Bibliofemme Bookclub An Irish Bookclub

South African-born Gillian Slovo is the daughter of two extraordinary people – journalist and political activist Ruth First, murdered in Mozambique in 1982, and Joe Slovo, head of the South African communist party and one of the founders of the ANC’s military arm. Both privileged white people in the turbulent South Africa of the Fifties

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It’s amazing how, when you get pregnant, your first reaction is to read and inwardly absorb as much information as possible, much of which is incomprehensible and terrifying. I’m lucky in that I have a friend who has gone before me – already has a baby, that is – and this is the book she gave me.

Written by five friends who

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When I recently discovered I was pregnant (and after I got over the shock), I did what most first time expectant mothers do – ran out and bought lots of pregnancy books. While most of these books are useful, the majority of them scare the living daylights out of me, and my ability to retain information seems to disappear as quickly as I turn

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An extraordinarily committed war journalist and novelist, Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998) also found the time in her wide-ranging and busy life to become Ernest Hemingway’s second of many wives. And it is for that, rather than her own writing, that she is remembered. A truly ambitious woman, this was a fact that she found intolerable while she

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