Great read

If you read just one book this year make sure it’s Lessons in Chemistry. Clever, hilarious, thought-provoking, uplifting … I could go on. Although set in the 1960s, protagonist Elizabeth Zott is a woman for our times who challenges the status quo with the sort of resolve we all wish we had.

- JULIET RIEDEN

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, Doubleday

We first meet her as a reluctant TV star, hosting hit cooking show Supper at Six in which she presents the nightly meal prep as a chemistry lesson. Water is H2O, salt – sodium chloride … for Elizabeth’s passion isn’t cooking, she’s a scientist. The story of how she landed in this seemingly unsuitable job unfolds at a dazzling pace and is served up with a delicious side-order of kick-arse feminism.

Without giving too much away, Elizabeth’s upbringing was tough and her potentially brilliant academic career scuppered by sexual abuse. Then she falls hard for super geek Calvin Evans. He’s a genius scientist and rowing fanatic who has escaped his own dark childhood. As their souls entwine Calvin and Elizabeth look destined to set the science world on fire with their dog “Six-Thirty” by their sides. (This cheeky hound talks to the reader – trust me, it works!)

But when Calvin dies in a freak accident, Elizabeth is left grief-stricken and pregnant in an era when children out of wedlock and single mums are frowned upon.

“I purposely set the book in the ’60s because that’s when my mother was Elizabeth Zott’s age,” says Bonnie Garmus. “I wanted to salute that generation of overlooked housewives. Women spent their days cleaning, cooking, ironing, mowing the lawn – doing everything for everyone, and yet this work was completely dismissed. Now I realise so many of them had huge talents and dreams of their own.”