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All Us Sinners, Katy Massey’s debut novel, is a gripping thriller set in late 1977 Leeds, against the backdrop of the real-life hunt for the killer who became known as the Yorkshire Ripper. The novel follows Maureen, a mixed-race brothel keeper and former sex worker, as she attempts to investigate the death of a fifteen-year-old boy.

The story begins on Christmas Eve, when Maureen is attacked outside Rio’s, her brothel. The identity of her assailant is not revealed but, in the fraction of a second before the attack, Maureen half-recognises his scent; her assailant is someone known to her. The narrative then rewinds to a night three weeks earlier when Mick, a policeman from Maureen’s past, calls unexpectedly at Rio’s, shortly before sweet-natured David, the son of Bev – one of Maureen’s girls – is found brutally murdered.

Without telling Mick, Maureen starts her own investigation into who killed David and why, research that brings her into dangerous contact with Leeds’ brutal drugs gangs. At the same time, she begins a tentative romance with her teenage crush, Bev’s handsome but evasive brother Dermot, who returned to the city from Ireland some weeks earlier.

The suspense never flags, sustained in part by the atmosphere of fear and paranoia surrounding the Ripper murders. But the Ripper is not the only threat to Maureen and her friends and her eventual discovery of the identity of David’s killer places her in mortal danger.

Massey’s writing is assured, and the unfolding plot both immersive and terrifying, but the most compelling aspect of All Us Sinners is the deft characterisation of its chief protagonist and the skilful delineation of her relationship with her “girls”, Bev and Anette. Although the novel is suffused with a sense of lurking danger, the narrative is neither bleak nor hopeless. Its fearful atmosphere is leavened by moments of warmth and affection shared by the women.

Maureen herself is neither a two-dimensional “tart-with-a-heart” nor a degraded or brutalised victim of misogynistic violence. Massey has created instead a complex and likeable character, with a rich emotional hinterland, who experiences love and desire and enjoys her own sexuality. Rather than portraying them as victims of men, of circumstance or of their own poor choices, Massey shows how Maureen and the women she employs have made pragmatic decisions about their lives and their work.

Without proselytising for the legalisation of sex work, the novel’s attitude is implicit. In the first chapter, a narrative voice observes: “Anyone would have thought the authorities would look more kindly on brothels at such a dangerous times for working girls. Instead, places like Rio’s were even more despised as gaudy symbols of desires the legit world preferred to hide.” It’s not clear who is speaking here, but one senses Massey’s own viewpoint seeping through, perhaps shaped by the author’s own experience of growing up on the margins of the world she describes. Her mother, she reveals in an author’s note at the end of the novel, worked in Leeds’ sex industry in the 1980s and ran a brothel like Rio’s.

Massey’s unique insight into the world about which she writes invests All Us Sinners with an authority and authenticity that invites the reader to think beyond the novel’s plot and about the parallel lives that exist under our noses, if only we could bring ourselves to acknowledge them.

Katherine Muskett is a part-time academic, freelance writer and tutor

Humans do tend to look on their own culture as normal, and others’ as weird. But it doesn’t take very piercing self-examination to recognise that we are in fact all very, very strange.

Virginia Nicholson’s examination of the Western world’s relationship with female beauty, and with the industries and culture that have built up around it, is very piercing indeed.  She has written fascinatingly before about female history, including Singled Out, about the post-WW1 experience of young women coming to terms with the facts that the men they might have married were dead, and life would be different to what they had been encouraged to expect. In All The Rage, she extends the territory of female experience both chronologically – 1860-1960 – and topically.

This is no rage-filled rant about the evils of high heels and the stupidity of women for putting up with them, nor a fourth-wave feminist declaration about the moral right to be fat or ugly without being “shamed”. It opens with a lyrical reminiscence about her childhood joys of dressing-up boxes, of art and decoration and musty velvet sleeves and leftover greasepaint; about the adventure of clothing and hairstyles and makeup, of sewing and making – of how we present ourselves and our bodies.

The journey – from the fully covered, flawlessly white, unmade-up, “legless”, wasp-waisted, corseted and crinolined woman of 1860 to Brigitte Bardot in three triangles, some string and a suntan on the beach at St Tropez a hundred years later – is told with a constant eye on the politics, society, religion and male requirements which shape it.

On the one hand, we learn what it would have been like to live in past times as women rich or poor, waited on or waiting, white or black, single or married.

What knickers would we be wearing, if any? What badges of class, education, allegiance, could we sport? What uniforms (formal or social), disguises, “mating plumage” as she puts it, social declarations (mourning, wedding dresses, symbolic jewellery) or workwear will tell the world who we are?

On the other hand is the constant and quiet demonstration that though there were some choices women could make to express themselves, much of the time the reader would doubt that women owned their own bodies at all. Consider Mrs Lanning of Atlantic City in 1913, who was beaten unconscious by a mob for her beachwear choice. And we all know that medieval attitudes concerning men’s right to police female presentation have traipsed murderously on after us into the 21st century.

