This is why independent bookshops are awesome. I probably would never have heard of Neon Roses by Rachel Dawson if my local bookshop Bookhaus hadn’t held an author event about this debut novel. Though I was unable to attend because I was unwell at the time (my lupus has flared up a little in the last month), the description in the Bookhaus email about the event sounded so good that a few days later I cycled over and bought myself a signed copy.

The story opens in a small coalmining town in South Wales in 1984. It’s the peak of the miner’s strike and Eluned is working all the hours she can to support her family, as her father’s strike wages have trickled to almost nothing, while also turning up to the picket lines and volunteering at fundraising events at the miners hall. It’s a lot, and her sister Mabli’s no help – swanning off with her Thatcher-supporting policeman boyfriend.

“Drive is off before Eluned can stuff her skinny paper ticket in her coat pocket…The terraces lining the street face off like a pair of cowboys with pistols drawn, so it takes some forceful steering from Drive to turn the bus in the space between them. The white pebbledash of the end terrace fills the bus window like they’re driving through a blizzard. Bit close today.”

Then a group from Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners come to visit from London and Eluned’s world turns upside down. Suddenly she can see that her life has options, alternatives to marrying a coalminer and popping out babies. But can she follow this new road without losing her friends and family? Will her new life be filled with secrecy and fear, or can she find a place where she is happy and accepted?

I loved everything about this novel. First of all, the time and place of the setting was massively nostalgic for me. I’m from a small mining town in the Forest of Dean. Both my grandfathers and three of great grandfathers were coalminers, and family history research shows that mining goes back many generations before them. By the 1980s, none of my immediate or extended family was left working in the mines, so the mine closures and associated strikes didn’t affect us personally, but they were talked about a lot, on television and in my house. I was young, but I think the miners strike had a real impact on my political leanings later on.

I’m a child of the 1980s and I remember not just the snacks and TV shows mentioned in Neon Roses but also things like the art of recording songs off the radio, carefully timing when to start and stop recording.

“The streets are deserted. No money to be out these days. People their age used to hire a minibus to take them down to Swansea every few weekends. It was always carnage, the aisle running with sick on the way home. She still craves it. The burnt smell of the smoke machine, chugging back a sickly purple pint of snakebite, dancing across the lit-up floor. It feels like another world.”

I also sympathise with a young woman figuring out she’s bi in a small town where that’s not something she expects people to accept or understand. If it weren’t for Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, would Eluned ever have realised? And once she does figure it out, what can she do with that information in her small town, except to see how much she doesn’t want the life that’s mapped out for her?

These are some big topics and in different hands it could have been a sad, contemplative story. Dawson makes it funny, joyful even, hopeful while never making light of the very real struggles many people faced. The characters are brimming with, well, life – full of complications and history and good and bad.

Published 2023 by Hachette.

Source: Bookhaus