Review
dryly captures the madness and the sadness of families though this perfectly observed account --Marina Lewycka, author A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
distinctive and engaging The dialogue is really good and that's a rare thing. --Tessa Hadley
This Witty worrying debut rambles across 1980's England through various women's communities, from the terraced houses of a northern town to the communal squats of Hackney, via the muddy sleeping bags of Greenham common. Helen Sandler, Diva --Helen Sandler, Diva
Product Description
Tracy is a kleptomaniac and a compulsive liar. A lost soul, she drifts fecklessly about, sponging on her friends with a high turnover of menial jobs as she searches for Anita. In Tracy's mind if she's disappeared out of her life, then she must have disappeared out of this world, and that means detective work. But she is quintessentially unreliable, and it gradually becomes clear that it is Tracy's neurosis rather than Anita's disappearance that is the driving force. Set in a northern English city in the 1980's, Other Useful Numbers explores a lost community of women who are floundering in the murky waters of economic depression, infidelity and feminist politics and is in turns moving and hilarious. It's a novel about love, dependence, disappearance and recovery.