Jennie Godfrey’s debut novel arrives like a gut punch wrapped in the comforting warmth of Yorkshire tea and chip butties. Set against the backdrop of Peter Sutcliffe’s reign of terror, The List of Suspicious Things transforms a historical nightmare into an unexpectedly tender meditation on friendship, loss, and the peculiar resilience of childhood.
A Yorkshire Childhood Under Siege
The year is 1979, and twelve-year-old Miv’s world is crumbling on multiple fronts. Margaret Thatcher has just become Prime Minister—a development her opinionated Aunty Jean declares “the beginning of the end for Yorkshire.” But there’s a more sinister darkness creeping through the streets: the Yorkshire Ripper has turned everyday life into a landscape of fear, where women clutch their house keys between their fingers and parents keep their daughters close after dark.
Godfrey captures this atmospheric dread with remarkable restraint. The fear doesn’t announce itself through overwrought prose; instead, it seeps into the mundane details of Miv’s life—the warnings whispered at school gates, the hurried walks home before darkness falls, the newspaper headlines that seem to multiply with each passing week. This is historical fiction that trusts its readers to understand the weight of what’s unsaid.
When Miv’s family threatens to leave Yorkshire for a fresh start, she hatches a desperate plan with her best friend Sharon: they’ll catch the Ripper themselves. Armed with a spiral notebook and twelve-year-old logic, the girls begin their “List of Suspicious Things,” cataloging neighbors, teachers, and anyone whose behavior seems even slightly off. It’s equal parts Nancy Drew and Lord of the Flies—innocent detective work that gradually reveals the darker complexities of adult life.
The Architecture of Memory
Godfrey’s greatest achievement lies in her portrayal of Miv’s narrative voice. She sounds authentically twelve—observant and naive in equal measure, capable of profound insight one moment and childish misunderstanding the next. When Miv describes her street as resembling “rows of battle-weary grey soldiers,” you feel both the poetry of her bookish imagination and her desperate attempt to make sense of decay she’s too young to fully comprehend.
The Yorkshire dialect threads through the narrative like the warp and weft of the region’s famous textiles—”laik,” “snicket,” “ey up”—grounding us firmly in God’s Own Country. Yet Godfrey never lets it become performative. The language feels lived-in, authentic to how people actually spoke, not how outsiders imagine they did.
The author’s background as the first in her mill-working family to attend university infuses the novel with genuine understanding of class dynamics in 1970s Yorkshire. The contrast between Miv’s cramped terraced house with its “chipped yellow Formica top” and Sharon’s home with “heavily lined velvet curtains” speaks volumes without ever feeling didactic. These aren’t just scenic details; they’re the architecture of social division that even children absorb.
The Heart That Breaks: Friendship and Loss
At its core, The List of Suspicious Things chronicles the friendship between Miv and Sharon with devastating precision. Sharon is “all curves and waves” to Miv’s “straight lines,” the sunny counterpoint to Miv’s darker worldview. Their bond feels achingly real—the kind of childhood friendship that seems eternal until adulthood proves otherwise.
When tragedy strikes, Godfrey refuses to soften the blow. Sharon’s death comes not from the Ripper they’ve been hunting, but from local boy Reece Carlton—a brutal reminder that monsters aren’t always strangers lurking in shadows. The aftermath is rendered with unflinching honesty, showing grief not as a linear journey but as something that lives in the body, that changes how you move through the world.
What elevates this beyond mere tragedy is Godfrey’s exploration of complicity and guilt. Miv must reckon with how their detective game may have contributed to the violence, how playing at catching a killer has real-world consequences. It’s a coming-of-age moment that arrives too soon and too harshly, stripping away childhood’s protective naivety in one brutal stroke.
The Weight of Silence
Miv’s mother exists largely as an absence in the novel—a woman who has retreated into silence after an attack that may or may not have been perpetrated by the Ripper. Godfrey handles this delicate subject matter with care, revealing the truth gradually while exploring how trauma ripples through entire families. Aunty Jean’s bossy efficiency, Miv’s father’s affair with Sharon’s mother, Miv’s own obsessive list-making—all are responses to this central wound.
The revelation of Miv’s mother’s assault, and the victim-blaming that silenced her, lands with particular force. When she asks Miv, “Do you think it was my fault?” and Miv responds with an emphatic “No!”—we see both the generational shift in understanding sexual violence and the painful recognition that children sometimes possess clearer moral vision than traumatized adults.