The arc Nicholson draws is convincing. Women gradually became more available to public view – through working outside the home, doing “men’s jobs” during WW1, through photography, film, printed media. Simultaneously, demands for easier clothing grew, so skirts became smaller – no more acres of petticoat – and shorter – a glimpse of stocking! (Wartime cloth rationing helped.) Thus women’s bodies themselves became not just more visible (Legs! Bottoms!) but more ubiquitous, more available to comparison, and thus to competition – for men, who were, remember, rarer during and after the Wars.

It’s much easier to find your body wanting when you are told to look like Louise Brooks or Betty Grable, and you see them everywhere, and everyone can also see your legs, and how they don’t match up. As almost every aspect of the female body became public, any perceived flaw became an opportunity for profit-making: figure, weight, hair, unwanted hair, teeth, complexion, lips, eyes, lashes, brows, feet, hands, nails, skin, ears, breasts… not to mention age. The former external corset has been successfully internalised as constant dieting and self-loathing. Everything can be disguised or remodelled, for money. Welcome to the toxic cocktail, the great modern crime against women: the beauty industry.

This is a fascinating book: funny, unexpected, forgiving, political, personal, glamorous and yes, quietly, angry. Read it for the amazing stories; stay for the self-knowledge. Or the Revolution.

Today Gary Stevenson campaigns against financial inequality and is a voice of economic reason, but in 2008, having worked his way up from East End backstreets to the heights of Canary Wharf, he was a 21-year-old interest-rate trader for Citibank.
And no ordinary one. In his first year he made £12 million for the bank and a £395,000 bonus for himself. He had such a successful stint as a record-breaking moneymaker that when, a few years later, he wanted to quit, he claims the bank wouldn’t let him.

Stevenson may also hold a record for the most uses of “fuck” in a non-fiction book. His shocking street-language memoir – more like an unedited transcript of an angry monologue – doesn’t just take the lid off the banking world, it spills out its guts in gory detail.

None of the grotesque characters – including his bosses, his fellow traders and Stevenson himself – comes out well in this Hogarthian tale of ruthlessness, greed and excess. These are men – it’s all men – who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

But gradually Stevenson begins to see the light – even though his initial realisation that the system means the rich get richer and the poor get poorer has a twist: “It was inequality. Inequality that would grow and grow until it dominated and killed the economy that contained it… It was the end of the economy. It was cancer. And I knew what that meant… I had to buy green Eurodollars.”

He explains: “A green Eurodollar is a bet on what American interest rates will be in two and half years’ time… pure betting. Casino stuff.”

Stevenson may be foul-mouthed and relaxed about grammar, but he makes it plain that a system serving only the wealthy is unsustainable. It works only for those who know how to play it. He tells how the Japanese earthquake helped him in his “betting” against economic recovery in 2011: “People thought the [Fukushima] nuclear power plant might blow up. That was good for my position. By a week in, I was up six million [dollars].” Then he sold “a fucking ton of Eurodollar futures”, flipped his position and made another five million.

“Economics is a subject in which students never really quite understand what they are being taught,” he says, “because the people teaching them never quite understood it themselves.”

If this book – with its protagonist’s remarkable journey and its parade of amoral characters – isn’t made into a movie, I will eat my laptop. And please, somebody, give Gary Stevenson a peerage – then make him Chancellor of the Exchequer.

When you leave home, who do you leave behind? This is the central question Keiran Goddard unpacks in his second novel, I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning – one familiar to any big City transplant who still feels a pang of guilt on the way out of Euston.

The story is told across a series of first-person monologues by five characters, each one more archetypal of quote-unquote Modern Britain than the last. There’s Rian, the spivvy, solipsistic boy-dun-good; Patrick, the bolshy, bookish moral conscience, beaten down by the gig economy; Shiv, Patrick’s fading childhood sweetheart trapped in a Barratt new-build cage; Conor, the lumpheaded brickie with a head full of dreams and a hair-trigger temper; and Oli, the longtime liability wasting away with addictions.

The clock has struck 30 for these childhood friends from the old estate and the book opens with a meditation on the scores-on-the-doors: who got the life they dreamed of as kids and who didn’t. Rian is high up in the sky in a smart hotel room, casting his eye over the cityscape below, one he has long since abandoned to make his fortune elsewhere. The city in question, though unnamed, is Birmingham; the estate where they all grew up is Goddard’s own Shard End. The Brummie verisimilitude is in Goddard’s atypical use of “mom” over the usual “mum”, an eccentricity confined to the West Midlands. The Trident – the “shit flat roof pub” where our story begins – still operates on the north-east frontier where Birmingham bleeds into Solihull.

