There’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, who disappeared from Edinburgh six years ago leaving her parents and sister Fiona in a bleak holding pattern. During a comically awful hen weekend, Fiona, a bored single mother trapped in a menial office job, discovers that Rona had been a sex worker before she went missing. 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, dangerous, entangling – is driven by a campaigning energy, but it is so keen to emphasise that not all sex workers are damaged, 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, however, is beautifully unsettling, while the depiction of Fiona’s empty world – failing Facebook friendships, cavernous glass-fronted bars and concrete austerity-struck business zones – shows off Innes’s gift for describing the mundane as well as the exotically marginal.
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