Bonnie Engstrom

The show revolved around the life of American Clare Pettengill, who, at the start of the series, had recently arrived in Glasgow, Scotland. She starts up a book club to try to find friends with similar interests. Those whom she encounters are not what she expected; her new group consists of a drug-addled, egotistical postgraduate student (and subsequently his neurotic and ever-worrying brother), an easy-going disabled man who aims to be a writer, three discontented footballers' wives, and a straggler who hides his homosexuality with an obsession for football. All of the members are brought together not so much by the books that they read (if they read the book at all), but by their own longings for companionship, and their ambitions to better their lives.