The Caseroom

By Kate Hunter

SHORTLISTED FOR THE SALTIRE FIRST BOOK AWARD

Torn between class and gender loyalties and embroiled in a bitter labour dispute, Iza must choose sides.

Set in the thick of workers' lives, in Edinburgh's thriving print industry, The Caseroom follows thirteen-year-old Iza into the arcane world of the caseroom where she learns the intricacies of a highly-skilled trade.

As one of some 800 Edinburgh women who, for a few decades did so, Iza becomes a hand-typesetter, work that had been, and was to become once more, a male preserve. Despite hostility to the cheap labour that women represent, Iza persists in work that allows her to feed her imagination on books. But holding on to her trade means hardening herself to the needs of those she loves. And when the men's union moves to eliminate women from the caseroom and a We Women movement forms to oppose them, there is no middle ground.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fledgling Press
• Release date: May 31, 2017
• ISBN: 9781905916917

Kate Hunter

Kate Hunter's father's family earned a living in the Edinburgh print trade. They made books and newspapers; they read them, but they never got the chance to write them. Kate has read thousands of books and helped to make a fair few. Now she's written one. She grew up in Edinburgh, worked in a printers there when she was fifteen and, later, was a Mother of the Chapel in Milton Keynes where she now lives.