I Could Be Famous is a book of semi-connected short stories set in California and largely around the LA/Hollywood celebrity ecosystem. Ten of the stories have young women as their focus, mostly in some way connected to or on the periphery of this celebrity culture (from aspirational actors to minor reality TV stars). One more story (Trick) focuses on the established actor Arlo Banks, who has recently found his career somewhat derailed by allegations of cannibalism. He also crops up again in several of the other stories, and it is implied that he is somehow a connecting thread between all of the women in the book.

Seascraper begins by introducing us to Thomas Flett, a young man in a Northern English coastal town in the 1960s who works in the seemingly already slightly anachronistic profession of a “shanker”, using a horse and cart to collect shrimp in often hazardous conditions from a beach littered with “sinkpits”. He lives with his mother, who had him as a teenager and has been shunned by the local community. She relies on him to earn money, which he does through his unsociable, repetitive and physically exhausting work.