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The fiction did not arrive from nowhere. The nonfiction sounded the note first. In 2018, in the immediate wake of MeToo, three books landed almost at once, Rebecca Traister’s ‘Good and Mad’, Soraya Chemaly’s ‘Rage Becomes Her’ and Brittney Cooper’s ‘Eloquent Rage’, each arguing that women’s anger was not a defect to be managed but a legitimate and even revolutionary force. Fiction took up the case and dramatised it, abandoning the old demand that a heroine be pleasant. A political climate that has left a great many women feeling vulnerable and unheard sharpened the appetite, and social media handed it a megaphone. Above all, the books offer catharsis. To read a woman raging freely on the page is a release valve for the anger that real life still quietly punishes women for showing. The genre’s refusal to make its women tidy or moral is precisely its draw, since a reader long told to smile finds, on the page at last, someone who simply will not.