What happens when the author of the bestselling, agenda-resetting phenomenon Invisible Women is hit with her own fertility crisis just as the world is becoming preoccupied with a global one – and increasingly convinced that rolling back women’s rights is the answer?

We live in polarised times, but there seems to be one thing that most people agree on: plummeting birth-rates are largely the fault of women. Selfish, career-addled, cat-obsessed women. It stands to reason, then, that the answer to our baby-making problems must involve reining in these childless cat ladies. But, asks Caroline Criado Perez, what if we’ve got this all wrong?

As she navigates her own fertility struggles, and arrives at a diagnosis of early menopause, Criado Perez is confronted at every turn with the wider crisis. With humour, heart and her signature deft handling of data, she takes in a fertility landscape full of punishing contradictions: women chastised for failing to procreate while poor maternity care, inflexible workplaces, inaccessible fertility treatment and incoherent policies make motherhood harder than ever. She interrogates the demonisation of menopause and our horror of ageing in a female body. And she asks: what would happen if we stopped blaming women, and started listening to the evidence?

Wide-ranging, hard-hitting, myth-busting and deeply personal, Barren reveals what’s really going on in the fertility crisis – and how our response to it could determine the future for us all.

'Criado Perez has a genius for seeing things that the rest of us miss' GUARDIAN

© Caroline Criado Perez 2027 (P) Penguin Audio 2027