The List of Suspicious Things - Jennie Godfrey

The List of Suspicious Things - Jennie Godfrey

The narrator of this debut novel is Miv, a young girl in Yorkshire in the late 1970s. Thatcher, skinheads and the Yorkshire Ripper loom large on the national news. In the meantime, Miv’s mum isn’t very well and her Dad is talking about moving somewhere else, plus her best friend is changing and she’s starting to think about boys and she doesn’t really have anyone to talk to. 

Centering an unreliable narrator is a bold move, and a good one - we see everything through Miv’s perspective but we’re able to bring our adult experience to what she’s telling us, sometimes understanding situations before she and her best friend, Sharon, do. 

Godfrey writes so well in the macro and the micro - we’re aware that the girls are gathering information on the Ripper, so they can carry on with their lives and not be worried about being murdered. At the same time, they’re making friends with the corner shop owner and his son, helping an old man who misses his recently deceased wife, and a hundred other improvements in their community.  Like so many novels based on fact, it’s not really about ‘the thing’, but more about how it affects the people living in and around the news item, long since resolved. 

The creeping dread which must have hung over people in Yorkshire over the years that Sutcliffe was active, must have been awful. Unfathomable, in fact.  Wikipedia tells me he first killed someone in 1969 and was caught in 1980 - across three decades. It’s no wonder that some people thought about moving, especially those with young daughters, sisters etc. 

Miv and Sharon are great characters, firm friends despite their differences, and Miv’s matter of fact explanation that they’re friends because Sharon’s mum felt sorry for her about her mum, is heart wrenchingly honest. 

They’re so compassionate, and clever, and I found myself invested in their quest to identify the Ripper while also being afraid for them to get sucked in and find themselves in danger, as well as mistakenly pointing the finger at innocent men in their area. 

This book gets you when you’re not looking, and the fact that it’s dedicated to the victims of the Yorkshire Ripper, whose names are listed at the end, made me cry. While Miv and Sharon and the other characters are fictional, there were real people living those lives. 

I’d recommend it for people who like an interconnecting cast of characters, a real village feel - such as Libby Page, for example. 

Thanks to Netgalley and Random House as always, for the DRC. This is now available to buy in the usual places.