Terry has a relatively comfortable life. He is still not yet thirty and he has a job he enjoys and a girlfriend he adores with whom he lives in a house he inherited from his grandmother. He spends his leisure time attending auctions and car boot sales where he purchases items which he identifies as bargains, some of which he hopes to sell on at a profit. He is mildly obsessed with the aim of making money on his deals and it is only when his girlfriend suddenly leaves him that he comes to realise that some of the most valuable things in life cannot be measured in monetary terms. The narrative follows Terry's attempts to get back together with her while also searching to find his mother who walked out of his life when he was a young boy. This is, in part, a study of the way individuals deal with the complex emotions we all experience in life and the relative difficulty many people have in expressing them. The story reflects on the fact that most people have an innate sense of justice and so, when things go wrong in life there may be an attempt to allocate - and sometimes assume - blame, even if no particular individual is wholly at fault.