Cheap Street

Realism is the cornerstone of Chick's work. In this new novel Lisa's environment seems designed to demoralise and depress her. Chick creates her setting skilfully: the reader experiences life on an estate through sympathetic engagement with the residents' lives. Most poignant of all is the cyclical nature of deprivation engendered by the protagonists' inability to take control of their own lives. Lisa's mother was trapped in a brutal marriage by a teenage pregnancy and when we see Lisa engaged in unprotected sex in an effort to assuage her loneliness we realise that she, too, is a victim of her needs.