Toto Among the Murderers: Winner of the Portico Prize 2022

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'Vividly portrays the human face of young women on the margins of society, women who defy being statistics, who have their own stories and loves to tell' Sophie Ward

WINNER OF THE PORTICO PRIZE

LONGLISTED FOR THE OCKHAM AWARDS

Leeds in the 1970s is a place fraught with danger for young women like Jude, for her best friend Nel and Janice across the road. Jude flirts with the wrong kind of people, gets drunk too often, ends up on wild hitch-hiking jaunts up and down the country. Until now it has all been fun, a way to let off steam when the relationship she's having with a married woman doesn't work out. Jude doesn't pay much attention to the news: to the young women who have been going missing, to the young women who haven't been returning home, to the dangers out there. That is until she's offered a lift by a couple in a grey car, a couple who have been stalking the roads, looking for someone exactly like her.

Reviews

An exhilarating novel, so evocative of the lives of broke, hedonistic art graduates in the 70s and all the joy and recklessness of youth. I was gripped also by the darkness and predatory threats circling these characters, who think themselves so invulnerable, and yet are anything but - Susan Barker, author of The Incarnations

Vividly portrays the human face of young women on the margins of society, women who defy being statistics, who have their own stories and loves to tell - Sophie Ward

Moments of startling beauty and heart-wrenching tenderness. The author's skill in portraying so much brutality with such a lightness of touch is truly impressive. The writing engages from the get-go with crisp dialogue, deft depictions of time and place and sharp observations of human behaviour . . . I relished every page - Emma Henderson

My favourite kind of book. A tense literary thriller grounded in the urgent mess of real lives in the 1970s, where a compelling sense of threat lurks behind every paragraph. Toto Among The Murderers captures an England ill-at-ease with itself full of people who don't know what they want, but they know it isn't this. This is a novel that introduces an assured writer, someone interested in lives that are often over-looked from a neglected period of recent history - Stephen May

Author Bio

Sally J Morgan was born in the Welsh mining town of Abertyleri, and grew up nomadically across Wales and England. She lives and works in Wellington, New Zealand, with her wife, the novelist Jess Richards. Toto Among the Murderers is based on her own experience of being offered a lift by Fred and Rosemary West.