Rian has enriched himself, to the point of disconnection from his old life, through following his nose and building on his youthful instincts: “Buying things. Selling things,” as Patrick says. Patrick was closest to Rian growing up, and it is their growing apart that opens the novel. Here, in fact, is where we meet the first shades of Goddard’s motif-driven style (as well you might expect, given Goddard’s grounding in poetry). Duality is the name of the game: Rian in the binary act of trade, Rian and Patrick portrayed as polarities, London and Birmingham, the centre and the periphery, night and day, blur and focus. It’s a rhythmic effect that drums into you a sense of the widening inequality of everyday life.

Rian has been made shallower by his money, a vacuity exemplified by his predilection for eating ice and fetishising glass; he thinks of his friends as noble savages who haven’t yet realised the log-choppers are on their edge of the rainforest. Patrick is skint and indignant: dropping off burgers for Deliveroo to the point of exhaustion, he’s more au fait with life’s hard realities. Rian’s money corrodes everything it touches, from the cash he gives to Oli for more coke to the thousands he promises Conor for a hair-brained apartment-building scheme. But money is not the root of all evil here. The real undoings in this story come from good old-fashioned human flaws, whether forged from closeness or grown out of detachment. It turns out the old life, as Goddard deftly reveals in this sharp-eyed novel, isn’t so easy to escape after all. 

Although Carys Davies’ books have won many literary awards, her beautiful writing remains largely a secret among devotees. Having honed her craft as a short story writer, including The Redemption of Galen Pike (2015), her novels are shaped by eccentrics and outsiders who chase their dreams in unfamiliar landscapes, encountering unsuspected dangers, both physical and emotional.

The terrain of her first novella, West, is cowboy country, while The Mission House is set in post-colonial India. Davies’ third novel, Clear, begins in 1843 when Scottish minister John Ferguson arrives at a remote small island in Orkney, “picking his way over the rocks like a tall, slightly undernourished wading bird, thin black hair blowing vertically in the persisting wind.”

He has reluctantly come to evict the island’s last inhabitant, Ivar, needing the fee from the landowner’s beady agent to support his wife Mary, after the Church of Scotland schism has left them in penury.

Destabilised by his surroundings, John’s ears are “full of the cries of curious and hungry gulls trembling on invisible currents overhead; of the wallop of the waves, and the noisy scrabble of the beach being dragged out beneath them as they retreated.”

Dreamily wandering this unfamiliar terrain, John falls and is found unconscious at the water’s edge by Ivar, who lugs John home on the back of Pegi his ancient pony and slowly nurses him back to health. John starts to learn Ivar’s dialect, Norn, a resonant language in which “gilgal and skreul, pulter and yog, fester and dreetslengi” are all nuanced descriptions of “a rough sea”. Warming to the island and to his saviour, John finds himself unable to enact his mission.

Alone on the mainland without news, Mary grows anxious and, with the clear-eyed resolution typical of Davies’ heroines, determines to make the difficult voyage to bring her husband home. “You never knew in advance if a decision was the right one,” she reflects later. “All you could do was try to imagine the future and use that to help you make up your mind in a difficult situation.”

The nineteenth-century “clearing” of island tenants by unscrupulous landowners is the narrative’s tragic underlying history. Davies writes with compassion for human frailty and indignation for the abuses of power. There’s gentle humour, too. Mary’s beauty is undiminished by the droll backstory of how her flying dentures first led her to John, the gangly love of her life.

“To have a relationship with the wild is, essentially, always going to be about having a relationship with fear.” Philippa Forrester’s latest book was written during a time of overwhelming fear. Marriage over, mid-50s and alone, raising teenagers and trying to make a new life for herself, Forrester deals with a familiar dread.

Fresh-start memoirs are appealing and seeking inspiration from the courageous exploits of other women is generally a failsafe formula. Who can forget Sara Wheeler’s excellent O My America! – Second Acts in a New World?

A TV presenter and conservation campaigner, Forrester isn’t new to wild places. As a student she travelled to Nigeria and volunteered on a primate conservation project. Later her professional interests took her all over Africa and the Amazon. And yet the Forrester we encounter is a woman who desperately needs to rewild.

“Why is it not enough to just load the dishwasher every day?” she asks herself.

Forrester’s unifying idea is a simple celebration of the natural world’s power to heal humans – even when the cold and wet English winters must have been an intolerable substitute for her North American snows. She misses Wyoming and, rather endearingly, her husband, a man she should be cursing for leaving her and their three children.

We hear of ecologist Anne LaBastille, the lusty author of Woodswoman, about the trials and rapture of living in a log cabin in the wild Adirondacks. There’s the all-female anti-poaching force, and the women who devote themselves to wildlife causes.

Surrounded by memories of happier married times at a family property now in a state of disrepair, Forrester finds the perfect setting for her existential crisis. “In primitive victim mode,” we see Forrester slashing back the brambles with a machete. It is apparent that some healing will need to take place, and fast. And it does. This is not a bitter book.

Short chapters and a conversational style keep the tone light although at times the narrative palls with its folksy wisdom and facile approach to material that would benefit from more rigorous handling. There’s gentle humour, humanity and some realisations.

“After years of being told not to try to handle the chainsaw, it is a relief now to just get on with chopping logs“