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Here Today
Set in London in the early 1980s when most offices still clattered to the sound of manual typewriters and word processors were only a rumour, this crime novel tells the story of a temp who disappears and another who goes to look for her. Winner of the 1984 Fawcett Book Prize, it was described by Tribune as "racy, crisp and yes, very thrilling", and by the New Statesman as "witty, provocative, ironic and lots of fun."
- GenresCrime
240 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 1984
9 people want to read
About the author
Zoë Fairbairns
22 books15 followersZoe Fairbairns was born in England on 20 December 1948, and educated at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, and the College of William and Mary, USA. She has worked as a freelance journalist and a creative writing tutor, and is the former poetry editor of Spare Rib. She has also held appointments as Writer in Residence at Bromley Schools (1981-3 and 1985-9), Deakin University, Geelong, Australia (1983), Sunderland Polytechnic (1983-5) and Surrey County Council (1989).
Her first novel, Live as Family, written when she was seventeen, was published in 1968, and her second, Down: An Explanation (1969), was published a year later while she was still at university. Both novels employ a first-person narrative to explore issues of personal and community responsibility. Her short stories have been included in many anthologies, including Tales I Tell My Mother: A Collection of Feminist Short Stories (1978) and Brilliant Careers (2000). She has also contributed to poetry anthologies, including The Faber Book of Blue Verse (1990). In the 1970s her writing centred on environmental and social concerns, and she produced reports for CND and Shelter. In 1984, with James Cameron, she published Peace Moves: Nuclear Protest in the 1980s, an account of the anti-nuclear protest movement.
Benefits (1979), a tense, dystopian novel, marked her return to fiction and to women's issues, and five further novels, which consolidated her reputation as a feminist writer, followed: Stand we at Last (1983), spans 120 years and three continents and chronicles the lives of five generations of women against a background of Victorian repression, prostitution, the suffragette movement, the devastation of war and the rise of the women's movement; Here Today (1984), which was awarded the 1985 Fawcett Society Book Prize, is an exploration of feminist themes in a crime setting; Closing (1987), is a sharp portrait of working women caught between feminisim and Thatcherism; and Daddy's Girls (1992), is a saga of three sisters in a family full of guilty secrets. Zoe Fairbairns' most recent novel, Other Names, was published in 1998. Her latest book is a collection of short stories, How Do You Pronounce Nulliparous? (2004).
From the author's website:
Born:
England, 1948.
Family:
Second of three daughters.
Parents:
Conscientious. Furious. Funny. Gave great parties. Had huge rows. Got divorced.
Religion:
Born with an open mind. Christened into Church of England. Educated by Catholic nuns. (Don’t ask. Or Click here) Secularist.
Employment status? (Employed full-time, employed part-time, unemployed, self-employed, retired?)
All of the above.
Blog, Twitter, Facebook?
None of the above. But I welcome friendly, interesting, emails from friendly, interesting people, and I do my best to reply in kind.
Contact her at: zoe@zoefairbairns.co.uk
Her first novel, Live as Family, written when she was seventeen, was published in 1968, and her second, Down: An Explanation (1969), was published a year later while she was still at university. Both novels employ a first-person narrative to explore issues of personal and community responsibility. Her short stories have been included in many anthologies, including Tales I Tell My Mother: A Collection of Feminist Short Stories (1978) and Brilliant Careers (2000). She has also contributed to poetry anthologies, including The Faber Book of Blue Verse (1990). In the 1970s her writing centred on environmental and social concerns, and she produced reports for CND and Shelter. In 1984, with James Cameron, she published Peace Moves: Nuclear Protest in the 1980s, an account of the anti-nuclear protest movement.
Benefits (1979), a tense, dystopian novel, marked her return to fiction and to women's issues, and five further novels, which consolidated her reputation as a feminist writer, followed: Stand we at Last (1983), spans 120 years and three continents and chronicles the lives of five generations of women against a background of Victorian repression, prostitution, the suffragette movement, the devastation of war and the rise of the women's movement; Here Today (1984), which was awarded the 1985 Fawcett Society Book Prize, is an exploration of feminist themes in a crime setting; Closing (1987), is a sharp portrait of working women caught between feminisim and Thatcherism; and Daddy's Girls (1992), is a saga of three sisters in a family full of guilty secrets. Zoe Fairbairns' most recent novel, Other Names, was published in 1998. Her latest book is a collection of short stories, How Do You Pronounce Nulliparous? (2004).
