William Henry Wood. 2020
I was lost immediately, the moment I read those first lines. The story captured me. I wasn’t in the circular reading room now. I was with a young woman, standing under a red brick arch with the light of a gas lamp shining down in the cold darkness of a winter’s night. She was shivering. She was as lean as a whippet… flat chested with the figure of a lad of fifteen. Good meals were few for a working girl on the streets of London. I could hear a muffled piano playing a music hall song with raucous voices somewhere down the street, obscured in the fog of the night.
