Join us to welcome author Joanna Miller to talk about The Eights, her novel following the first female students ever admitted to Oxford University in the 1920s
Monday 7th September
6:30pm
Above the Bookshop
They knew they were changing history. They didn’t know they would change each other.
Oxford, 1920.
For the first time in its 1,000-year history, the world’s most famous university has admitted female students. Giddy with dreams of equality, education and emancipation, four young women move into neighbouring rooms on Corridor Eight and find themselves thrust into an unlikely, life-affirming friendship. They have come here from all walks of life, but Dora, Beatrice, Otto and Marianne all long to move on from the Great War, whose ghosts, grief, and secrets still feel very real indeed.
But Oxford is a place caught between tradition and change, where centuries of misogyny and exclusion clash with the promise of new freedoms. And as the group navigate this tumultuous moment in time under the city’s dreaming spires, their friendship will become more important than ever.
Joanna Miller was raised in Cambridge and studied English at Exeter College, Oxford. After a decade working in education, she set up an award-winning poetry gift business. She has recently graduated from Oxford again, with a diploma in creative writing. She lives with her husband and three children in Hertfordshire.
The Eights, Joanna’s first novel, tells the story of the first women to study alongside men at Oxford. Described by The Times as both ‘sparkling’ and ‘inspiring’, it was shortlisted for the East Anglian Book Awards and longlisted for the HWA’s Debut Crown. The Eights has been published in over twenty countries to date and was recently selected for the Queen’s Reading Room.