1993. 218pp. As New Condition.A portrait of a girls adolescence, of family life and of London in the 1970s.Lisa, her heroine, is a student at a drama school (a sort of drama sixth form college, pre-drama school proper). Her parents divorced long ago, and she lives in a small rather grim council flat with her gentle mother Marguerite and fox-obsessed younger brother. Lisa's rebellious older sister, Ruby, lives in North London in a squat, and turns up every now and then with tales of her adventures with her rock-obsessed boyfriend. (Predictably, things don't go too well for Ruby, and she ends up in rehab about halfway through the book.) The novel follows Lisa's life over the months before her drama school audition, in which she has a few disastrous flirtations and semi-relationships with men, helps to look after Ruby during Ruby's crises, dreams about living in a proper home and suffers a bout of anorexia brought on by panic attacks.