The only named woman in Andrew McMillan’s fine debut novel is Margaret Thatcher, and she looms large over the narrative due to her role in the 1984/85 miners’ strike. The setting is South Yorkshire and the tale flits back and forth across three generations of a Barnsley family. The everyday monotony and hardship of working down a pit is well drawn, but I felt more engaged with Simon’s tale, set in the present day. Simon earns his crust by working in a call centre, but he also performs weekly drag shows and has a side hustle selling his homemade porn videos via the OnlyFans site. ‘Pity’ isn’t a long novel – I read it in two chunks – but it is weighty with ideas that take in emasculation, community, sexuality and class. There’s also a central motif of things being buried, quite literally in the case of men being lost under tonnes of earth, but also buried emotions and desires. RM

Canongate