It was like reading a queer anxiety-ridden Jane Eyre - not just time-period and style wise, but because there was too much description for my personal taste but all of it beautiful and worth persevering through for the rest of the wonderful thing. It was a joy, an undertaking, a dedication, an absolute delight. I have never read anything quite like it. Told through journal entries and letters, Nettleblack is a picaresque ride through the perils and joys of finding your place in the world, challenging myths about queerness – particularly transness – as a modern phenomenon, while exploring the practicalities of articulating queer perspectives when you’re struggling for words. Is the world she’s lost in also a place she can find herself?

As the net starts to close around Henry, the new people in her life seem to offer her a way out, and a way forward. And to make things worse, sinister forces threaten to expose her as the missing Nettleblack sister. Assailed by strange feelings for her new colleague - the tomboyish, moody Septimus - Henry quickly sees that she’s lost in a small rural town with surprisingly big problems.

But the Division soon finds itself under siege from a spate of crimes and must fight for its very survival. Desperate to hide from her older sisters, Henry disguises herself and enlists. Having run away from her family home to escape an arranged marriage, Welsh heiress Henry Nettleblack finds herself ambushed, robbed, and then saved by the mysterious Dallyangle Division - part detective agency, part neighbourhood watch. Subversive and playful, Nettleblack is a neo-Victorian queer farce that follows a runaway heir/ess and an organisation of crime-fighting misfits as they struggle with the misdeeds besieging a rural English town.

Nat reeve nettleblack