We weren’t sure what to title this episode. It was clear that there was a collective theme to these books, but our original idea of feminist dystopia wasn’t quite right. I ended up at Gender-Interrogating Speculative Fiction, but Nicole told me (correctly) that is way too long and complicated. You can see what we’ve settled on above. These thought-provoking books about gender roles in our society are sometimes hard to read, with very intense upsetting scenes and character trauma. Nevertheless, the rewards are great: reading these books can prompt you to re-examine some of the accepted truths about our society today.

Listen to the episode on your favourite podcast platform by searching for Read This Next or watch on our YouTube channel. Place your TPBL holds for print books through our online catalogue, or search for eBooks through cloudLibrary. For full details about these titles and all the books we’ve mentioned on the show, go to https://www.goodreads.com/tbpl_readthisnext