Community as Character
Yorkshire itself pulses through every page, rendered with the kind of affection that only comes from lived experience. The corner shops and chip butties, the church jumble sales and Wakes Week shutdowns, the derelict mills standing as monuments to industrial decline—Godfrey assembles these elements into a vivid portrait of a community under siege from both economic devastation and a serial killer.
Mr. Bashir’s corner shop serves as an unlikely sanctuary, a place where Miv, Sharon, and Ishtiaq can be children together despite the darkness outside. The casual racism Ishtiaq and his father endure is never sensationalized but presented as the constant background hum of prejudice that marginalized communities navigate daily. When the shop is vandalized with graffiti, Godfrey doesn’t need to explicitly connect it to the broader climate of fear—the parallels speak for themselves.
Where the Novel Stumbles
If there’s a weakness, it’s that certain secondary characters occasionally feel more like types than fully realized people. Aunty Jean, while memorably drawn, sometimes tilts toward caricature—the opinionated northern woman with a list for everything. Some of the suspects on Miv’s list receive cursory treatment, their plotlines resolved too neatly or abandoned too quickly.
The pacing also falters in the middle section, where the investigative episodesmight feel repetitive. While this mirrors the actual tedium of the Ripper investigation—years of fear and false leads—it occasionally stalls the narrative momentum.
Additionally, readers seeking a traditional mystery may find themselves disappointed. The List of Suspicious Things isn’t a whodunit where clues carefully laid eventually reveal the killer. The real Peter Sutcliffe appears only peripherally, a shadow that looms but never fully materializes until his capture. The novel’s true mystery lies in understanding how communities survive collective trauma, how families keep secrets, how children process adult failures.
A Debut That Resonates
Godfrey joins a lineage of British writers who understand that the most powerful historical fiction emerges from personal memory rather than research alone. Like Alan Hollinghurst capturing AIDS-era London or Sarah Waters conjuring Victorian spiritualism, she transforms lived experience into literature that feels both historically specific and emotionally universal.
The author’s note reveals that her own father knew Peter Sutcliffe, lending the novel an urgency that pure imagination couldn’t achieve. This is a tribute to victims and survivors, yes, but also to the generation of northern children who grew up under the Ripper’s shadow, who played outside until dark despite warnings, who constructed their own narratives to make sense of inexplicable evil.
The Resonance of Everyday Horror
What makes The List of Suspicious Things remarkable is its refusal to sensationalize either the Ripper murders or Sharon’s death. Instead, Godfrey focuses on the texture of daily life lived in fear’s long shadow—the way Miv still shells peas and reads books and negotiates friendship dramas even as the news announces another body found. This is how trauma actually works: not as constant crisis but as a persistent undertone that colors everything without consuming it entirely.
The novel’s final movement, where Miv begins keeping a new list—”A list of wonderful things. A list of all the things I loved about her and all the adventures we had had”—offers not closure but a way forward. Grief doesn’t end; we simply learn to carry it differently.
Final Verdict
The List of Suspicious Things announces Jennie Godfrey as a significant new voice in British historical fiction. While the novel occasionally stumbles in its ambitions, these are the stumbles of a writer reaching for something beyond mere competence. This is a book about the end of innocence rendered with uncommon grace, about how childhood friendships shape us even—especially—when they end in heartbreak.
For readers seeking atmospheric historical fiction with genuine emotional heft, or anyone interested in how communities process collective trauma, this novel delivers. It’s neither a comfortable read nor a simple one, but it’s an honest one—and in an era of slick commercial fiction, that honesty feels revolutionary.
Yorkshire in the late 1970s was a place where the mills were dying, Thatcher was rising, and a serial killer stalked the streets. Godfrey has given us that world in all its grim specificity while never losing sight of the human hearts beating within it.
If You Loved This, Try These
Readers drawn to The List of Suspicious Things should explore:
- “The God of the Woods” by Liz Moore – Another mystery anchored in a specific time and place, exploring how communities respond when children go missing
- “We Begin at the End” by Chris Whitaker – A moving portrait of childhood resilience in the face of violence, with similar attention to voice and place
- “The Essex Serpent” by Sarah Perry – Historical fiction that captures a community gripped by fear, with rich period detail and complex female characters
- “My Name Is Monster” by Katie Hale – A debut exploring survival and connection in a devastated landscape
- “The Behaviour of Moths” by Poppy Adams – A dark, atmospheric novel about family secrets in rural England, with a child’s perspective on adult mysteries
Godfrey has crafted something rare: a debut novel that feels both achingly personal and historically significant, intimate in scope yet epic in emotional resonance.