The City Changes Its Face is both a sequel to and a kind of retelling of McBride’s brilliant 2017 work The Lesser Bohemians. It joins that book’s protagonists, Eily and Stephen, just a few years after its events, with the setting roughly the same - we’re still in grimy mid-90s London, although the lovers’ new house is somewhat less poky and grim than their Camden dwelling in the first book. It hops around in time between the ‘present day’ setting of late 1996, and various periods in between the action of The Lesser Bohemians and that time. The broad concept is that the ‘now’ sections detail an argument between the two over the course of a day, with the hops back in time providing some context. In the middle of all of this is the book’s centrepiece, a description by Eily of a screening of a rough cut of Stephen’s autobiographical film, which expands on his traumatic backstory, this time artistically mediated and then interpreted by Eily, rather than in his first-person confessional voice as in the first book.

The Accidental takes place mainly in a sleepy village in Norfolk, where a middle class family from Islington, London are spending their summer.  Eve Smart is the family’s mother, and a novelist who draws on real-life stories for her fiction, and is currently suffering from writer’s block.  Her partner is Michael, also a writer and a university professor in London, who is prone to infidelity with his students.  Eve’s daughters from a previous marriage (to an Adam, no less) are Astrid, a 12 year old girl with a love for photography and a delightful way with words, and Magnus, an older teenager with a scientific mind and a serious (and justified) sense of guilt hanging over him over an incident that happened before the holidays.

Children of Paradise (named after Marcel Carné’s 1945 French film) tells the story of Holly, a young woman just arrived in an unnamed city, who takes a job at its oldest cinema, The Paradise. The cinema is clearly a relic of a bygone age, staffed by a memorable motley crew of misfit cinephiles, barely existing on pitiful wages and whatever their customers leave behind underneath their seats (money, valuables, unidentifiable narcotics) in its one screen. Holly is a relative novice to the world of the cinema, and initially an outsider. She soon becomes accepted by her fellow employees, and begins to live their life of seemingly 24/7 film viewings, subsisting on pilfered booze, popcorn, dubious nachos and those even more dubious abandoned drugs. She begins to have regular encounters with a fellow employee, Paolo, though later discovers that this was merely par for the course - everyone is sleeping with everyone else at the Paradise.