Janet Gordon, who lives in Takeley, reviews best-sellers and debut fiction for the Indie…
Maybe Tomorrow by Penny Parkes (Simon & Schuster £8.99)
Oh my goodness, Penny Parkes’ latest really tugs at the heartstrings.
Jamie Matson started a travel agency with her friend, organising trips for single-parent families, which sadly closed due to the lockdown. A single mother herself, she lives with her 10-year-old son Bo in a mould-ridden, one-bedroom dump with a leery landlord and has managed to find minimum-wage employment in a local deli, presided over by a bully-type owner.
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Jamie is in despair with no savings and with Bo, who she knows deep down is on the spectrum but who has a wonderful artistic flair and a talent for keeping Jamie going as well as severe asthma necessitating many late-night emergency visits to A&E for treatment. She has to keep this job.
Until the day Jamie comes home to find the leery landlord inside her flat with a pair of her lacy knickers hanging out of a trouser pocket. He serves Jamie notice, giving her just a few days to find somewhere else to live. And then, having spent the night in A&E with Bo but been forced to come into work, the bully boss sacks her after an out-of-control child, whose mother spends a lot of money in the deli, deliberately swipes bottles of expensive oils off the shelf and then accuses Jamie of pushing him. A kindly elderly lady tries to explain what has happened, but the bully boss refuses to listen.
Jamie, who normally sneaks into the food bank feeling totally ashamed and embarrassed, turns up there at a totally different time and meets Kath, the A&E nurse who had looked after Bo the previous night and whose abusive husband works on the oil rigs; Amy, struggling to hold back tears after being turned down for yet another entry-level job and Bonnie, trying desperately to get her little booth of a hairdressers off the ground.
This totally disparate group bond and become friends. They are joined by Ruth – the elderly lady who Jamie met in the deli – and Harry, her husband, who realise Jamie’s plight and offer her the job of housekeeper/companion/carer. Ruth thinks Harry needs care and Harry is definite that it’s Ruth who needs looking after. And so Jamie and Bo move into Harry and Ruth’s annexe.
I was actually in tears reading this. I’ve been there – when son Daniel was just a baby, I was living in a wreck of a house in Westcliff and having to choose between baked beans on toast or just toast. But, with help and managing to get a decent job, I worked my way out of it and now the thought that this is reality for so many people drives me to despair.
This is such a lovely story and, yes, there may well be a happy ending.
Have You Got Anything Stronger? by Imogen Edwards-Jones (Welbeck £8.99)
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This is a completely madcap read about a year in the life of four best friends as they juggle work, school, children, shopping and all the other things that make up a mum’s life without much – if indeed any – help from their other halves.
There’s even – not much, but some –married sex! There’s also too much alcohol. One to read for all mums juggling their life.
Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson (Hutchinson £14.99)
This is much more than a take three girls-type read following the lives of the very WASPy (White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) Stockton family.
The three daughters, Darley, Sasha and Georgiana, are all so used to having oodles of money that they don’t even think anything of it. They own acres of New York, a country cottage for summer in the Hamptons and Mama Stockton loves to throw themed dinner parties. The one thing they aren’t is happy.
Darley is married to Michael, Sasha is married to Cord, forced to live in the big house on Pineapple Street surrounded by everything the Stocktons will never throw away, and Georgiana loses the love of her life. Can their money cocoon them or is it the root of all their unhappiness?
Did you ever watch The Undoing with Nicole Kidman (those wonderful clothes) and Hugh Grant, with their beautiful brownstone house and all that superb scenery out by the sea? This is sort of the literary equivalent, only set in Brooklyn Heights.
The End of Us by Olivia Kiernan (Riverrun £16.99)
You know how it is, you move into a new house and you say hello to the neighbours as you spot them going about their business. And so when Myles and Lana move in to a select cul-de-sac they nod and smile to their neighbours Gabriel and Holly Wright.
They seem such a glamourous, sophisticated couple and Myles and Lana are impressed, particularly as Myles has definitely overstretched himself to afford their big new house. And when an investment fails it looks as though they will have to bring their new would-be lifestyle to an end.
Over drinks, Gabriel and Holly listen with a sympathetic ear to their worries. When Gabriel suggests a solution, with a cut for him and Holly, Myles is unsure whether it is an elaborate joke or they’re for real. But then Lana doesn’t come home.
Oh my goodness, what a twisty, turny, complex and dark plot – and very, very clever.