The Furies

Women around the world are fighting back against their oppressors, and these powerful stories - conveyed with rigour and compassion - will leave readers fired up, furious and raring to join the cause

Kirsten Miller, author of The Change

These stories of women's vengeance are both harrowing and thrilling. Rosa Parks' defiance was a carefully planned political act; these begin as the opposite - sheer rage. This gripping, inflaming book, itself an act of fury, shows how revenge can transmute into politics or be crushed by it

Larissa MacFarquhar, author of Strangers Drowning

The Furies is a remarkable and important exploration - reported with deep rigour and care - of what justice looks like for women who have been stripped of power and are trying to reclaim it

Rachel Aviv, author of Strangers to Ourselves

The Furies is a glorious excavation of women's rage. But it is also a cautionary tale of how the world treats women who dare to fight back, to assert their rights, to scream into the dark void of endless discrimination and inequality. These three women will fill you with hope, despair, and yes, fury

Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises

Drawing on in-depth interviews over many years, Emmy Award-winning journalist Elizabeth Flock creates vivid profiles of three women who responded to abuse with violence and vengeance.…. Stirring narratives of defiance

Kirkus Reviews

Flock has a novelist’s knack for creating suspense, her reporting is thorough, and her prose is moving . . . This one will stick with readers

Publishers Weekly

Flock brings rigor and granularity to her reporting . . . the juxtapositions in The Furies provoke thought. We tend to see violent women as deviants, but as Flock recounts the stories of Smith, Dahariya and Zibo, their longings and indulgences, their fears, motivations and faults, she shows how mistaken this notion is. The violence in her book is committed by women who are in many ways perfectly ordinary . . . Flock has done a service by portraying her subjects’ human complexity

Sanam Maher, New York Times

Flock brings the gripping stories of Brittany Smith, Angoori Dahariya, and Cicek Mustafa Zibo to life with vivid detail and in-depth research . . . Her compelling narrative will resonate with those who seek to live in a more feminist, egalitarian society

Booklist

This is an arresting, deeply reported new book, which considers three case studies of women . . . who, when faced with institutional failures of various kinds, took matters into their own hands . . . Flock is a patient reporter who embeds with her subjects long enough to write about their inner worlds with authority and nuance

Rachel Monroe, The Washington Post

Sensitively reported . . . There is a deep compassion in Flock's account

Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker

Particularly incisive is Flock’s assessment of the ways so-called justice systems pathologize and punish women . . . Flock’s masterstroke [is the] immediacy and occasionally unnerving potency of her mythmaking . . . [The Furies] feels hopeful, even rebellious

Emily Ann Zisko, Los Angeles Review of Books

Engrossing . . . the vividness and directness of The Furies is distinctly filmic . . . a powerful and determinedly unsentimental book that exposes engrained injustice against women on three continents

Rosemary Goring, Scottish Herald

Flock has written an important and deeply moving book . . . She is a dogged investigative reporter

Sara Wheeler, The Telegraph

The Furies delicately unpicks the lives of these three flawed, brave women in an engaging as well as thoughtful way . . . Elizabeth Flock’s respect for her own story, as well as the stories told by Smith, Dahariya and Zibo, are testimony to her acceptance of the complexity of all our lives

Joanna Bourke, TLS