Normal Women

EARLY PRAISE FOR NORMAL WOMEN ‘A brilliant, essential read … full of surprises … you’ll lose count of the number of things you learn about women and their skewed place in history as you read Philippa Gregory’s stunning Normal Women … The book reframes the past by telling the important stories of women that have been left out by so many male historians and diarists who, as she remarks, simply “amplified” themselves’ INDEPENDENT, five-star review ‘Gregory’s theme is that although women have always been regarded as naturally inferior, in reality they make the world go round. They are the “healthy, strong, intelligent, spiritual and sexual” beings who did everything: nurtured families, farms and businesses, dug graves, birthed babies, brought in harvests, staffed factories, led riots and held communities together…Gregory has the novelist’s eye for the quirky and the vivid; the wryness of a confident narrator. Normal Womenis a lasting work of social history’ THE TIMES, BOOK OF THE WEEK ‘Gregory has always put women centre stage in her historical fiction but this new nonfiction work strives to restore them to their rightful place in history, and in so doing radically reframe our national story. To an impressive extent, it succeeds’ OBSERVER ‘Philippa Gregory has been working on this book for more than 10 years, women have been waiting for this gratifying and informative acknowledgment for a thousand’ ADELE PARKS, PLATINUM MAGAZINE ‘Normal Women is lively, timely and gloriously energetic. Each page bursts with life, and every chapter swirls with personalities left out of traditional narratives of Britain’s past. Philippa Gregory has produced something rare and wonderful: a genuinely new history of our nation, with women at its beating heart’ DAN JONES