The Eights

They knew they were changing history. They didn't know they would change each other.

Oxford, 1920. For the first time in its 1,000-year history, the world’s most famous university has admitted female students. Giddy with dreams of equality, education and emancipation, four young women move into neighbouring rooms on Corridor Eight and find themselves thrust into an unlikely, life-affirming friendship. They have come here from all walks of life, but Dora, Beatrice, Otto and Marianne all long to move on from the Great War, whose ghosts, grief, and secrets still feel very real indeed.

But Oxford is a place caught between tradition and change, where centuries of misogyny and exclusion clash with the promise of new freedoms. And as the group navigate this tumultuous moment in time under the city’s dreaming spires, their friendship will become more important than ever.

‘A beautifully wrought story of women’s rights, freedom, love and experience. I couldn’t put it down’ Harriet Evans, author of The Treasures

‘I became completely involved in the lives of the four pioneering heroines whose friendship is the beating heart of the book’ Clare Chambers, author of Small Pleasures

Joanna Miller was raised in Cambridge and studied English at Exeter College, Oxford. After a decade working in education, she set up an award-winning poetry gift business. She has recently graduated from Oxford again, with a diploma in creative writing. She lives with her husband and three children in Hertfordshire. The Eights is her first novel.