Emma Flint has cleverly structured this story so that the reader is aware of the murder trial from the beginning. We must protect what they offer: access to centuries of knowledge, to different cultures, different histories, different ways of thinking and expressing ideas. A rather disappointing follow-up to Flint's brilliant Little Deaths (2017), this once again reconstructs in fiction a real-life crime, this time from the 1920s. Meticulously and movingly, Emma Flint constructs a world in which women are generally dismissed as second class citizens, where a man having an affair is admired, while his female companion is condemned as a loose woman with no morals.

She isn’t straying far from that path with Other Women, which is set in the 1920s and based on a murder which inspired plenty of lurid headlines in Britain and around the world.

It is written from the points of view of drab Beatrice in the typing pool who falls for the charms of fellow employee Thomas Ryan, and his wife Kate who pretends that all is well with her marriage, I found it an entertaining and gripping story. The only criticism I have is that Tom's character (the husband and womaniser), was never really fleshed out - I understand that Flint was giving a voice to the women here - but I wanted to fully understand the motivations for his actions. Sadly, I felt that everything felt predictable and rather clichéd from the straightforward prose style to the way the story hits every expected milestone. Flint does a brilliant job of highlighting the societal expectations and pressures placed on unattached women at this time, despite the greater acceptance of women working. Initially, there was some suspense of what might happen to either woman, but halfway through the book, she goes right to the heart of it by starting with the court case against Tom who was accused of killing poor Beatrice.

This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use. Other Women was born from a fury that the life she created for herself could be so entirely destroyed, and from a determination that she would not be forgotten.As we read more, it soon becomes clear what has happened, but there are two different stories coming out as we see the trial unfold. Although the evidence against Omar Evans, the school’s Black athletics trainer, was flimsy, he is currently serving a long prison sentence. In Flint’s moving, gripping retelling, Kaye becomes Beatrice Cade, a 37-year-old typist working in London after the first world war, holding tight to her small scrap of life and independence. The world was mourning the loss of almost 20 million military personnel and civilians during World War I, followed by the devastating effects of Spanish Flu which killed 50 million people globally.