Former advisory teacher José Patterson, who lives in Oxford, has written her first children’s book, No Buts, Becky! (Matador, £6.99) about an early 20th-century Yiddish-speaking Russian Jewish girl growing up in London’s East End. Feisty heroine Becky concocts a series of ‘brilliant’ ideas to wreck her father’s plan to use a matchmaker to find himself a new wife.