From the author's website:
Born:
England, 1948.
Family:
Second of three daughters.
Parents:
Conscientious. Furious. Funny. Gave great parties. Had huge rows. Got divorced.
Religion:
Born with an open mind. Christened into Church of England. Educated by Catholic nuns. (Don’t ask. Or Click here) Secularist.
Employment status? (Employed full-time, employed part-time, unemployed, self-employed, retired?)
All of the above.
Blog, Twitter, Facebook?
None of the above. But I welcome friendly, interesting, emails from friendly, interesting people, and I do my best to reply in kind.
Contact her at: zoe@zoefairbairns.co.uk
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 5, 2021
I first read this novel back in the very late '80s (it was published in '84) and it made quite an impression on me for some reason, perhaps because the themes of office temping and feminism were subjects I could relate to, having experience of both. (Like main character Antonia, I too was sent on a word processor training course, and very high-tech it all seemed at the time.)
Life isn't going well for Antonia. Her husband has left her - for reasons you can't really blame him about - and she has fallen out of favour at Here Today, the temp agency run by the ferocious Mrs Hook, where she was formerly Temp of the Year.
Temping is a way of life for Antonia, who has no desire for a permanent job, but it's only a stopgap for Catherine, a trained teacher. Alarmed by the low pay, uncertain conditions and frequent sexual harassment endured by her fellow temps, Catherine takes it on herself to try to unionise them. However, she's also on a mission to find a temp who left a previous job where she may or may not have been raped. Someone she knows only by name - Samantha Yardley. A mission Antonia too finds herself reluctantly drawn into...
It's never quite clear why Catherine is so obsessed with finding Samantha, someone she knows hardly anything about and who quite possibly doesn't want or need to be found. However, it's the hook for a story which sees a character travelling to the holiday resort of Larana in search of the elusive Samantha (I'm not sure we're ever told where this actually is, geographically).
Here Today is steeped in the '80s, when computers were a terrifying new thing threatening office workers' jobs, sexual harassment in the workplace went mainly unchallenged, and you could still smoke on planes. It's called a crime novel, but it doesn't feel (or look) like one, as for much of the story there's no clear evidence that a crime has been committed.
Like Zoe Fairbairns' other books, this is a great read with some spot-on observations about contemporary (i.e. early 1980s) women's lives. I wasn't sure how I would feel about it all these years later, but I enjoyed it a lot.
Life isn't going well for Antonia. Her husband has left her - for reasons you can't really blame him about - and she has fallen out of favour at Here Today, the temp agency run by the ferocious Mrs Hook, where she was formerly Temp of the Year.
Temping is a way of life for Antonia, who has no desire for a permanent job, but it's only a stopgap for Catherine, a trained teacher. Alarmed by the low pay, uncertain conditions and frequent sexual harassment endured by her fellow temps, Catherine takes it on herself to try to unionise them. However, she's also on a mission to find a temp who left a previous job where she may or may not have been raped. Someone she knows only by name - Samantha Yardley. A mission Antonia too finds herself reluctantly drawn into...
It's never quite clear why Catherine is so obsessed with finding Samantha, someone she knows hardly anything about and who quite possibly doesn't want or need to be found. However, it's the hook for a story which sees a character travelling to the holiday resort of Larana in search of the elusive Samantha (I'm not sure we're ever told where this actually is, geographically).
Here Today is steeped in the '80s, when computers were a terrifying new thing threatening office workers' jobs, sexual harassment in the workplace went mainly unchallenged, and you could still smoke on planes. It's called a crime novel, but it doesn't feel (or look) like one, as for much of the story there's no clear evidence that a crime has been committed.
Like Zoe Fairbairns' other books, this is a great read with some spot-on observations about contemporary (i.e. early 1980s) women's lives. I wasn't sure how I would feel about it all these years later, but I enjoyed it a lot.
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January 28, 2017I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews