This is the story of Stella, an advice columnist for a teenage magazine. Stella's friends assume she doesn't have any problems of her own and deluge her with their woes. Abigail, deserted by her husband, moves in with Stella, but then starts to move in on Stella's husband.
I don't read much of this kind of thing but needed a break from violent death and this has been on my bookclub pile for ages and looked like a quick easy read, which it was. Nell returns from holiday with her teenage daughter after her husband has left her for another woman, is mugged at the airp...
Hippies from the 70s, Mac and Lottie made a ton of money in the days of their progressive soft-rock band Charisma. But they've got little left apart from the rather grand but somewhat dilapidated house where they raised their family. Mac and Lottie now decide, on a whim, to sell up. To travel the...
All through the conservatory tea, during the stroll to admire the clinic’s flowerbeds, the pause for Edward to rest on the terrace bench, she must have been waiting, keyed-up with curiosity, to ask. Heather was concentrating on pulling out into a busy stretch of rush-hour motorway, which unfortun...
He was driving Kitty crazy and she’d taken to shouting ‘I’m not in!’ at the first ring. Of course no-one in the house took any notice. Petroc just looked depressed and growled, ‘It won’t be for me,’ which she took to mean it wouldn’t be Amanda and if it was anyone else he didn’t care anyway. Lily...
It shouldn’t – there was never much going on in August – but you never knew. The meeting with the hotel people that she had scheduled for when she got home was the only important thing at the moment work-wise and she was completely prepared for it. She was nervous though, stomach-churningly so. I...
‘Do you remember if I ever asked you to put Dishing the Dirt flyers through the doors in Masefield Avenue?’ ‘Not a clue!’ came back the immediate reply. No thinking had gone into the response, that was obvious. Ellie didn’t do multitasking yet. If she had gone to clean her teeth then that was exa...
They were so hard to get right. Alice had never liked them, not even in the form of presents, although he was pretty sure even she wouldn’t turn her nose up at an unexpected diamond necklace. She had hated it when he’d tried to whisk her away for a mystery weekend. There he’d been, dancing round ...
The sleeves of her yellow kimono top (over a purple satin tulip skirt, over orange lace leggings, scarlet killer heels, a combination which shouldn’t have worked but just did) billowed and flapped. ‘Oh now this is a gorgeous space! I’ve seen smaller village halls!’ She abruptly stopped twirling, ...
It was either the sun blazing through the flimsy, unlined curtains (useless in winter), rain on the pear tree leaves, or the wind blowing its branches against the windows. At home in Barnes she used to think that on holiday one of the great pleasures would be staying in bed late in the mornings, ...
The atmosphere in the hotel complex veered between apprehension and overexcitement, reminding Lucy of those dreadful weeks of pre-Christmas inertia when the whole of life seems to be on hold till the dreaded event is over. Hotel guests, in a pointless panic far too soon, cancelled excursions they...
Then she carried her cup of tea to a table on the far corner of the pool terrace beneath the tamarind tree, where he wouldn’t immediately see her when he returned. He’d assume that at this hour she would still be in bed; his early-hours thinking time was, she understood, a vital and private start...
She could be coming home only a few hours from now with an entirely altered wardrobe philosophy: an aversion to her customary shade-range of blue to grey perhaps, or a new-found need to wear hats. It shouldn’t matter if she turned up in her oldest Saturday-mornings-at-the-garden-centre jeans or a...
It was a strange building, all slabs of dark glass and long, weathered cedar struts. They’d only managed to get planning permission for it because it was sufficiently hidden among trees and behind high fencing not to flaunt its shocking modernity among the tasteful, discreet Georgian/Edwardian mi...
She was sure that under something less honest her face wouldn’t look anything like as lived-in. She’d been a still-optimistic thirty-five when she and Joe had opted for the high-tech low-voltage lighting makeover. ‘Then when you’re old and your eyes have gone, you won’t get lipstick all over your...
She felt that if she allowed herself out, let loose in public, she would be sure to be accosted by someone doing a survey, and would confess, when asked, her new occupation. ‘I fellate strange men for money,’ she could hear herself announcing loudly to a bored student with a clipboard trying to s...
His plump, pink little face was half-submerged in the clumsily knitted blue blanket that Charlotte had insisted on making for her. ‘I know it’ll be a boy,’ she’d said as she handed it to Emily. ‘So I wasn’t going to bother with some daft neutral just-in-case colour.’ Emily had decided then and th...
With Brenda and her family in residence, Melanie could hear constant signs of occupation. From Melanie’s side of the dividing wall it was very much like having a television on somewhere in the house that you couldn’t find to switch off. Usually Mrs Jenkins was the quietest possible neighbour, but...
Naomi was dusting – very gently, as if tending a delicate baby – the tops of the three Oliver Stonebridge paintings that hung there. ‘You’ll want to hurry up and get it redirected or it’ll be coming here till next year. You know what they’re like. Red tape and bureaucrats.’ She spat the last word...