Slammerkin, by Emma Donoghue (Virago, 7.99 in UK)

First thought, upon finishing this retelling of the story of Mary Saunders, an 18th-century girl who was born on the wrong side of the tracks even before there were any tracks: thank God I wasn't born poor and female in London - or anywhere - in the 1790s. Second thought: I wish I hadn't finished yet, so as to have the joy - and pain - of reading it all over again. A vibrant recreation, first of the St Giles area of London, all bad smells and desperate remedies, then of a desolate town near the Welsh border, all bad smells and - well, you get the idea - Slammerkin is both an impressive feat of the imagination and a very real indictment of past socio-sexual horrors which, in our headlong rush to a bland, globally anaethetised future, most of us would prefer to forget. Donoghue's Mary Saunders, however, is too memorable for forgetting; complex, sharply intelligent, she is both a creature of another century and, in almost every sense, our absolute contemporary.