5. Suzanne Joinson - 'Somebody Else's Story'

Available for over a year

Concluding the series of specially commissioned essays under the title theme I've Never Told Anyone This Before, the novelist and street market enthusiast Suzanne Joinson shares a story of plunder and ethical dilemmas, in which she found a box of letters on a stall in Deptford Market and began to read them. When someone else's life is up for sale is it an act of rescue to revive their story or an act of trespass and looting? What are the borders between prurience and respect? On a day Boxing Day when cardboard packaging begins to pile up outside people's houses this is a story about what gets thrown out and who it belongs to.