Lessons in Chemistry

Elizabeth Zott is a research chemist in the early 1960s, working on an all-male team with no intention of treating her as an equal. Bonnie Garmus follows her out of the laboratory and, improbably, onto daytime television, where Elizabeth hosts a cooking programme and insists on teaching chemistry to her audience along the way. The novel moves between comedy and real anger at how women were shut out of scientific work, with Calvin Evans, a brilliant and solitary colleague, at the centre of its emotional line. It has sold in the millions and been adapted for the screen. Where the value sits: • A 1960s setting used to examine women's exclusion from science • Comic and serious registers held together across the narrative • Adapted into a major streaming series • An award-winning bestseller with a very wide readership For readers of literary book club fiction and character-led historical novels, available at Boipoka.