Being hailed as "Lawrentian" might thrill some new writers, but not Pat Barker…. [Her novel may be] the latest, long over-due working-class masterpiece, but its story and sympathies are firmly based on the lives of working-class women, not men. And for that, as Barker ruefully says, there is next to no literary tradition.

It was Angela Carter who recognised the talent and singularity of Barker's writing, and helped nurse Union Street into life. Prejudice about working-class and feminist writing being what it is, however, it is perhaps necessary to say immediately what Barker's book isn't: two-dimensional, self-indulgent, propagandistic, or blood-soaked eeh-bah-gum realism. Summed up as the story of seven women living on the same street in the North East during the 1973 miners' strike, it may sound drab. But Union Street is beautifully written and not worthy of attention only as a didn't-she-do-well adjunct to the male, bourgeois body...