After producing two superb collections of short stories, Sweet Home and Dance Move, the Belfast-based writer Wendy Erskine has a lot to live up to in The Benefactors, her debut novel. The good news is that the shift has been achieved with no noticeable grinding of gears. Like all the best writers of fiction, Erskine is less interested in stylistic experiment or reductive polemics than in people and what makes them tick. 

Strident and self-regarding Frankie grew up in care and met her rich husband, Neil, while working as an air stewardess. Her stepson, Chris (who wants to ‘do medicine’), is arrested, along with his friends Rami and Lyness, for sexually assaulting a girl, Misty Johnston, at a party. The three young men insist that the encounter was consensual. Rami’s mother, Miriam, is in mourning for her husband, a Coptic Christian who died in a car accident in mysterious circumstances. Lyness’s mother, Bronagh, the daughter of two doctors, is the CEO of a children’s charity and far less stable than she outwardly appears. While the three women don’t meet until near the end, the novel is vitalised by their differences.

Misty was raised by her cab driver stepfather, Boogie, and her grandmother Nan D after her mother left. By eighteen, she’s dealing drugs while drudging in a hotel, as well as secretly doing webcam sex work in her childhood bedroom (the novel takes its title from her porn site’s euphemism