She has published two novels for young adults – Massive and Dirty Work – and the bestselling Creative Writing Coursebook, as well as poetry and short stories in various magazines and anthologies.
The book was well-received, with Stephanie Merritt describing it in The Observer as: "Julia Bell's gritty second novel […} follows two teenage girls through the brutality of Europe's sex trade.
Hope, the wealthy English teenager mistakenly kidnapped by traffickers, makes explicit the comparison with slavery: 'No one buys people any more, they banned that, we did it in history.
Bell's dual narrative, divided between spoilt but resourceful Hope and fierce, broken Oksana from Russia, is pitch-perfect and the careful research is worn lightly.
It is devised as a series of lesson plans with contributions from 40 authors including David Lodge, Malcolm Bradbury, Ali Smith, Vicki Feaver.