YOU tend to forget how long Lesley Glaister has been writing: this latest novel is her 15th, in a distinguished career that began with Honour Thy Father in 1990. She has won prizes, written poetry and drama, and has been published consistently ever since,

at the rate of almost a book a year. But she’s not the easiest writer to place: part of her work lies firmly within the realist tradition, but there are also explorations of madness in her fiction that almost border on fantasy.

Glaister follows three rules in her work: she’s the kind of writer who makes her reader feel thoroughly uneasy; her novels look directly at disturbing situations; and finally, she often eschews a metropolitan setting or a large world view in favour of something smaller, more local. In The Squeeze, Glaister follows the first two of these; the third “rule” is flouted for a particular reason.

That is because this novel is about sex trafficking and so Glaister situates her novel in a capital city, in this case Edinburgh. That’s not to say such a crime is exclusive to urban areas of course, but cities make it easier to hide. It’s the end of the 1980s and Romanian teenager Marta has been wooed by a flashy businessman who promises her a future as a teacher in the UK. She only realises he’s a human trafficker when she wakes up on board a ship, having been drugged. She ends up trapped in a brothel in London first, then she and some other girls are “bought” by two Scottish men and taken to Edinburgh.

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Glaister, as expected, doesn’t shrink from harrowing details but she’s careful not to sensationalise. Running parallel to Marta’s nightmare is the story of Norwegian Mats, who has moved to Edinburgh from Oslo to be director of communications of the company he works for. It’s an ironic job title: Mats isn’t best at communicating, especially with women. His Norwegian wife, Nina, doesn’t share his dream of having a child together and she doesn’t follow him to Scotland.

After he meets Vivienne at work, and eventually marries her, he struggles to deal with her post-natal depression, having also failed to understand that she doesn’t want his baby either.

Mats and Marta are brought together when an American businessman gets Mats drunk and takes him to a brothel one night for a bit of “fun”. Mats at least isn’t quite as blind to the exploitation that is taking place as his fellow businessman, but it’s really only when he spots Marta on Princes Street, after she’s briefly escaped one of her pimps, that he fully realises the situation that she’s in and feels compelled to do something about it.

Realistic characters with all their failings and weaknesses are Glaister’s stock-in-trade, and she certainly hasn’t made things easy for herself here. At times, it’s hard to sympathise with the self-centred Mats or to see Marta as anything other than a victim and there are moments, particularly when Vivienne writes to her friend Rita voicing her suspicions about her marriage in a tone that just comes across as irritating, that Glaister risks losing us. But in creating characters

who are often hard for us to like, Glaister is also refusing to allow us to sit at ease, and that’s important. It’s after Mats has paid drunkenly for sex with Marta that his perspective changes from the first person to the third person. It is as though he’s lost a sense of himself after that transaction, lost an innocence he will never retrieve. It’s his teenage son Tom, towards the end of the novel who will be granted that first-person perspective.

Marta, needless to say, is never in the first person, always in the third. It is as though she has never really been allowed a sense of herself, whether as a teenager living under the dictator Ceaucescu or as a woman forced into prostitution. These distinctions matter because they shape our relationship with the characters, and it’s how Glaister manages to keep us hooked even when we question our own sympathy for some of the people involved.

This is not an easy novel to read and it can’t have been the easiest to write. But Glaister has never shied away from a challenge, and she never disappoints. She may not be the most high-profile writer of her generation, and her unflinching approach to difficult subject matter may be part of the reason for that. But she deserves to be better known.

The Squeeze by Lesley Glaister is published by Salt, priced £14.99