My father is dead. I simply can't tell you how happy this makes me.

Lucas Cage loses his father and gains a disused printing works in east London, the only part of his father's legacy he has ever cared for.

Casting aside the shackles of his life, Lucas transforms the building, swimming against the tide of gentrification to create a refuge for the misfits and malcontents he meets: marital asylum seekers, a couple obsessed with resurrecting Blitz-era Britain, three washed-up cockney criminals - and the charismatic Jamie Dear: a man who shares a past as troubled as Lucas's own, and a gift for bringing people together.

The nuclear family has exploded. Welcome to the factory for lost souls.

The Works is an elegy to the inextricables of life - pasts and presents, husbands and wives, fathers and sons, hopes and fears - told with Joseph Connolly's inimitable gift for character and voice as he digs up the dirt on nineties London.