“I want to read about the trouble a person might have with making things. About what might stop a person making things, making art, I mean. Like money”. A request which leads Nicola Long to the letters of Donna Dreeman, a potter who died in the eighties, whose letters to her best friend, Susan Baddeley, catalogue messy life, loves and the precarity of making art. How can you make art if you’ve no money? How can you make art if you have to work at a job which leeches away time and inspiration? Is life any better making art? These are some of the questions that swirl around the heads of the characters in Hannah Regel’s brilliant and compelling novel, The Last Sane Woman. Nicola, a potter, who doesn’t make much pottery obsessing about a potter who did but never got the breaks she needed and deserved. The letter archive eventually dragging her into a hall of mirrors which reflect back at her an idea of herself and Donna, that may not quite be right. Especially as Susan, Donna’s old friend and letter recipient, approaches Donna through a completely different lens of middle-age, middle-class stability and the suppressed fury of someone who never fitted in or felt comfortable around Donna’s arty set. Nicola’s and Susan’s different outsider and outlier perspectives bumping up against each other. Donna’s not quite the tragic figure Nicola wishes her to be. Based on her letters to Susan, Donna seemed to be charismatic, manic, self-critical, but with a determination to be the best she could be at a time when Thatcher’s vandals scorned the kind of unpaid work that created anything of beauty. Her letters, maybe, a sly lesson in the dogged art of precarious living. Or maybe not. But there’s no dispute about the quality of this novel by Hannah Regel which will be there or thereabouts when it comes to selecting my novel of the year. A future classic.

The Last Sane Woman – Hannah Regel – published by Verso - £10.99

Steven Long