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.  

The Finkler Question is a comic but thought-provoking novel focusing largely on the lives and relationships between three men. Julian Treslove is a former BBC radio producer, drifting through middle age with a lack of direction and stable relationship, and working as an impersonator of various Hollywood stars. He is friends with two men who are both recently widowed: Sam Finkler, his old school friend, is a popular Jewish philosopher and TV personality, and Libor Sevcik is their former teacher and a former Hollywood gossip columnist, nearing ninety.