The Bottle Factory Outing focuses on two young women who live together in a bedsit in North London, while both also working as labellers in a wine-bottling factory. The factory is owned by the Italian Mr Paganotti, who filled most of the factory’s roles with Italians from his hometown who feel indebted to him as a result. In this space, the two English women are relative outsiders, treated with a mixture of suspicion and reverence by the Italian men.  

widow and resident of the town for around ten years, decides to open a bookshop in an abandoned seafront property known as The Old House, which is damp, decaying and apparently haunted by a "rapper" (poltergeist). She faces opposition from influential (and rich) local resident Mrs Gamart, who despite having shown negligible interest in the Old House previously, declares that she wants to use the location to set up an arts centre.

After the Seventies saw the Booker taking its tentative first steps, stumbling here and there, occasionally landing on a genuine classic but more often than not serving up curiosities rather than solid-gold genius, we venture into more solid ground in the Eighties.

There’s a sense here of more self-awareness, of the need for winners to feel “important” and make a statement of some kind. There are certainly more hits than misses, and even the latter are perhaps in some ways more interesting than those of the previous decade.