From the publication of her first novel, Livi Michael has garnered both critical and popular attention for her work. While Michael's working-class fiction has won several literary awards and received largely favorable reviews from the popular press, some critics have dismissed her works as more political than literary. In a review of Under a Thin Moon (1992) for The Guardian (5 March 1992) Philip MacCann suggested that because Michael sacrifices literariness to politics, she ought to consider the House of Commons instead of authorship, and Jenny Turner in her 27 December 1994 Guardian review, of Their Angel Reach (1994) reprehended an "aesthetically unchallenging realism." Michael responded to such charges in an interview with Pat Wheeler and Sharon Monteith, published in Critical Survey (2000), by pointing out that her characters reflect the psychological impact of political economic policies. She also drew from her academic background to point out that for its entire history, working-class fiction has...