Ethical issues: prostitution & sex industry – The Bell Bookshop

The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey

Emma — Thu, 07 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

WINNER OF THE CWA ALCS GOLD DAGGER FOR NON-FICTION’Brilliantly summons up one girl’s life, dreams and suffering. It’s ingenious history writing’ Mail on Sunday’A gripping, unputdownable masterpiece’ – Hallie Rubenhold, author of The Five’Extraordinary’ – Guardian’Historical writing does not get any better than this’ Matt Houlbrook, author of The Prince of Tricksters1910, Wellington, New Zealand. Lydia Harvey is sixteen, working long hours for low pay, when a glamorous couple invite her to Buenos Aires. She accepts – and disappears.1910, London, England. Amid a global panic about sex trafficking, detectives are tracking a ring of international criminals when they find a young woman on the streets of Soho who might be the key to cracking the whole case.As more people are drawn into Lydia’s life and the trial at the Old Bailey, the world is being reshaped into a new, global era. Choices are being made – about who gets to cross borders, whose stories matter and what justice looks like – that will shape the next century. In this immersive account, historian Julia Laite traces Lydia Harvey through the fragments she left behind to build an extraordinary story of aspiration, exploitation and survival – and one woman trying to build a life among the forces of history.

The Right to Sex

Emma — Thu, 19 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERBLACKWELL’S NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021Essential lessons on the world we live in, from one of our greatest young thinkers – a guide to what everybody is talking about today‘Unparalleled and extraordinary . . . A bracing revivification of a crucial lineage in feminist writing’ JIA TOLENTINO‘I believe Amia Srinivasan’s work will change the world’ KATHERINE RUNDELL‘Rigorously researched, but written with such spark and verve. The best non-fiction book I have read this year‘ PANDORA SYKES————————-How should we talk about sex? It is a thing we have and also a thing we do; a supposedly private act laden with public meaning; a personal preference shaped by outside forces; a place where pleasure and ethics can pull wildly apart. Since #MeToo many have fixed on consent as the key framework for achieving sexual justice. Yet consent is a blunt tool. To grasp sex in all its complexity – its deep ambivalences, its relationship to gender, class, race and power – we need to move beyond ‘yes and no’, wanted and unwanted. We need to interrogate the fraught relationships between discrimination and preference, pornography and freedom, rape and racial injustice, punishment and accountability, pleasure and power, capitalism and liberation. We need to rethink sex as a political phenomenon. Searching, trenchant and extraordinarily original, The Right to Sex is a landmark examination of the politics and ethics of sex in this world, animated by the hope of a different one.

The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey

Emma — Thu, 01 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

‘A gripping, unputdownable masterpiece’ Hallie Rubenhold, author of the Baillie Gifford prize-winning The Five’Ingenious history writing’ Mail on Sunday’Extraordinary’ Guardian’A masterwork’ Australian Book Review’Imaginative and compelling, impassioned and powerful, and deeply, deeply moving’ Matt Houlbrook, author of Prince of TrickstersLydia Harvey was meant to disappear. She was young and working class; she’d walked the streets, worked in brothels, and had no money of her own. In 1910, politicians, pimps, policemen and moral reformers saw her as just one of many ‘girls who disappeared’. But when she took the stand to give testimony at the trial of her traffickers, she ensured she’d never be forgotten. Historian Julia Laite traces Lydia’s extraordinary life from her home in New Zealand to the streets of Buenos Aires and safe houses of London. She also reveals the lives of international traffickers Antonio Carvelli and his mysterious wife Marie, the policemen who tracked them down, the journalists who stoked the scandal, and Eilidh MacDougall, who made it her life’s mission to help women who’d been abused and disbelieved. Together, they tell an immersive story of crime, travel and sexual exploitation, of lives long overlooked and forgotten by history, and of a world transforming into the 20th century.