A Short History of Women

NOMINATED FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE
A profoundly moving portrait of the complicated legacies of mothers and daughters, A Short History of Women chronicles five generations of women from the close of the nineteenth century through the early years of the twenty-first.

Beginning in 1914 at the deathbed of Dorothy Trevor Townsend, a suffragette who starves herself for the cause, the novel traces the echoes of her choice in the stories of her descendants—a brilliant daughter who tries to escape the burden of her mother’s infamy; a granddaughter who chooses a conventional path, only to find herself disillusioned; a great-granddaughter who wryly articulates the free-floating anxiety of post-9/11 Manhattan. In a kaleidoscope of characters and with a richness of imagery, emotion, and wit, A Short History of Women is a thought-provoking and vividly original narrative that crisscrosses a century—a book for "any woman who has ever struggled to find her own voice; to make sense of being a mother, wife, daughter, and lover" (Associated Press).

Kate Walbert is the author of His Favorites, The Sunken Cathedral, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2015 and BBC ten best, A Short History of Women, chosen by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2009 and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Our Kind, a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction in 2004; The Gardens of Kyoto, winner of the 2002 Connecticut Book Award in Fiction; and Where She Went, a collection of linked stories and a New York Times Notable Book. She has had fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library. Her short fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize stories.