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Set in a northern English city in the 1980s, this novel explores a lost community of women floundering in the murky waters of economic depression, infidelity, and feminist politics. In turns moving and hilarious, the story of love, dependence, disappearance, and recovery follows Tracy, a kleptomaniac and a compulsive liar. A lost soul, she drifts fecklessly about, sponging off her friends with a high turnover of menial jobs as she searches for Anita. Tracy thinks that if Anita's disappeared out of her life, then she must have disappeared out of this world completely, and that means detective work is in order. Tracy is a quintessentially unreliable, however, and it gradually becomes clear that it is her neurosis, rather than Anita's disappearance, that is the driving force behind her adventure.