Author(s): Alice Albinia

Novel

A mysterious death, a band of women and a remote island where anything is possible...

"Fantastic - a wonderful book. With intelligence, wit and zest, Cwen's matriarchal dream...offers a bold vision of an alternative future, teases at our deep past and subtly weaves together our environment and gender" - Lily Cole

On an unnamed archipelago off the east coast of Britain, the impossible has come to pass. Women control the civic institutions. Decide how the islands' money is spent. Run the businesses. Tend to their families. Teach the children hope for a better world. They say that this gynotopia is Eva Levi's life's work, and that now she has disappeared, it will be destroyed. But they don't know about Cwen.

Cwen has been here longer than the civilisation she has returned to haunt. The clouds are her children, and the waves. Her name has ancient roots, reaching down into the earth and halfway around the world. The islands she inhabits have always belonged to women. And she will do anything she can to protect them.

This remarkable novel is a portrait of female power and female potential, both to shelter and to harm. What are we? Islanders or mainlanders, migrants or landowners, men or women, past or future? Or a mixture of them all? And how do we make sense of these islands we call home?

Fantastic - a wonderful book. With intelligence, wit and zest, Cwen's matriarchal dream...offers a bold vision of an alternative future, teases at our deep past and subtly weaves together our environment and gender' - Lily Cole

On an unnamed archipelago off the east coast of Britain, the impossible has come to pass. Women control the civic institutions. Decide how the islands' money is spent. Run the businesses. Tend to their families. Teach the children hope for a better world. They say that this gynotopia is Eva Levi's life's work, and that now she has disappeared, it will be destroyed. But they don't know about Cwen.

Cwen has been here longer than the civilisation she has returned to haunt. The clouds are her children, and the waves. Her name has ancient roots, reaching down into the earth and halfway around the world. The islands she inhabits have always belonged to women. And she will do anything she can to protect them.

This remarkable novel is a portrait of female power and female potential, both to shelter and to harm. What are we? Islanders or mainlanders, migrants or landowners, men or women, past or future? Or a mixture of them all? And how do we make sense of these islands we call home?

Review: Magical, rich and magnificent, Cwen leads us from past to the present through a cast of majestic women. Exploring and reigniting the feminine might and its unbreakable connection with Mother Nature. -- Maxine Peake
A clever, strange and wonderful book, which brims with mystery. A group of women recount their past and present stories, revealing their visions of the future. Cwen by Alice Albinia is a rare book, bold and powerful. -- Xiaolu Guo
A wild, original, sure-footed feminist reimagining of the present and the past that brushes up against the mythical. It reminds us, eloquently and passionately, what is or can be possible, and in its depiction of a revolution becomes a revolutionary book itself. Beautiful work. -- Neel Mukherjee
A phenomenal novel showing us that learning to love our female selves is essential for survival. Alice Albinia's diverse cast, from ancient Britain to contemporary Pakistan, step up to support each other, take down patriarchy and create a new collective story -- Farhana Yamin, Environmental Lawyer, Woman's Hour Power List: Our Planet
I loved everything about Cwen, a fable that is filled with wisdom but leavened with humour, balancing the light and dark, and expressing female fury as well as tenderness. -- Ceridwen Dovey

Author Biography: Alice Albinia is the prize-winning author of two books, Empires of the Indus and a novel, Leela's Book. RLF Fellow at King's College London, she has spent the past seven years travelling around the edges of Britain, from Orkney to Anglesey, piecing together ancient, medieval and modern tales of islands ruled by women, research that has inspired both this novel and a work of non-fiction, The Britannias, due to be published by Allen Lane in 2022.