Union Street, Pat Barker’s first novel, concerns seven neighboring women near a factory in northeast England. Life for these women is trying: some of them are married to alcoholics, some are victims of abuse; one is old and near death, another is still a child but has the experience of an adult; all are struggling to survive. First published in 1982, it was made into the film Stanley & Iris by MGM in 1989, starring Robert DeNiro and Jane Fonda

Blow Your House Down, Barker’s second novel, also portrays the lives of women in industrial England–but these women are prostitutes, living in a northern England city that is stalked by a vicious, Jack the Ripper-style serial killer who is singling out women with nowhere else to go.