Loughborough Junction is a bit of London that would like to imagine itself as the edge of somewhere nicer, but Stella Duffy relishes its tatty ordinariness. The setting for her interlocking narratives is like the odds and ends Robert Sutton fishes out of the pockets of the clothes brought in to his dry cleaners – overlooked and yielding of small secrets. Like Hanif Kureishi’s laundrette, The Room of Lost Things has an odd couple at its heart: Sutton, 50-odd years a dry cleaner, and his successor, Akeel, a second-generation Pakistani from east London who must get to grips with south of the river and the business. Akeel’s introduction to the "room of lost things" where Robert files the forgotten best man’s speeches and love letters, forces the old man to come clean about his past, while the lives of his customers are as jumbled as a sack of dirty washing. These narrow lives and everyday disappointments are as inconsequential as watching a load of laundry spin, but somehow also as satisfyingly mesmerising.