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The Next Best Thing
The Next Best Thing
Jul 20, 2025 10:18 AM

Author:Sarah Long

The Next Best Thing

At thirty-five, Jane realises something rather disturbing. She thought she had her life perfectly balanced: working from home as a a freelance translator allows her to keep her financial independence, spend time with her daughter and escape office politics. But somehow, instead of combining a rewarding career with a satisfying mother-daughter relationship, she's become an all-purpose dogsbody, rushing from crisis to crisis and combining missing deadlines with repairing the dishwasher.

Rupert is also leading the life he planned: a job in the city, glamorous girlfriend, plenty of money. But he's beginning to have doubts about the dull-but-sensible route he's chosen - and to realise it's just possible he wants more out of life. So when he and Jane meet, each escaping their day-to-day life with a stolen afternoon in the peace of the cinema, they both start to wonder whether it's really enough to settle for the next best thing ...

Reviews

A grass-is-greener comedy about the quagmire of female choices

—— Woman's Own

Funny and intelligently written

—— Family Circle

One to get your teeth -- or claws -- into

—— Daily Mirror

A 21st century Brief Encounter

—— Choice Magazine

Personal Days is amusingly spare, yet soon becomes something darker, aspiring perhaps to the unblinking horror of Joseph Heller's corporate schlub epic Something Happened

—— The List

I laughed until they put me in a mental hospital. But Personal Days is so much more than satire. Underneath Park's masterly portrait of wasted workaday lives is a pulsating heart, and an odd, buoyant hope

—— Gary Shteyngart

The narrative, a DeLillo-like, pellet - sized series of vignettes, rings true in its evocation of the paranoid weirdness of office life

—— Arena

A comic and creepy debut novel...Park transforms the banal into the eerie

—— New Yorker

sketches so expertly; if you like this genre, he gets the tone just right

—— William Leith , Evening Standard

Park's eye for the minutiae of office life is sharp... This is as funny as Seinfeld

—— Brandon Robshaw , The Independent on Sunday

Chilling, compulsive, and hilarious

—— Elle, 'Read of the Month'

P.G. Wodehouse wrote the best English comic novels of the century

—— Sebastian Faulks

Sublime comic genius

—— Ben Elton

Quite simply, the master of comic writing at work

—— Jane Moore

To pick up a Wodehouse novel is to find oneself in the presence of genius - no writer has ever given me so much pure enjoyment

—— John Julius Norwich

Compulsory reading for anyone who has a pig, an aunt - or a sense of humour!

—— Lindsey Davis

The Wodehouse wit should be registered at Police HQ as a chemical weapon

—— Kathy Lette

Witty and effortlessly fluid. His books are laugh-out-loud funny

—— Arabella Weir

The funniest writer ever to put words to paper

—— Hugh Laurie

The greatest comic writer ever

—— Douglas Adams

P.G. Wodehouse wrote the best English comic novels of the century

—— Sebastian Faulks

Sublime comic genius

—— Ben Elton

You don't analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour

—— