The seven narratives of Pat Barker's Union Street are … solidly linked. Each deals with a woman living in an English working-class city street in the North East, during the winter of the miner's strike….

No grim detail is avoided …, and no idiom goes unnoted…. An authorial voice, which speaks of 'stoicism' and 'horror,' makes sure we are moved. The result is a serious, well-meant, gripping set of case-histories, but not a novel.

Hermione Lee, "At Spaghetti Junction," in The Observer, May 30, 1982, p. 31.∗