I found out about Pat Barker watching Stanley and Iris, a 1990 film starring Jane Fonda and Robert De Niro based on her novel Union Street. Blow Your House Down is her second novel, published in 1984, and follows a group of prostitutes in a bleak northern English city. As a portrait of what women living on the edge have to endure, it is excellent. The dialogue and situations strike home. Usually I prefer a novel to intensify day-to-day experiences, not merely recount them, but these women have intensity enough for several novels.
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