Sugar, a 19-year-old whore in the brothel of Mrs Castaway, yearns for a better life. Her ascent through the strata of 1870s London society offers the reader a host of characters. At the heart of the story, however, is a young woman's struggle to lift her body and soul out of the gutter.

* An eerie and utterly compelling novel of mystery and seduction set in a women's prison in Victorian London.

We could pass anything, anything at all, at speeds which would astonish you . Sue, orphaned at birth, is born among petty thieves - fingersmiths - in London's Borough. From the moment she draws breath, her fate is linked to another orphan, growing up in a gloomy mansion not too many miles away.

Decades into our future, a brilliant nanotechnologist named John Percival Hackworth has just broken the rigorous moral code of his tribe, the powerful Neo-Victorians. He's made an illicit copy of a state-of-the-art interactive device called a young lady's illustrated primer, designed to raise a girl capable of thinking for herself.

The setting is an unidentified country, suffering from an unexpected outbreak of very large holes. The McNally children find themselves in The Dell hotel surrounded by a strange assortment of ridiculous characters ranging from Charlie Twinkle Toes , to Tweedy, the house detective.