Yorkshire, 1979
Maggie Thatcher is prime minister, drainpipe jeans are in, and Miv is convinced that her dad wants to move their family Down South
Because of the murders.
Leaving Yorkshire and her best friend Sharon simply isn’t an option, no matter the dangers lurking round their way; or the strangeness at home that started the day Miv’s mum stopped talking.
Perhaps if she could solve the case of the disappearing women, they could stay after all?
So, Miv and Sharon decide to make a list: a list of all the suspicious people and things down their street. People they know. People they don’t.
But their search for the truth reveals more secrets in their neighbourhood, within their families – and between each other – than they ever thought possible.
What if the real mystery Miv needs to solve is the one that lies much closer to home?

IN A NUTSHELL
‘The List of Suspicious Things‘ was a joy to read, even though the topics it covered are unpleasant. It felt honest. It portrayed people that I recognise: the speech patterns, the things not said, looks exchanged, and the attitudes taken for granted.
It could easily have been a ‘Look how bad we were back then‘, but instead it’s infused with a love of time, place and people that says ‘We weren’t perfect, but we were mostly doing our best.‘

’The List Of Suspicious Things‘ was one of my favourite books of 2024. I’m reviewing it now, nearly two years after I finished it, because I’ve just bought Jennie Godfrey’s second novel ‘The Barbecue At No.9′, a story set in the twelve hours of the LIveAId concert in 1985 , which was published today.

Why am I so late with this review? Well, sometimes it’s the books that I enjoy most that I find hardest to review. This one was packed with so many good things, was so well-written and so wonderfully turned into an audiobook that I was struggling to say anthing beyond “That was unbelievably good”. 

‘The List of Suspicious Things‘ has stuck with me through the past two years as an example of how good a novel can be when it tries to capture life as it’s lived.

The odd thing is that I almost didn’t buy the book when it came out. It was a debut novel that seemed to be about a teenage girl’s self-appointed quest to find the Yorkshire Ripper. I was worried it might be gory or voyeuristic, but I kept hearing good things about it, so I downloaded the audiobook and settled in for eleven hours of first-class listening. 

It turned out that ‘The List of Suspicious Things’ was really about what it was like to be a teenage girl in Yorkshire in the 1970s. It was a joy to read, even though the topics it covered (racism, violence against women, bullying) were often unpleasant. It felt honest. It portrayed people that I recognised through their speech patterns, the things not said, looks exchanged, and the attitudes that we used to take for granted back then. 

It was also a nuanced depiction of how friendships develop between teenage girls and of how friendships and small acts of kindness can sustain hope.

One of the strengths of the book is that the story is told from many perspectives, and each character has a distinctive voice and way of seeing the world. One of the strengths of the audiobook was that it used five narrators to bring the characters to life. It’s an exceptional audiobook. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.

Becuase it’s set in 1979, ‘The List of Suspicious Things‘ is classified as Historical Fiction. That’s not how it seems to me. I was studying in Yorkshire back then, on the cusp of graduation. To me, this time and place aren’t history, they’re memory. 

I went into the book hoping to be reminded of how things were in 1979, or, at least, how they appeared to someone a few years younger than me, to whom Yorkshire was home and not a place that they were relatively newly arrived at.

Although it was forty-six years ago, my memory of my hatred of Thatcher and her war on the North is still strong. I will never forgive her and her party for the destruction they wrought. My memory of the Yorkshire Ripper is less clear, perhaps because he wasn’t in my city and I didn’t know the people who lived in Peter Sutcliffe’s shadow. I do remember that it reinforced my dislike for the Yorkshire police.

One of the things that pulled me to ‘The List Of Suspicious Things‘ was that Jennie Godfrey excavated her past to write the book, rather than basing it on research of events that hadn’t touched her life. If you’d like to know more about that, click HERE to go to Penguin’s article on the story behind the book

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Jennie Godfrey was raised in West Yorkshire and her debut novel, The List of Suspicious Things, is inspired by her childhood there in the 1970s. Jennie is from a mill-working family, but as the first of the generation born after the mills closed, she went to university and built a career in the corporate world. In 2020 she left and began to write. She is now a writer and part-time Waterstones bookseller and lives in the Somerset countryside.