In her memoir Undercurrent, which was short-listed in 2023 for the Nero Book Awards, Natasha Carthew recalled her childhood and adolescence in “the constant brawl of poverty” by the seaside in Cornwall. In her latest book, Rough Edges (Sceptre, £20), she journeys round coastal communities elsewhere in Britain, aiming to share the voices and stories of people who are feeling similar pressures. The book was reviewed yesterday in The Sunday Times by Jack Burke. He says that Carthew is a gifted writer, tackling a subject “lodged deep in her bones”. Her book is “part memoir, part political meditation, part travelogue and part polemic on class and exclusion… But the balance between reportage and introspection never settles. Again and again Rough Edges arrives somewhere fascinating only to move on before the reader has absorbed the texture of the place or its people.”