Bernard Hall

Miss Perfect is set in the north of England in the space between the Falklands War and the miners’ strike when I was a social worker in a staunchly Labour local authority. [...] In resolving to write a fictional portrait of just such a woman I wanted to explore two questions: was love possible, might she find life beyond work? I needed to unpick the reasons behind her present state, how she reached this point where work had become her life. Part of my answer came in the back story I weaved around her after delving into a skeleton in my family history cupboard and extracting the experience of an ancestor who suffered an abusive childhood. These dark undertones in shades of grey are not gratuitous; they are there to help explain her present situation. From the Introduction

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