Boots

It's the 2040s, and London has devolved into a surveillance-ridden city-state. All-seeing drones police its drizzling, clouded skies, and even those with nothing to hide have everything to fear. When a harmless joke posted on a subversive website brings young postgraduate student Harry Bunbury to the attention of the Ministry of Metrics Management, the hapless twenty-four year-old is obliged to choose from a range of themed rehabilitation options offered by outside providers.

Harry's unassertive nature is just as well, as he is assigned to provide his services to Punctilius, a pioneering biotech company whose labs look set to blaze a trail in feeding the world, making vast fortunes for staff and stockholders in the process, thanks to exclusive patents for genetically modified meat. Harry soon finds that Punctilius's power-dressed, all-female executive board makes some imperious demands when it comes to staff discipline - ones that, applied with rigour, take Harry humiliatingly deep into spanking, bondage, SM and enforced feminisation, and on a strange trip to the American Southwest.

As Harry comes to understand his own masochistic nature, he is made privy to Punctilius's ultimate corporate goal - the creation of a lunchbox of an entirely different sort, with the aim of offering uncomplicated pleasure to the world's women, as good as the real thing because it is the real thing. Through a series of bizarre and fetishistic physical trials, Harry learns there's a painful price to be paid for his newfound self-knowledge. Meanwhile the unassumingly-named Babington Society is working discreetly from within to bring an end to Londoners' cowed and self-censoring ways. Will it reach Harry before he finally accepts his lot in life, or will he have found its silver lining?