Diane Langford

Page Updated: 09/06/99

Diane Langford

Left For Dead

pbk 04 Mar 99

Shame About the Street

About the Author

Bibliography

British Pbk Original - Serpents Tail (1999)

Left For Dead
Montse Letkin works for the council. She's what you might call a snooper. Montse is getting so good at her job that her boss Gwendoline Rhodes - that's the one they used to call Red Gwen - has lined Montse up as her personal security consultant. Montse wasn't so good at that though - Gwendoline fell out of a high window. And it would suit a lot of people if Montse took the rap.
In Montse Letkin, Diane Langford has created a true heroine for our times, a bruised and cynical young woman learning the hard way that the personal really is political.
Left For Dead is a taut, subversive London thriller set about ten minutes into the future. In a city where privatisation is the watchword and politics a dirty word. In a city where the weak and the homeless had best fend for themselves. In a city of secrets and lies. The legacies of the past collide in this unsettling, visionary slice of millennial noir.

Shame About the Street
'There in the paper was a photograph of the newsreader in a fashionable restaurant, leaning across the table towards a companion whose face was in the shadow. Their hands were touching. A white circle was superimposed around the head of the other woman whose face was invisible.'
A boiling summer day in the not-too-distant future in London, and business goes on despite the stifling heat: the tabloid newspapers churn out lurid headlines, cleaners in the newspaper offices go to work, and at Victoria station, Rosemary, a civil servant, is on her way to work. Rich, demure, and dull, Rosemary is the ideal Home Counties Woman and government cog in the wheels. But before the end of the day she will become 'The Lesbian Civil Servant' exposed by tabloids as the leak on the government's proposed re-introduction of an Anti-Homosexual law.
Shame About the Street is a bitter-sweet investigation into the mores of the press and society of today.
'Political opposition, in her own writing and in that of others like her, is alive and very well. This is just the start' Northern Star
'Wicked and funny' Pink Paper
A right-on slice of dystopian paranoid' The Herald

About The Author
Diane Langford is the author of Shame About the Street, a novel about Fleet Street. She was born in New Zealand and moved to England in 1963, since when she has been active in the trade union, women's liberation and anti-racist movements.

Bibliography
N.B. dates and publishers in dark red indicate British First Editions. Dates and publishers in black indicate recent reprints.

Left For Dead (Serpents Tail Pbk, 1999) (Montse Letkin)

Shame About the Street (Serpents Tail)

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