Martha’s Story: The Girl Who Broke Her Chains by Tony Barnsley (Grosvenor House, £6.99)

ON HER 11th birthday Martha Wood receives paper and pens as a present and, from that moment on, keeps a diary about her life as the daughter of a chain-making family at the beginning of the 20th century.

Author Tony Barnsley has chosen this fictional diary form to provide us with a vivid picture of life in a working-class household in the Black Country at the time. It was an area renowned for its metal-working factories and notorious for the way families were exploited by the chain-making companies. Often most of them, including wives and daughters, would be involved in the back-breaking work of chain-making in their own homes and backyards for appallingly low wages.