Tracy is a kleptomaniac and a compulsive liar. A lost soul, she drifts fecklessly about, sponging off her friends with a high turnover of menial jobs as she searches for Anita. Tracy’s thinks that if Anita’s disappeared out of her life, then she must have disappeared out of this world, and that means detective work. But Tracy is an quintessentially unreliable, and it gradually becomes clear that it is her neurosis, rather than Anita’s disappearance, that is the driving force behind her adventure. I bite the icing from the Gems because it reminds me of nipples and smoke other people’s cigarettes. Set in a northern English city in the 1980’s, Other Useful Numbers explores a lost community of women floundering in the murky waters of economic depression, infidelity and feminist politics, and is in turns moving and hilarious. It’s a novel about love, dependence, disappearance and recovery.
