She's 54.
She cleans other people's sinks for a living.
She rents places she's not legally supposed to be in.
And the world looks straight through her.
Meet Steffie Cartwright — the anti-heroine at the heart of Siân Hughes' new novel No Such Thing as Monday.
Hughes, longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2023 for her debut Pearl, is back. And she's angry.
"Middle-aged women are invisiblised all over the world," she says.
And she wrote a whole book to prove it.
Hughes kills off Steffie's abusive father, Stan, in the very first sentence.
Why?
So the lid finally comes off.
Stan didn't just dominate Steffie. He wrote her. Told her who she was. Cut her off from her sister. Kept her mother so terrified she died of a chest infection because she was too afraid to visit a doctor.
Antibiotics would've saved Eileen.
Fear killed her instead.
Hughes anchors the entire plot to one brutal, invisible number:
👉 How long it takes a minimum-wage worker to pay for the cheapest possible funeral.
The answer?
12 months of instalments.
One year of:
One lid lifts. Another slams down.
The grief comes with a payment plan.
Steffie works by the hour. No contract. No security.
She lives in housing she has no paperwork for.
She exists in the cracks of every system built to see people.
"She only exists by the hour," Hughes says.
And society, when it does look, only sees two things:
⚡ a woman going through a bad divorce
⚡ or nothing at all
Steffie's mother took in laundry for a living.
Steffie herself loves in strange, practical ways — she won't hug you, but she'll bleach your sink and fold your clothes.
Hughes pulled this straight from Purity, a medieval poem obsessed with how to mend and clean cloth… as a way to prepare your soul for heaven.
Washing shame out of the fabric.
Washing shame out of the self.
No rich prince. No sudden inheritance. No romantic rescue.
Hughes says she's frustrated by fiction where happy endings always mean money or love falling from the sky.
So she asked herself: who could look Steffie in the eye and say "it's not your fault" — and be believed?
The honest answer: nobody.
So Steffie has to rescue Steffie.
She finally says the smallest, most radical sentence in the whole novel:
"I'll do."
And for an invisible woman, that's the loudest thing she's ever said.
That's all for now!
