In Episode 5 of Gateway Books by Crestance, we remember the Mirabal sisters—symbols of courage under dictatorship. Through Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies, their letters, and Dedé Mirabal’s memoir Alive in Their Garden, we explore love, resistance, and sacrifice in the Dominican Republic under Trujillo’s brutal regime. Their legacy lives on in the fight for justice and truth.

In Episode 4 of Gateway Books by Crestance, we uncover the deadly consequences of fear and accusation during Norway’s 17th-century witch trials. Through The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave, the Malleus Maleficarum, and The Witches of Vardø by Ingrid Hale, we examine how hysteria, power, and silence led to tragedy—and how remembering these stories gives voice to those who were never heard.

In Episode 3 of Gateway Books by Crestance, we follow Frankie, a young nurse in Vietnam, in Kristin Hannah’s The Women, and uncover the real stories behind the era with The Movement by Clara Bingham and An Unfinished Love Story by Doris Kearns Goodwin. From war to protest to personal reckoning, this episode explores how the 60s and 70s reshaped a generation—and how those echoes still reach us today.

In Episode 2 of Gateway Books by Crestance, we journey through love, loss, and legacy with The Book of Everlasting Things by Aanchal Malhotra. Alongside it, we explore the real stories of Partition through her nonfiction works Remnants of Partition and Remnants of a Separation. Fiction and history intertwine to reveal how memories—and the objects that hold them—endure across generations.

In Episode 1, we explore the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley through Her Lost Words, pairing fiction with the real writings that shaped feminism and gothic literature. From A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to Frankenstein, this episode traces a legacy of bold ideas passed from mother to daughter.