Cwen

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