In a South Coast port, a middle-aged trawlerman has one last throw of the dice. In the Thames Valley, property is booming. And the meek won't inherit the earth. In a Warwickshire vicarage, the Master of an Oxford college must try to unite past and present. Three Seasons is about the Thatcher era in Britain, but it is not about politics. These three stories of England in the 1980s are portraits of a country and its people on the verge of change.

So you think you know your dog? Bazza is an easy-going middle-aged college lecturer with a taste for weed, porn, beer and redheads. When he adopts a rescue dog, he sees nothing odd about the animal. Then a Himalayan monk comes to visit, and senses something strange. Dog is a powerful story of love and loss, sin, redemption and dog mess. You'll never see your pet the same way again.

This is the late 1970s and ’80s as explained through the urgent and still-relevant songs of the Clash, the Specials, the Au Pairs, the Style Council, the Pet Shop Boys, and nearly four hundred other bands and solo artists. Each chapter presents a mixtape (or playlist) of songs related to an alarming feature of Thatcher’s Britain, followed by an analysis of the dialogue these artists created with the Thatcherite vision of British society. “Tell us the truth,” Sham 69 demanded, and pop music, however improbably, did. It’s a furious and sardonic account of dark times when pop music raised a dissenting fist against Thatcher’s fascist groove thing and made a glorious, boredom-smashing noise. Bookended with contributions by Dick Lucas and Boff Whalley as well as an annotated discography, The Fascist Groove Thing presents an original and polemical account of the era.