DAVID PEACE BEGAN the first novel of his acclaimed Red Riding Quartet, about the Ripper killings and other grim goings-on in Yorkshire in the 1970s and 1980s, with a quotation from Harry S Truman: ‘The only thing new in this world is the history you don’t know.’ It is a statement that illuminates much about Peace’s purpose – particularly his interest in grounding his fiction in the verifiable, in order to get at the unverifiable: speculative history that could not be told in another setting. In this book about the miners’ strike of 1984, telling a story he describes as ‘a fiction, based on a fact’, Peace ranges beyond the history we know – the television images of police and pickets battling in the sunshine – into a secretive world of murk and mendacity.

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