For me, the most terrifying takeaway from Nuclear War: A Scenario is the misplaced faith we have in leaders, safeguards and protocols. Leaders make mistakes, or simply can’t think fast enough to keep up with events. Safeguards fail, or never worked in the first place. And negotiated protocols are forgotten or ignored, (even simple ones such as – if the hotline rings, answer it!).

Throw in a mad despot, a few missed opportunities in the early, crucial moments of a nuclear missile launch, then compound that with hubris and alpha male chest-beating, and, in Jacobsen’s extensively researched scenario, within 72 minutes most of humanity is dead or dying.

The stories of three women living in three different centuries – one on trial for witchcraft, one caged in her home during World War II and one trying to escape the bonds of an abusive relationship in the present day – form the narrative backbone of Weyward, Emilia Hart’s stunning debut novel. Altha Weyward, Violet Ayre and Kate Ayre are related by blood: they are all Weyward women. And Weyward women have magic powers.

Once I started this novel I could not put it down. It’s not just the beautiful tapestry of the narrative; it’s Emilia’s lyrical writing. Every sentence crackles with life.

In early February I attended a wonderful writers’ retreat. One of the workshops, led by the successful romance writer Annabel Monaghan, focussed on creating memorable characters in fiction. Her advice (paraphrased) was: give your characters an emotional wound - one that guides and misguides their actions and reactions. All your characters, she counselled, need a wound. Even your villains. Instinctively, I’d given my protagonist and my main secondary characters wounds. But my antagonist? I’d long felt she was a bit 2D, yet I wasn’t sure how to fix that.

Nativism and extremist politics are on the rise in many democracies. Dark times are coming.

Like many of my colleagues and friends, I’d been actively avoiding thinking about this. When I did, I felt numb. Or defeatist. Maybe these feelings spur other writers to creative heights, but they made me want to crawl into bed and pull the covers over my head.

In early November, by coincidence, I borrowed Clare Mulley’s fabulous The Spy Who Loved: the Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville from the Toronto Public Library. As soon as I read the final page I needed another fix. That came in the form of Code Name Lise: the True Story of the Woman Who Became WWII’s most Decorated Spy. I am now halfway through Sonia Purnell’s 2019 A Woman of No Importance: the Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win WWII.

They are all eye-opening books about women who made a difference. Women who, faced with dark times, did not despair. They acted.  

In a way, their actions saved me as well.