Supermarket Supermodel by Jim Cartwright

Jim Cartwright is a great playwright, best known for The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, adapted into a memorable film starring Jane Horrocks and Michael Caine. There are echoes of Little Voice in Cartwright's first novel, which also looks at a young northern woman pulled from obscurity into the limelight.

In Little Voice, however, Laura makes an appearance only in a seedy club; in Supermarket Supermodel Linda Longbottom is catapulted from till girl to catwalk queen in a variation on the Cinderella story that the reader assumes is heading towards midnight and the glass coach turning back into a corporation bus in a drizzly Lancashire town.

The plot of Supermarket Supermodel is unlikely to the point of unbelievable, but it's meant to be. Linda has a humdrum life at Safeshop, which is enlivened by her workmates, women with names such as Igor, Thinnie and Quiet Alice. She is going out with a dull-but-reliable bloke called Mark and her life is ripe for change, in a Shirley Valentine way.

Change comes in the shape of Rafe, “a handsome older man in younger clothes�? who stumbles into the supermarket one early morning, buys a basket of things and gives Linda his card. “Ever thought of modelling?�?he says, and Linda's life is turned upside down.

Linda the checkout girl becomes Crystalline the model. In a dizzyingly rapid way, perhaps more suited to a film than a novel, she plunges into a world of five-star hotels and first-class travel, of photoshoots and magazine covers.

So far, so predictable, in one sense, and the reader waits impatiently for the inevitable crash-and-burn. Crystalline spirals downward via drugs and despair, but then unexpectedly picks herself up by deciding to use homeless people as models, putting them on the catwalk with their dogs on strings and their hedge-backwards hair.

Cartwright's strength, as in his plays, is his dialogue and his creation of character; he can create the rhythms of Northern speech as well as any writer writing today. He seems less surefooted in the fashion world, but the playwright in him keeps moving the action along, and keeps the reader's interest alive. But here's an idea, Jim: why not adapt Supermarket Supermodel into a play ?