CATHERINE STEEL relishes a compelling novel about Augustus’s right hand man, but misses the politics, the cultural shifts, and more detail about his restoration of Rome
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A case of conflicted loyalties
PAUL SIMON recommends a novel exploring the conflicts between class and gender politics in Edinburgh at the turn of the last century
A sunset over Edinburgh, the setting for Kate Hunter's novel
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The Caseroom
by Kate Hunter
(Fledgling Press, £9.99)
SET in the Leonards and Canonmills areas of Edinburgh, the protagonist of Kate Hunter's The Caseroom is Iza Ross, whom we meet as she is about to start work at a printing firm as a compositor. It is through her eyes, somewhat naive at first but increasingly aware of the underlying issues determining her life, that Hunter immerses the reader in the city at all levels.
This is an Edinburgh that heaves and swells with industrial tensions, the determined rise of the women’s suffrage movement and an anxiety over the growing Irish independence movement.
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