give me a long kiss on the forehead … and her whiskers would tickle my eyelids.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. It was exactly as described by the seller and was packaged well to prevent any damage during transit. Haynes shines with these classroom vignettes, which capture the self-conscious, insecure and often raw nature of troubled teens.

A seriously joyous celebration of and by women (though not only for them, because the sisterhood loves its allies), this collection of 15 short stories marks the half-century of feminist publishing house Virago. Some stories are more relatable than others but each one as beautiful and interesting because it celebrates our being, our existence. Most of the titles – rather vintage-seeming gendered insults – have a degree of ambiguity baked in, perhaps even a lurking admiration for the distinctive, unpredictable woman. But to say that would be to undervalue the tight ideation and editorship that birthed this anthology.Alex, a promising young theatre director, whose boyfriend was killed while intervening to protect a woman in a street brawl, moves to Edinburgh to start a new life and takes on a job teaching in a unit for children expelled from the regular state system. And in The Furies Parker finds himself fighting to protect two more women as the city of Portland shuts down in the face of a global pandemic, but it may be that his clients are more capable of taking care of themselves than anyone could have imagined . Late in the book, Alex is being groomed to take over as director of the Unit when Robert retires, which seems hardly plausible bearing in mind she's barely qualified to be teaching there in the first place. And if they get a little carried away in the process, what’s a little extra blood and guts in the grand scheme of things? She was charged with murder, and planned to invoke a “ stand your ground” defense — a statute that permits the use of lethal force against deadly threats.

I enjoyed the sense of inclusivity and representation, the richness that came with so many different perspectives exploring identity, gender, sexuality, patriarchy, femininity, motherhood, ageing, and more. Dazed by grief, Alex fails to recognise that her emotional involvement with this particular class is becoming problematic. It highlights how, from a cellular level, the most basic minute way, we were indoctrinated to make ourselves occupy as small a space as possible because that is how the world is.An intriguing range of stories around protest, folk-lore, transformation, fairytale and historic fiction. Ali Smith’s Spitfire is a different look at a mother, where the narrator realises there is much about her parents she’ll never know, with their memories of wartime often being filtered or unsaid. Hachette Australia acknowledges and pays our respects to the past, present and future Traditional Owners and Custodians of Country throughout Australia and recognises the continuation of cultural, spiritual and educational practices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. These three immersive narratives follow Brittany Smith, a young woman from Stevenson, Alabama, who killed a man she said raped her but was denied the protection of the Stand-Your-Ground law; Angoori Dahariya, leader of a gang in Uttar Pradesh, India, dedicated to avenging victims of domestic abuse; and Cicek Mustafa Zibo, a fighter in a thousands-strong all-female militia that battled ISIS in Syria. The Amber Fury is a book I remembered fondly and have long considered a favourite, despite the fact that my review at the time – published on my now-defunct blog – contained quite a lot of criticism.