Rough Hands

It is 2001 and Jacey O'Riordan is trying to get to grips with the new millennium.

As senior copywriter at Touche Trott Loveless, London's sharpest advertising agency, she is sinking under a sea of millennial products drastically in need of new images. And there are men everywhere. The predicted glut of single men between 20 and 50 has happened, and Jacey herself is a serial fiancee, engaged four times since the age of 22.

Now, at 29, she becomes more and more convinced that every man is Mr Wrong.

Travelling back from her father's funeral in Manchester, she sees a railway worker stripped to the waist, working on the tracks, and is suddenly amazed to realise that, despite coming from a blue collar home herself, she has never slept with a working class man.

She thinks about the men she has always dated. Men with manicures and juicers. Not one of them smelling of sump oil. Lying in bed that night, Jacey thinks, I don't want a man with nothing under his nails but hair gel and who lets wine breathe. I want a man who can make love to me all night long, eat a full English fry up in the morning without checking his blood pressure afterwards, and then put up shelves in every room before going off to get slaughtered with his mates and be back home putting it to me across the kitchen table by midnight.

I want a man with rough hands. But where do I find one? Have women, so busily reconstructing men to be as they want them, merely been hoist by their own petard?

This is the theme on which Julie will beam her laser in this hilarious new novel.<