Our Better Natures

Our Better Natures is an elixir of hard-won inspiration and risky curiosity. Set against the tumult of the 1970s, this taut novel unfolds with elegant precision and vulnerability, examining the inner lives of a poet, a small-town housewife, and an activist all navigating change and choice as their known worlds collapse. Our Better Natures is a stunning meditation on hope, its fragile insistence, driven by Sophie Ward’s singular wit and astounding philosophical playfulness. It cements Ward’s place as one of our most inventive, inquisitive and alert novelists working today * MARGOT DOUAIHY *
Our Better Natures is potent and beguiling. It makes one see with a better eye – LAURA CARLIN
Our Better Natures is an absolute marvel - a marvel of ideas, full of intellectual delights; a marvel of construction that propels us toward the most unexpected - and inevitable - outcomes; a marvel of writing, elegant, poised, wise, achingly beautiful at times, but never pulling focus from the stories of the three women and the people around them; and a marvel of compassion. A truly magnificent creation – NANCY CRANE
An ambitious and earnest (in a good way) novel that demonstrates that even the most ‘ordinary’ of lives can, in their own small, significant way, change the world – Catherine Jarvie * Marie Claire UK *
Our Better Natures is a triumph of literary empathy, an intellectual adventure connecting Korean immigrants in the US midwest to the activist Andrea Dworkin in Amsterdam to the poet Muriel Rukeyser as she protests the Vietnam war. Sophie Ward miraculously joins each living, breathing dot of this unique novel to build a convincing picture of a turbulent, formative cultural and social moment * RICHARD BEARD *
‘Sophie Ward’s inventive novel… seamlessly integrates the real private and public lives of Andrea Dworkin and Muriel Rukeyser with the fictional world of Phyllis Patterson… Ward fleshes out her real-life characters with complete conviction, deftly threading their own words into the fabric of her fiction’ – Michael Arditti * Financial Times *
An ambitious, multivoiced account of second-wave feminism shot through with Korean flavours and celebrity cameos… Ward evokes the stages of womanhood with dark panache – Melissa Katsoulis * The Times *
[T]he strength of sympathetic engagement is what the novel has always done best, [and] Ward movingly demonstrates the need to use this to keep freeing ourselves, day after day – Lara Feigel * Guardian, ‘Book of the Day’ *
[Our Better Natures] tackles big ideas with verve while remaining alert to the multiple power dynamics shaping women’s lives – Claire Allfree * Daily Mail *
A captivating invocation of a moment of revolutionary zeal and hope, Our Better Natures invites us to consider what has been achieved since the 1970s - and what hasn’t. It is also a prescient reminder of the importance of testimony in the fight for justice, of individual stories. Eventually, they will be heard. * Irish Examiner *

Sophie Ward is an actor and writer. She is the author of Love and Other Thought Experiments, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020, and her second novel The Schoolhouse, which was shortlisted for the Polari Prize 2023. Sophie has a degree in Philosophy and Literature and a PhD from Goldsmiths on the use of narrative in philosophy of mind. She lives in London with her Korean-American wife.

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