A tale of a criminal defence barrister who is raped by a male colleague, the award-winning Prima Facie began life as a one-woman play starring Jodie Comer and was a hit in the West End and on Broadway. Such was its impact that it helped to change the law around what juries are allowed to consider when deliberating on rape cases.
The writer Suzie Miller, who spent 15 years as a lawyer, has since expanded the play into a novel, in which she fills in the gaps in protagonist Tessa Ensler’s life before she became a junior barrister specialising in sexual assault cases. Tessa recalls overcoming a difficult childhood on a Luton council estate to get a place at Cambridge, a scholarship in chambers and her own two-bedroom flat. Though she feels like a fish out of water in her old life, she is nonetheless irritated by the privileged, public school-educated upstarts who surround her at the bar.
