The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper

“Hallie Rubenhold, the author of The Five, has researched the lives of these five women absolutely brilliantly. It’s a great piece of detective work into some very obscure sources…She really disproves what the ‘Ripperologist’ literature says about the victims and recovers these women’s lives with a good deal of sympathy. It’s a moving book. It’s humane, it’s scholarly, and it challenges, from a feminist position, a whole library of books on Jack the Ripper.” Read more...

The Best History Books: the 2020 Wolfson Prize shortlist

Richard Evans, Historian

“Jack the Ripper is not in this book. We know how they die and that they die. And then the rest of it is: here are the lives of people, women, working class women, who are often written out of the history books. And this seems to me to be a brilliant and brave voicing of people who otherwise would be voiceless.” Read more...

The Best Nonfiction Books of 2019

Stig Abell, Journalist