No Middle Ground‪?‬

Pearl Booth has lived beside her neighbour Flo for more than fifty years. Two widows, two gardens, two women of different cultures who never needed a treaty to tell them how to treat each other. When Flo is injured and distant relatives arrive to care for her, Pearl expects a short disruption to their quiet routine. What she gets instead is a fortnight of dogs sent at her gate, children lifted over her fence, break-ins she cannot prove, racism she cannot name out loud, and a police force that visits her for five minutes and spends an hour with the people harassing her. When Pearl's grandchildren arrive and witness what has happened to their grandmother, they bring the energy of youth, the tools of their generation, and a fury that is entirely justified. But Pearl watches something more troubling than anger move across their faces. She watches the tolerance she raised them with begin to crack. She watches them learn, against their will, that some people use race as a weapon, and that the institutions meant to protect everyone have chosen sides. "Middle Ground?" does not offer easy comfort or tidy resolution. It asks who is responsible when the system protects ideology over individuals, and whether the quiet, hard-won decency of ordinary people can survive that failure. Readers who believe that fairness should be colourblind, and who have ever been told that their genuine grievance is the wrong kind of grievance, will find this story impossible to put down and difficult to forget