"From Ada Lovelace to Florence Nightingale, Rosalind Franklin to Tu Youyou – discover the women who changed science forever
Imagine a scientist. Maybe they’re wearing a lab coat and safety goggles. Maybe they bear a passing resemblance to Albert Einstein. Most likely they’re a man. However, from radiation to climate change, DNA to computer code, pulsars to the Earth’s core – women have always been at the forefront of scientific discovery.
Reclaiming the legacy of twenty-one trailblazers, from ancient astronomer Hypatia to CRISPR pioneers Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, Dr Marieke Bigg charts a fresh history of science.
Learn how Ada Lovelace’s tumultuous upbringing inspired her to become the first computer programmer. Join Marie Curie as she becomes the University of Paris’s first female professor, discovers two elements and earns two Nobel prizes, all before the age of forty-five. Learn how Katherine Johnson launched the first American into space – defiant in the face of vast institutional racism.
A timely addition to the growing global conversation around the future of science – and who gets to shape it – A History of Science in 21 Women is a paradigm-shifting exploration of the scientists who history tried, and failed, to brush under the carpet, and why their stories still matter today."
"Jacky ‘The Beetle’ McKenzie is, if you ask her, the most sensible and rational person in the world. Unfortunately, her ordinary and the rest of the world’s ordinary don’t mix. To the rest of the world, she is belligerent, weird, obsessive, angry and volatile.
Always, in the background, husband Mark and girlfriend Clarissa have one eye on each other, both asking the same question – which of them will she push too far first? Which of them will abandon her, and which will be left to pick up the pieces?
A Scarab Where the Heart Should Be invites us into the mind of one of the world’s few true individuals as she embarks on her quest to streamline her life into the most perfect version it can be. Part visionary architect, part whirlwind of furious artistic chaos, but always, unwaveringly, searingly true to herself, this is a case study on what happens when obstinate obsession comes up against an unyielding society."
"WAITING FOR TED charts the destruction of Rosalind and Ted’s relationship at the hands of an expensive chaise longue. Rosie comes from a wealthy, upperclass background. She dreams of being a traditional housewife to her big strong working man, cooking, tending the house and instagramming her perfect life. But she also needs to fill her house with things that she can Instagram, so when Ted bans her from spending any more of her father’s money on her ‘work’ as an interior design influencer until she’s actually earning, she begins to scheme – only to watch her schemes unravel, and the rest of her life with them.
Told in a series of reflections over the course of an evening spent waiting for Ted, Rosie charts her relationship’s downfall, how she drifted from her only friend (who she never really liked anyway), how she contributed to the breakdown in her parents’ marriage, how she never really let Ted into her perfect world, how she drove them to their spectacular breakdown, and as she does it becomes increasingly clear to the reader that Ted may not be coming home at all."
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