Other Women: Emma Flint

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A classic love triangle which starts when he, Tom, walks into the office where Bea works as a typist. The true crime story is so riveting that I read the whole book in one go, but there is so much more there as well. The woman who inspired the character of Beatrice Cade was around my age and she had all these things too – yet she risked every one of them for a relationship with a man she knew was married and unavailable.

She was unmarried and childless (and given the shortage of men in the years after the First World War, she seemed likely to remain that way) – but she set out to make a different kind of life for herself. Beatrice is one of the women left in limbo after the First World War, when a lack of young men meant that many women were denied the status of marriage. Their lives of "freedom" we're still seen as unsatisfactory and they were vulnerable to judgement about their character and appearance. Remarkably well written I am not sure I’ve yet to recover but I’m shouting at everyone to read this.

Life for single women in the inter-war period was challenging, and there were lots of ‘spare’ women. If you’re a woman, I have no doubt you will RAGE at so much of this story and the very limited ways women of this generation were pigeonholed.

Although I would like to believe that things have improved over the past century, I fear not much has changed. Little Deaths, Emma Flint’s much praised debut novel, was set in New York and inspired by a crime which happened back in the 1960s. The man I fictionalise as Tom Ryan got newspaper headlines, hours of courtroom time, people prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt – and one hundred years later, it’s still too often the male perpetrators of abuse that news report focus on; it’s their stories that we read.Emma Flint is an absolute queen of the courtroom drama (her previous book, Little Deaths, is also excellent). Similarly, I had a lot of empathy with Kate and was glad the book ended the way it did (when I was reading the novel, I didn’t at that point realise this was based on a true story. Flint maintains suspense in what is a thoroughly captivating and unsettling page-turner that deserves to land her on awards lists again.

She sees them as she mudlarks on the shores of the Thames, she meets them as she wanders the streets and she starts to dig into the mystery of what happened to Mercy Roberts, a vanished girl whose name Carmel was forced to use by the preacher, but whose reality “still sometimes drifted through people’s thoughts like a trail of smoke from a bonfire”. It was interesting how Flint almost challenges the reader to judge the women from the typical male gaze of society in the first half of the book which swiftly changes when we get to the second part of the book and we soon discover the prejudices laid against the women and the control men asserted in the 1930s. It appears authentic, with the petty details of office life, and renting rooms in clubs and from frosty landladies. And eventually the dream will become a nightmare as these two women become connected in a way they could never begin to imagine. Alternating between the two, it is gripping, fast paced, and full of intrigue - you’ll not want to put it down.Not quite the mystery plot I went into this expecting, but one for true-crime and courtroom drama fans for sure. A brilliant narrative that humanises the women involved, adding complex emotional layers and repositioning them as more than just victims of a horrific crime.

Bea is 37, like thousands of women of her generation mourning the losses of a brother during the Great War - which she feels has also robbed her of her chances to find a suitable husband. It’s been six years since Flint’s debut novel, the compelling Little Deaths, but Other Women is certainly worth the wait. Based on a real murder of a woman by her married lover we follow the stories of Beatrice, a single woman in her late thirties who fell for the charming Ryan Thomas, and Kate Thomas, his wife. A way that the reader sees slowly unfold as the novel progresses, yet neither Bea or Kate can imagine the horror that their lives will become. Other Women follows two women in London in the 1920s, both linked to one man: the enigmatic, charming Thomas Ryan, a salesman at the company Bea works at, and husband to Kate, who has a daughter with him.A previous investigation has failed and Russo struggles to make headway with the suspicious, reticent locals – only 50 or so of them, in a town located in the middle of an “empty region the size of Belgium”.