Enjoy five of our favourite novels by women from our front table and celebrate some of the best female contemporary writers. Sarah Hall's Helm, tracking two thousand years of English history through the voice of the wind, is regarded as her best work yet, while Claire Adam's novel about a mother looking for her adopted daughter is already Booker-longlisted. Defne Suman's The Last Apartment in Istanbul is an uplifting intergenerational look at twentieth-century Cyprus, while Notre Dame is Burning's innovative prose style is widely acclaimed. Paula Byrne's Six Weeks by the Sea pays homage to the great pioneer of female writers, Jane Austen, in a novel which takes Austen's own family dramas and places them inside a pastiche of Georgian satire.