The Piano

"In the award-winning film The Piano, writer/director Jane Campion created a story so original and powerful it fascinated millions of moviegoers. This novel stands independent of the film, exploring the mysteries of Ada's muteness, the secret of her daughter's conception, the reason for her strange marriage and the past lives of Baines and Stewart.

The Piano is the poetic and erotic story of Victorian woman's sexual journey. Through her silence one perceives the strength of her will - a will that is so strange and strong that she is afraid of what it might do. "

The Old Religion

"Set in the American Deep South in 1914, and based on a true story, this is a twisted and vicious tale of race, religion and sex, in which an innocent Jewish man is accused and found guilty of a terrible crime. "

The Nerve: The 1998 Virage Book of Writing Women

"Co-authored by: Maggie Hannan, Debbie Taylor, Pippa Little

Virago now joins forces with Writing Women - the journal that launched Helen Dunmore, Janice Galloway and Kathleen Jamie, to publish this new annual anthology.

In this, the best of new women writers of 1998, the sensuality, the eating, the loving that has always characterised women's writing is combined with a dangerous edginess: the elegant Mrs Beecham convulses with secret pleasure at the hairdressers; barefoot Camilla makes her lover drink her blood; bald Eva, with no eyebrows or palm-prints, has a terrible secret; Dr O serves vodka in a jagged bean tin. Ranging in age from 20 to 50, mainly from the north, these authors fly in the face of the idea that exciting new fiction is the monopoly of young Londoners. Selected from over 3,000 submissions, here are 12 new prose writers and 12 new poets whose work redefines 'women's writing' at the end of the 90s. Published with the help of Northern Arts. "