[Union Street] is a product of the grim wasteland of England's industrial northeast. It is the hard winter of 1973; a miner's strike amplifies a landscape of gray drizzle, physical and spiritual impoverishment. Against this background seven women enact their individual rites of passage…. When it was published in Britain it was called feminist, proletarian, socialist-realist; Lawrencian, Osbornian, Sillitoe-esque…. There are those who've found it too grim and gritty, and those who've called it "the undiluted gospel of the distaff side."

But Pat Barker's work sits squarely in the tradition of Willa Cather…. Barker's working-class world of shabby, burnt-out buildings and daily work in the cake factory calls to mind the arid, provincial small towns of Willa Cather's shoreless plains, the "iron country" from which there is no escape….

Union Street reaches into human truths that are older than the sad historical milieu in which they are acted out...