When Lucy's husband of eighteen years runs out on her, she'll do anything to win him back. Jasper has left Lucy for her best friend, the chic and thin interior decorator Renee. To make matters worse, her teenage daughter Tally, blames her Mum. 'Dad left because you've let yourself go, you're overweight and you nagged him'.
If you're starting to wish that your husband had a mistress rather than a mother, and your nuclear family is exploding into a war zone, can your dreams survive the fall out? "There were three of us in the marriage" Ellie can't pus Princess Diana's infamous words out of her mind, except Ellie isn't dealing with a mistress, but with a matriach, and she can't decide which is worse... The Coopers were everything Ellie had always wanted. A large, loving family, parents Linda and Michael doted on their three children, and when Ellie married Dan, their eldest son, she was thrilled when they welcomed her in and treated her as one of their own. But Linda, who starts off as the perfect mother quickly turns into the mother-in-law from hell, and once Dan and Ellie return from their honeymoon and the Coopers' dysfunctions start to reveal themselves, Ellie wonders whether she's made a terrible mistake. with the arrival of baby Tom, Ellie's sure that the constant rows with her husband and simmering fury with her new family will die down. But instead, his birth sets off a chain of events that threatens everything Ellie has always dreamed of...
Ein Kriminalroman in englischer Tradition, in dem Sergeant Whitelaw und sein Team in Blackport zwei Morde aufklären müssen. Die Ermittlungen stören die feine Gesellschaft, da Denstone, der größte Arbeitgeber der Stadt, betroffen ist.
Perhaps the best novel yet about the collapse of the Berlin Wall, 'at once cinematic, intimate and epic' (The Times) - from Granta Best of British novelist Philip Hensher, author of the bestselling The Mulberry Empire.