Wednesday is handover day, the day that Ralph takes the children for the weekend, or at least until Sunday morning. I don't want to include spoilers here but I will say this novel took me for an emotional roller coaster ride! I’ve also read ThirtyNothing and One Hit Wonder before getting a hold of Lisa’s latest The Truth About Melody Browne late last year.

Ralph misses Jem but tries to find his muse - he ends up spending time with an old man and having a fling with a young American. It's been eleven years since Ralph and Jem finally became an item at the end of Lisa Jewell's first novel Ralph's Party. What I also loved was the fact that the author didn't rush the ending and the reader is still wondering what will be the outcome right until the last few chapters.Full of suspense yet emotionally grounded…Fans of Liane Moriarty, Paula Hawkins, and Carla Buckley will adore this peek inside a gated community that truly takes care of its own, no matter the consequences. A small shiny object leaves his hand and hurtles toward her, catching the light as it falls, landing on the pavement within an inch of her toes.

For Jem, motherhood is wonderful but exhausting and with Ralph abdicating responsibility for even the simplest of chores, she resents his desire for intimacy when she feels she is too tired and too busy to oblige. This book was rather different to the ones I'd read before; which wasn't a problem at all and I enjoyed it. It's also interesting for me in that Ralph's Party was very much set in the approach to 1997, the arse-end of a pretty bad recession and a moribund Tory-led Britain before the expectation of a New Labour victory. These are littered throughout and are an amusing way of providing insight into her characters, their thoughts and feelings, without spelling them out to the reader. She sighs again, feeling the weight of things she needs to do now that she has the children for the next few days: baths to run, stories to read, clean clothes to sort out.And, I'll be honest, I'm slightly biased against books with infidelity, so that may affect my enjoyment (or lack thereof) of the book. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? When she gets there, she glances down, as she always does, into the basement pit of the house at number thirty-one. It’s helped that she appears to have a new friend in single dad Joel – but is that all there is to it? Lisa Jewell's first novel, Ralph’s Party, was published in 1999 and was the best-selling debut novel of the year.