‘Ashley is a much-needed force.’ Jameela Jamil

‘Essential reading for every woman’ Em Clarkson

‘Raw and gloriously unapologetic … a rallying cry for every woman’ Carol Vorderman

‘A smart, brave and unapologetic reclaiming of female power’ Katie Piper OBE

Bossy. Frigid. Spinster. Sl*t. Mumsy. Milf. Bimbo. The English language has a seemingly infinite number of judgemental and hypocritical words to describe women and their life choices. We can’t win, no matter what we do.

Whether it’s on the sofa of ITV’s This Morning or online, Ashley James is a fierce advocate for women. In Bimbo, she unpacks the labels that box women in, and the systems that keep them there. From ‘bossy’ little girls, ‘tarty’ teens, to mothers who ‘let themselves go’, and ‘left-on-the-shelf’ single women, Ashley dissects the systems that try to confine us and asks: what if we broke free?

Told through raw personal stories, humour and with a fierce feminist lens, this is a battle cry for every woman who’s ever felt too much ― or not enough. This is a call to women to stop shrinking, stop competing, and start rising ― together.

This is a book to be shared, discussed, and cherished, and a beacon of hope for a better future.

‘Ignore this Bimbo at your peril.’ Ellie Taylor

‘The book I’ve been waiting for my whole life.’ Bryony Gordon

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‘In one short and sly book after another, [Levy] writes about characters navigating swerves of history and sexuality, and the social and personal rootlessness that accompanies both’ Atlantic

Who was Gertrude Stein?

Avant-garde American poet and art collector who made her home in Paris, godmother of modernism, queer icon, friend to Picasso and Hemingway, self-declared genius ― a writer who has baffled readers and critics for a century.

And why does she matter?

The narrator of Deborah Levy’s latest, dazzling fiction has gone to Paris to find out. There she meets Eva with the blinding gaze, an artist in a long-distance marriage, and Fanny, a sexually adventurous financier; together they cook, walk, read and argue late into the nights.

As Paris sweeps her along in its ceaseless flow, she thinks – about what we have to lose to become modern, navigating anxiety, living with uncertainty, angry fathers, making a new life in another country, art and language – how all these things looked to Gertrude Stein in the early days of the twentieth century, and how they look to her and her friends in the early twenty-first.

This is a book about how we put ourselves together― an exhilarating, witty, cosmopolitan meditation on the pleasures and challenges of friendship, desire and living with other people. But it is also crashes through genre to create an inspired portrait of Stein herself: a writer who experimented fearlessly with a new way of living and who wrestled herself free from the nineteenth century to invent a brand-new way of looking at the world.

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