Pat Barker’s debut novel, Union Street is a sequence of interconnected stories following seven working-class women living in the same unnamed northern English community. 

Published in 1982, this work very much reflected her sense of style carrying her forward; unsentimental, close to the body and concerned deeply with class. Each of the women are at a pivotal point in their lives, different from each other, but they overlap through work, sex, motherhood, unemployment, illness, domestic violence, ageing. Everything really.

The issues are big, but the scale of the work is kept domestic to have a cumulative effect.  Effective to show how class filters through into what kinds of futures can be imagined at all. The writing is plain, hard and often funny in exactly the places where sentimentality would be easiest. 

Virago Press, London, 1982; reprint 1984. Paperback. Light-to-moderate shelf wear, rubbing and creasing to covers and edges; small edge knocks and age-toning. Internally clean; binding firm. Good condition.