With more women MPs at Westminster than ever before, here are ten inspirational political novels that would make any woman want to take to the hustings.

Persepolis

Marjane Satrapi

A spirited graphic novel, it took readers by surprise when it appeared, because it was the first glimpse of Iran, both before and after the Revolution, from a young woman's perspective.

Beloved

Tony Morrison

This Pulitzer prize-winning novel revolves around the murder of a baby girl by her mother, Sethe, who does not want her child to live the life of a slave she has endured. Utterly harrowing, but beautiful too.

The Abbess of Crewe

Muriel Spark

A glorious satire on the Watergate scandal, and of religious flummery, it is set in a nunnery where the would-be Mother Superior bugs the premises, to aid her election to the post. If only she had done the same for Holyrood and the Kirk.

The Color Purple

Alice Walker

Few novels so vividly capture the sense of being a powerless and invisible woman of African-American descent. It takes place in 1930s Georgia, and is told in the form of letters to God, by 14-year-old Celie. Repeatedly raped by her father, she has given birth to a girl and a son, both of whom he takes from her.

There but for the

Ali Smith

At a fashionable London dinner party Miles goes upstairs, locks himself in a room, and refuses to come out. For days. Weeks. Months. Smith has fun with the publicity circus that ensues, with admirers camping outside, and t-shirts and mugs bearing his name sold under the window.

Oryx and Crake

Margaret Atwood

In this dystopian version of the world, as it careers towards the environmental abyss, Atwood's vision of irreversible ruin and the doomed lovers in its midst is scarily believable.

The God of Small Things

Arundhati Roy

A sweeping novel that shows the caste system's utter callousness, but also addresses issues such as the post-colonial legacy of empire. It won the Man Booker prize and much acclaim, although in India some found its sexual explicitness unacceptable.

The Golden Notebook

Doris Lessing

Written in the form of four notebooks kept by the writer Anna Wulf, and covering the duration of her life, it is a wide-ranging work of political comment, whose subjects include nascent feminism, and a critique of communism. It also suggests a link between mental ill health and the breakdown of society.

The Hunger Angel

Herta Muller

Winner of the Nobel Prize, Muller writes often about her Romanian birthplace when under Ceausescu. The novel is about a young man who is sent to a Soviet labour concentration camp for five years, as was the author's mother. Based on interviews with survivors of such punishment, it is chillingly bleak.

We Have Been Warned

Naomi Mitchison

None of Mitchison's provocative fiction was as red-hot as this. An account of sexual behaviour including rape and abortion, following a visit to the Soviet Union, it was initially roundly rejected by publishers. After she toned it down, it was published to widespread condemnation in 1935. Apparently it "alienated readers on the left and horrified those on the political right". No small feat.

BY ROSEMARY GORING