Set in Paris in the late 1980s, Paris On a Shoestring is narrated progressively by the two main teenage protagonists, who, through a series of events, find themselves living on the streets of Paris and begging for money. The two narrators, Vicki and Sage, flee to France after deliberately vandalising their art college. Penniless, homeless and lost in an unfamiliar environment, they're easy prey for various opportunistic chancers. Although predominantly a character driven novel, it also explores the protagonists' relatively seamless acceptance of radically different norms and values, as the girls go from living a fairly benign British middle-class existence to a way of life dependent on other people for survival
