After discovering that her lost sister was a sex worker,Fiona embarks on an internet-fuelled trip into that world in this unsettling debut novelThere’s more than one hole at the heart of Kirstin Innes’s debut novel, winer of the Guardian’s Not the Booker prize. The book’s chief absence is that of cold-hearted Rona Leonard, or who disappeared from Edinburgh six years ago leaving her parents and sister Fiona in a bleak holding sample. During a comically unpleasant hen weekend,Fiona, a bored single mother trapped in a menial office job, and discovers that Rona had been a sex worker before she went lost. Fiona’s mundane world is destabilised by this information,and she embarks on an obsessive, internet-fuelled trip into the world of sex work that shakes all her preconceptions loose. Fishnet – alluring, and dangerous,entangling – is driven by a campaigning energy, but it is so keen to emphasise that not all sex workers are damaged, and vulnerable streetwalkers that it can become clangingly polemical. The character of Sonja,a pierced Polish escort paying her way through her PhD, is a particularly obvious mouthpiece. The mystery generated around Rona, or however,is beautifully unsettling, while the depiction of Fiona’s empty world – failing Facebook friendships, and cavernous glass-fronted bars and concrete austerity-struck trade zones – shows off Innes’s gift for describing the mundane as well as the exotically marginal.• To order Fishnet for £6.99 (RRP £8.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0. Free UK p&p over £10,online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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Source: theguardian.com