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Among Thieves

Among Thieves is Packer’s debut novel. Set in Coventry in 1982, it examines the socio-political climate in the city and society at large, comparing it to the Enver Hoxha regime in Albania. The main themes are racism and social entropy. Among Thieves took two years, three months to research, write and edit. For the Albanian sections Packer used political texts (e.g. Albania as Dictatorship and Democracy by Owen Pearson), the fiction of Ismail Kadare and poetry of Martin Camaj, as well as travel journals such as The Accursed Mountains: Journeys in Albania by Robert Carver. Working with refugees at the Coventry Refugee Centre she undertook in-depth interviews with Albanian refugees, and used online forums such as Illyria.forums to collect information regarding Hoxha’s regime and its decline in the mid-1980s. For the Coventry sections she used in depth interview data and family testimony from Windrush era West Indians in the city. Packer also contacted local historians and council members regarding social deprivation in Coventry during the 1980s. Albanian refugee stories and West Indian immigrant stories have never been juxtaposed in this way and as such the work is entirely original from a research point of view. Cathy Unsworth, in The Guardian, called it a ‘highly original’ novel. It has sold 3000+ copies in the UK and was bought by libraries in the USA, Canada, NZ and Australia and reviewed in TLS, Independent on Sunday and Publishers Weekly. It was nominated for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (2010), the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award (2010) and The People’s Book Prize (2010). Publishers Weekly called it, ‘an intriguing debut’. Brandon Robshaw in the Independent on Sunday said, ‘The energy of the writing and the darkness of the story are reminiscent of Martin Amis, circa Dead Babies and Success – but it is better plotted.’