What Doesn’t Kill Us

A killer stalks the streets of Leeds, a city in England’s industrial north. Every man is a suspect. Every woman is at risk. But in a house on Cleopatra Street, women are fighting back.

It’s the eve of the 1980s. Police officer Liz Seeley joins the squad investigating the murders. With a violent boyfriend at home and male chauvinist pigs at work, she is drawn to a feminist collective led by the militant and uncompromising Rowena. There she meets Charmaine--young, Black, artistic, and fighting discrimination on two fronts.

As the list of victims grows and police fail to catch the killer, women are too terrified to go out after dark. To the feminists, the Butcher is a symptom of wider misogyny. Their anger finds an outlet in violence, and Liz is torn between loyalty to them and her colleagues and job.

In this novel based on the true events of the Yorkshire Ripper murders and the feminist arson campaign it triggered targeting porn outlets, Ajay Close combines the tension of a police procedural with the power and passion of the Women’s Lib movement. By turns emotional, action-packed, and darkly funny, What Doesn’t Kill Us reveals just how much the world has changed since the 1970s--and how much it hasn’t

Ajay Close grew up in the North of England and studied at Cambridge. She worked at Granta, a literary publishing house, before becoming a journalist and then a novelist. She is the author of six literary novels, of which her first, Official and Doubtful, was nominated for the Orange Prize (now known as the Women’s Prize). Her novels are pacy, page-turning, dealing with family and relationships under pressure and sometimes with a political edge, and can be read as thrillers.