Shortlisted for the 1974 Booker Prize, and with a new introduction by A. K. Blakemore, a razor-sharp and mercilessly funny novel of friendship, class and desire.

Freda and Brenda divide the bed they share with a barricade of books, then spend their days working side by side in an Italian-run wine-bottling factory. A picnic out at Windsor Park for the two women and their colleagues offers promise for Freda and terror for Brenda. Passions run high before coming to a brutal and startling end. With an unforgettably dark heart, The Bottle Factory Outing is laugh-out-loud funny, grubbily evocative and slyly weird, and is for fans of Muriel Spark, Anita Brookner and early Ian McEwan.

Beryl Bainbridge was the author of seventeen novels, two travel books and five plays for stage and televi­sion. She was shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, and among other awards, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Whit­bread Novel of the Year and the Guardian Fiction Prize. She died in 2010.