This is a really impressive piece of writing which takes you deep into the lives and the world of the characters. It is also a troubling vision, a world of disappointment and moral ambiguity made painful because of its pathos and realism.
Set in a small post-industiral community in the Welsh valleys it captures the lives of a group who but for the hand of fate could have been the cast of 'Friends'. It is in particular the story of three women - they are each an archetype, one a mother, one a business women, and one a creative idealist.
The character Sian is perhaps the most tragic, as the picture of devoted motherhood becomes the annihilation of any sense of self, her existence defined only by the care she gives to the children and to her husband. When that care goes into self destruct the destruction is total. There may be many with a "post-feminist" lookout who are troubled by this part of the story, who would want to claim to be a mother (and even a wife) is a source of fulfilment rather than the prison cage of Sian's life. Sian reminded me on the winner of this year's "Great British Bake-Off" who had married young and raised a brood of men - core to her identity was her ability to provide for her family - to feed them well - and so her success (or failure) in the bake-off seemed to cut more deeply into her identity than any other contestant. There is perhaps some middle-class guilt as we try not to pity those who are happy with, in our eyes, such limited horizons.
The other two women both break this mould, rejecting family life or domestic roles - however as both find 'success' in their own terms off the back of drugs money they are hardly ones to be held up as role-models for "the Sisterhood". They are attractive, in a kind of hypnotic way, but it is hard to see either of them as truly 'likeable'.
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