Tanya Stephens is a 29-year-old graphic designer who works for Ill Will, a greeting card company founded on the principle that British people can be atrociously rude to their friends with impunity. Tanya herself is beginning not to see the point of having friends or even lovers. She has had one true love, and a series of boyfriends who have variously become too keen, too needy or just mind-numbingly boring. She keeps Richard, her current boyfriend ¿ a carpet-fitter ¿ for sex, but has encounters with Carl ¿ a road-sweeper ¿ when he pops round to borrow books. Tanya is happy with her books, the occasional episode of Frasier and her own dark imagination. When Tanya finds a book ostensibly about her own life in a second-hand bookshop, the line between truth and reality begins to blur. Is her true love now happily married and working for the DVLA in Swansea? Did her mum sleep with her dad¿s best friend? On her quest to separate fact from fiction, Tanya upsets a few people and coolly pleases herself.