Interview | Author Sian Hughes on exploring the idea of the invisible middle-aged woman

Steffie, the improbable protagonist of Siân Hughes’ darkly comic caller novel, No Such Thing arsenic Monday (Picador India), emerged from a penning store game. “There would beryllium each these jobs successful the mediate of the table, and I had to prime one; I ever picked the laundress,” says the Cheshire-based teacher and writer, whose debut novel, Pearl, was longlisted for the Booker Prize successful 2023.

Hughes recovered herself going backmost to this quality implicit and implicit again, continuing to constitute successful the dependable of this laundress, who “has been with maine for rather a agelong time”. She began her exploration of Steffie, a profoundly flawed, self-destructive pistillate moving astatine a adust cleaners, by asking her a bid of questions: “Why are you truthful obsessed with getting the stain retired of this garment? Why bash you consciousness truthful impure inside? What has happened to you that makes you consciousness truthful unworthy?”