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Digital Book Club: March 2025

This month’s Digital Book Club title is A History of Women in 101 Objects by Annabelle Hirsch

This is a neglected history. Not a sweeping, definitive, exhaustive history of the world but something quieter, more intimate and particular. A single journey, picked out in 101 objects, through the fascinating, too-often-overlooked, manifold histories of women.

Open up this cabinet of curiosities and you'll find objects that have been highly esteemed – even, like the Bayeux tapestry, fought over by nations – and others that are humble and domestic. Some (like a sixteenth century glass dildo) are objects of female pleasure, some (a thumbscrew) of female subjugation. There are artefacts of women celebrated by history and of women unfairly forgotten by it; examples of female rebellion and of self-revelation; objects that are inspiring, curious or (like radium-laced chocolate) just fundamentally ill-conceived.

Through the variety and nuance in all these 101 objects, Annabelle Hirsch has created a new history - teeming, unexpected, witty and always illuminating. This overdue corrective reveals what a healed femur says about civilisation, what men have to fear from hat pins, and it shows that the past has always been as complicated and fascinating as the women that peopled it.

A History of Women in 101 is available on BorrowBox as an eBook and eAudiobook with no waiting.

Previous titles

February 2025 - Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart
January 2025 - The Illuminations by Andrew O’Hagan
December 2024 - The Twelve Days of Murder by Andreina Cordani
November 2024 - The Library of Heartbeats by Laura Imai Messina
October 2024 - A House of Ghosts by W.C. Ryan
September 2024 - The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
August 2024 - Bad Men by Julie Mae Cohen
July 2024 - Another Life by Kristin Hannah
June 2024 - Big Swiss by Jean Beagin
May 2024 – The Colony by Audrey Magee
April 2024 - Happy Head by Josh Silver
March 2024 - Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry

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Last updated 01 March 2025