Among my four reviewed books of three years ago there were three focusing on the lives of women. The 2008 historical novel The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie revolves around a sixteenth-century Indian princess whose good looks and charms made her the companion of powerful men and brought her from her native India via Florence to the Americas. Much less glamorous than hers is the life of the protagonist’s mother in the forgotten Austrian classic The Red House by Else Jerusalem because the renowned beauty is a prostitute in Vienna before 1900. In contrast, The Blue Flowers by Raymond Queneau is an experimental novel pacing through French history from the thirteenth century through the 1960s in a dream-like plot. In The Rose Petal Beach by Dorothy Koomson the seemingly perfect life of a woman turns into a nightmare after her husband’s arrest for attempted rape in Brighton of today.