Bryan and Mary Talbot have pedigree – she's a widely published academic, he's the author of comic-book classics including Alice in Sunderland. Their first collaboration, Dotter of Her Father's Eyes, about James Joyce's daughter Lucia, won the Costa biography prize. Their second, with illustrator Kate Charlesworth, is a tale of women's suffrage that begins in 1898, when its eponymous heroine joins the Pankhurst household as a seamstress. Sally gravitates towards the radical wing of the suffragette movement, encountering rallies, domestic violence, force-feeding and romance. There's a potent mix of hope and brutality here, hammering home the radicalism of those who fought for the vote and the self-satisfied power of those who resisted. It can feel didactic, but this is a very readable crusade. Flashes of colour (the red of Sally's hair; the purple, white and green of the women's union) illuminate Charlesworth's vivid black and white panels, and sparks of personal drama keep the narrative fires burning in a book that combines an academic attention to detail with passionate politics.