When things go wrong you'd think it would pay to have Fate, Providence and Destiny on your side. But once they start drinking...
When Derek Dibble is expelled from school for a misunderstanding involving drugs his dream of going to Cambridge lies in ruin. He goes instead to a mediocre establishment in the Midlands and meets Sarah, to whom he becomes engaged. They graduate, move to London and (after she has had an affair) Sarah decides that she cannot marry him. Derek is then sacked from his job due to a bogus charge of sexual harassment as his employer looks to economise during the downturn.
It is at this low ebb that Derek joins Duck Tail Books, a publishing company of no significance in a tatty corner of London. And it is now that Fate, Destiny and Providence - three divine ladettes on a celestial girls' night out – take an interest in Derek Dibble and begin to exercise their influence to his benefit.
His life becomes an unlikely parade of sex, drugs and celebrity weddings as the deities become decreasingly sober (and correspondingly more ornate in their plans for him), shuttling him between London's most fashionable nightspots and Indian hill-palaces. The naive Derek struggles to both survive and comprehend this strange new world in which he finds himself.