“Ey up?” It is 1979 and northern England’s greatest existential threats – Margaret Thatcher and the serial killer known as the Yorkshire Ripper – are both in the ascent. Twelve-year-old Miv, an archetypical tomboy, is living under the shadow of both of them and more. Her mother has long stopped talking, her finickity aunt has moved into the family home to assist, and her father has taken to hiding from it all in the pub. Worse, the notion of moving the family Down South has lately been suggested, something Miv regards as “a fate worse than death”.
Her response is as ambitious as it is ridiculous: she will discover the identity of the Ripper and so restore tranquillity to God’s Own Country. To this end, Miv recruits her best friend and together they careen less towards investigative breakthroughs than towards their own messy transitions into adulthood. In the process, they drill deep through a bleak industrial town enlivened by Miv’s imagination as they clumsily poke their way into the private lives of the Elton John-loving shopkeeper Mr Bashir, his bullied son, the boy’s angry schoolteacher, and more. In the process, the novel grants readers a warm and frequently witty perspective on how we never truly know those around us, one which is delightful, shocking, and genuinely poignant in turn.
An accomplished debut from a vibrant new voice, The List of Suspicious Things lives and breathes Godfrey’s immersive evocation of 1970s Yorkshire. Miv, like a preteen Patrick Kavanagh, is never in any doubt about the social validity of her community. Her family is “Yorkshire through and through” with “the moors and the mills running through our veins”.
Godfrey has written a love letter to this place and time, yet she is never blinded to how it is defined by the fault lines of class, race or the smouldering threat of violence, not just from the Ripper but from the “short-haired lads” who stalk the streets calling for the end of immigration, the rejection of the common market, and the return of capital punishment as a way to “Make Britain great again”. And in that, like a magic trick, the novel clicks into focus as historical fiction, sure, but also as work intimately intertwined with the England of today.
