Clever Girl

The fifth novel from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Free Love , The Past and Late in the Day , Clever Girl is a tale of an ordinary life made extraordinary by the gifts of Tessa Hadley. Stella was a clever girl, everyone thought so. Living with her mother and rather unsatisfactory stepfather in suburban respectability she reads voraciously, smokes until her voice is hoarse and dreams of a less ordinary life. When she meets Val, he seems to her to embody everything she longs for - glamour, ideas, excitement and the thrill of the unknown. But these things come at a price and one that Stella despite all her cleverness doesn't realise until it is too late. 'Tessa Hadley writes like a dream' Daily Mail

The fifth novel from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Free Love , The Past and Late in the Day , Clever Girl is a tale of an ordinary life made extraordinary by the gifts of Tessa Hadley. Stella was a clever girl, everyone thought so. Living with her mother and rather unsatisfactory stepfather in suburban respectability she reads voraciously, smokes until her voice is hoarse and dreams of a less ordinary life. When she meets Val, he seems to her to embody everything she longs for - glamour, ideas, excitement and the thrill of the unknown. But these things come at a price and one that Stella despite all her cleverness doesn't realise until it is too late. 'Tessa Hadley writes like a dream' Daily Mail

A smart and incisive exploration of everyone's favorite dinosaur movie and the female dinosaurs who embody what it means to be angry, monstrous, and free The Jurassic Park series is one of the most famous and profitable cinematic experiences of all time, with an entire generation of people who have never known life without these CGI dinosaurs. But while the movie spectacle broke film and merchandising records, pioneered special effects, and made Jeff Goldblum into an unlikely sex symbol, it has also been re-envisioned as a classic of queer feminist storytelling. In Clever Girl , Hannah McGregor argues that the female-only dinosaurs of Jurassic Park are stand-ins for monstrous women, engineered by men to be intelligent, violent, and adaptive, and whose chaos resists the systems designed to control them. As they run wild through their prison, a profit-driven theme park, they destroy the men and structures who mistakenly believed in their own colonialist and capitalist power, showing the audience what it means to be angry, monstrous, and free. The velociraptors were not just jump scares for children, but also revelatory and predatory symbols of feminist rage. Clever girls, indeed. About the Pop Classics Series Short books that pack a big punch, Pop Classics offer intelligent, fun, and accessible arguments about why a particular pop phenomenon matters.