Kate Walbert's latest book "A Short History of Women", reviewed earlier this summer on the front-page of the New York Times Sunday Book Review, is a critically acclaimed novel following the women of the Townsend family and their lives writ large.

 

 

"Nearly everything about Kate Walbert's new novel is wickedly smart, starting with the title: "A Short History of Women." Does it connote modesty or grandeur? "Short" sounds modest. "History" sounds grand - grandiose, in fact, when affixed to a work of fiction. But "Women" clinches it: modest, then. After all, what more trifling subject could one elect to research? Such, at any rate, is the prevailing view in the world inhabited by Walbert's characters - all five generations of them. One of the book's accomplishments is that it persuades us that this sentiment holds no less currency in 21st- century America than it did in late Victorian England. But Walbert's primary concerns - unlike those of some of her characters - aren't political. Her writing wears both its intelligence and its ideology lightly. No manifesto, this is a gorgeously wrought and ultimately wrenching work of art." -Leah Hager Cohen, The New York Times 

 

Hardcover $24.00