A woman leaves her husband and takes her two children back to London. She buys a disintegrating flat with horrible neighbours and sets about rebuilding her life. Faye, the woman in question is remarkably absent from a book which purports to be about her. She is a fairly passive character to whom people tell their stories. The book is full of the stories of other people's lives while Faye's life, with the odd exception, keeps ticking along in the background. Disconcertingly passive, I found the last section of the book particularly unsettling. It stirred up a lot of feelings and I went from being intellectually interested in the book to being fairly annoyed with it.