'A feminist Western about a world in which women's worth and right to live are determined by the vagaries of fertility. Set in an alternate past, one all too similar to our today, OUTLAWED is a masterpiece' R.O. Kwon
This absorbing feminist western plucks the greatest conceits of the genre - the tension between individual freedom and society, the romance of the Old West marred by its inherent violence - and turns them on their heads . . . Anna North skewers the machismo traditionally championed by outlaws, and gives us instead resilient women who dress, rob and kill as men, but have all the burdens and forbearance of rejected women . . . written with careful prose that lingers lovingly on the details of convalescence, and luxuriating in its surroundings: the jackrabbits that hide behind jagged rocks, the smell of sage in Powder country . . . Outlawed shares concerns with The Handmaid's Tale and The Crucible, but is distinctly itself . . This is first a moving examination of how the marginalised find friendship in an indifferent world and only second, a western. John Wayne's characters had the luxury of self-imposed isolation; these outlaws must stick together or die
