Launderette Girl

There are two kinds of people at Ashcombe College: the ones who arrive in a Range Rover, and Immy Hale, who arrives in a smoking Transit van pushed through the gates by her dad in a charity-shop hoodie. Immy lives above Bubbles & Suds launderette in Peckham with Danny, the kindest man alive, and the hole their mum Grace left when she died on a March night in 2018. Everyone called it an accident.

Then a scholarship puts Immy among the children of London’s richest families, and she finds threads that lead back to that night. There’s a tech company called Kestrel, a gold bird above a Bishopsgate lobby, a voicemail at 23:24 and an old Nokia hidden behind a wardrobe. She gets help from the posh rower Kit, from Minty, a girl with a monster for a father, from the estate’s fierce aunties and from a stubborn detective. As the years pass from sixth form to Oxford and on into adult life, Immy writes it all down and slowly builds a case that money tried very hard to bury.

It’s a story of grief, class, love and justice, and of the people who say “someone has to” and mean it.