Not All Tarts Are Apple by Pip GrangerPenguin, 2003 (originally Bantam, 2002)

Soho (London) in the 1950s, rhyming slang (“she’s probably too Brahms to give a monkey’s”) and all the pimps and their girls, the mobsters, and seven-year-old Rosie at the center of it all. Fun and charming, though sometimes precious or sentimental: sentences like “Now I like the telly as much as the next person, but I sometimes miss the days when people did things together.”