Unreasonable Women: Three Stories of Violence, Imprisonment, and Extraordinary Survival

Chosen as a Recommended Summer Read by the Boston Globe and Notable New Nonfiction by Daily Kos

A groundbreaking account of how the legal system punishes those it purports to protect, told through the stories of three unforgettable women

When award-winning journalist Justine van der Leun began researching the issue of criminalized survival, she was astonished to see women being imprisoned for protecting themselves against abuse. This sparked an intensive, years-long investigation into how survivors are targeted for prosecution, leading her to collect more than a thousand personal accounts from women's prisons across America.

In Unreasonable Women, van der Leun tells the propulsive, shocking, and intimate stories of three extraordinary women who, finding themselves caught in the direst circumstances, had to kill to survive. Tanisha is a spirited Michigan mother determined to help authorities solve a cold case, whatever the consequences. Jema is a softhearted Missouri factory worker struggling to keep her family together while navigating a dangerous relationship. TC is a bold Californian trying to escape generations of trauma and a toxic family environment. In each case, the women's childhood abuse was replicated in adulthood--until they were forced to make an impossible choice.

A work of literary reportage that reads like a crime novel, Unreasonable Women is the result of seven years of unprecedented research and on-the-ground reporting in U.S. prisons. It is the story of women and violence in America, a wake-up call about a broken system, and the moving narrative of three women who find hope and humanity in the unlikeliest of places.

Justine van der Leun is a journalist and the author of several books, including We Are Not Such Things. She is also the host of the podcast Believe Her. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, New York Magazine, Harper's Magazine, The New Republic, and The Guardian. She has received fellowships from New America, the Emerson Collective, and PEN America, among others. She lives in New York.