Publisher's Synopsis
?Born from a pelvis that was blue with cold, and later swept southward to the somewhat darker green pastures of the Midlands, Annie Elizabeth Crook had sometimes heard her name pronounced as Cook, she knew not why, but concluded it all had to do with a change in the wind from up to down. The dropped r was what happened when you left Scotland. Nobody rolled it then, although you could still go on talking that clipped antiseptic brogue...? So begins Paul West's new novel set in the London of Jack the Ripper. Using the mythical involvement in the Ripper murders of men like the painter Walter Sickert and the Queen's surgeon, Dr Gull, West portrays a violent, frightening city in which women are seen as fair game for male lust. A mesmeric evocation of English life at the end of the nineteenth century, The Women of Whitechapel suggests that, now, one hundred years later, all is not well in this land. A dazzling performance by a writer whose linguistic dexterity matches his thematic ambition.
