Paying for It: A Novel

Kathleen and Bernadette are two very different women; one a middle-aged mother with a lifetime of regret, the other a teenage Glasgow prostitute chasing a simple ambition. They meet for the first time in a room from which there is no escape and quickly discover that, despite very different backgrounds, they have two things in common: a dislike for the other and the fact that they are both dead. As the repercussions of the women's deaths ripple through the living, Katheen's son and Bernadette's best friend, desperate to find reasons for their loss, discover that both deaths are rooted in darker events. Unwittingly, they are brought together by guilt, betrayal and another death. When Kathleen and Bernadette begin to realise that death will finally give them what life could not, they are faced with a choice that will have profound implications for them and for those they love.