The blurb
For the families of the victims of the St Botolph and Old Billingsgate disaster, the undoing of a miscarriage of justice should be a cause for rejoicing. For more than thirteen years, the search for truth has eaten up everything. Marriages, families, health, careers and finances.
Finally, the coroner has ruled that the crowd did not contribute to their own deaths. Finally, now that lies have been unravelled and hypocrisies exposed, they can all get back to their lives.
If only it were that simple.
The author and publisher
Jane Davis is the author of eight novels; her first novel won the Daily Mail First Novel Award; her seventh was Writing Magazine’s Self-Published Book of the Year 2016; and Smash All The Windows won the first ever Selfies Award.
She’s someone who takes writing and self-publishing very seriously, and it was an absolute pleasure to meet her at the London Book Fair earlier this year.
The bookshop
I bought the ebook version from the Kobo store.
The bingo card
This could count towards: ‘A Women’s Press’; ‘A New To You Press’; ‘An Award-Winner’, or ‘Book from a micro press’.
My thoughts
This is a really good book. It takes as its starting point an imagined crush disaster in a London tube station, and follows the families of the victims as they variously seek the facts, campaign for justice, and come to terms with their loss. Sometimes diving deep into the day of the disaster, sometimes looking several years beyond it, the interweaving strands are easy to follow, and the characters are well delineated and all very human.
There were times when I forgot that I was reading fiction, and found myself wanting to go to Wikipedia to find out more about the disaster. Jane Davis says that she thinks of fiction as ‘made-up truth’. She’s certainly achieved that here.
Kathleen Jowitt 