Rachel Hills is the author of The Sex Myth: The Gap Between Our Fantasies and Reality. Here she tells us the last five books she read.

Only Ever Yours by Louise O’Neill

Louise and I have followed each other on Twitter for about a year, and after seeing the fantastic reviews her book was getting in her native Ireland, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it once it was published internationally. Only Ever Yours weighs in at more than 400 pages, but I devoured it in a day. It’s a science fiction dystopia in the mould of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, set in a post-climate change world where women have stopped being conceived naturally, and are genetically engineered and raised to be Companions, Concubines, and Chastities instead. But what’s most remarkable about it isn’t that it shows what our world could become, but how it illuminates the way the world already is.

Freedom Fallacy: The Limits of Liberal Feminism edited by Miranda Kiraly and Meagan Tyler

I read about this book on The Conversation a couple of months ago and was immediately intrigued. A collection of essays from radical feminists across least three continents, it looks at how popular feminism has been drained of its political ‘bite’, to be more a label or a fashion statement than a coherent philosophy. It also critiques contemporary feminist assumptions: in the particular, the notion that any choice a woman makes is ‘feminist’, so long as she is the person making it. I’m still making my way through it, and while I don’t agree with everything in the book – my copy is marked up with its share of ????s and really??s – I appreciate the complex and challenging politics it presents.

God Help The Child by Toni Morrison

Morrison’s new novella, about an LA woman named ‘Bride’ whose dark skin sees her neglected by her mother as a child and embraced by the fashion industry as an adult, contains some beautiful turns of phrase and astute observations about race and colourism.

Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own by Kate Bolick

I took a little longer to pick this book up than I thought I would. While I’m fascinated by the changing status of single women, I’d heard that Spinster was more of a literary history focused on the women writers who inspired Bolick (most of whom weren’t actually spinsters), and I wasn’t sure if it was a book for me. I’m so glad I bought it though, because it is a beautiful, beautiful book; less about singledom per se (hence some of the crotchety reviews) than about what it means to carve out a life on your own terms, independent of the expectations that have been set out for you. I found myself identifying strongly with Bolick’s search for a Big Life, inspired by her historical ‘awakeners’, and just a little envious of her remarkable skill as a writer.

Hot Little Hands by Abigail Ulman

Ulman and I share a publisher, so I was fortunate to receive a copy of Hot Little Hands before it hit bookstores. A collection of short stories about young women on the brink of adulthood, I found it emotionally rich and stark and devastating all at the same time. ‘Warm-Ups,’ about a group of teenage Russian gymnasts who travel to the United States for a competition, left me needing to lay on the couch for a good half hour to recover.

Rachel Hills is our featured author for August. Find out more here.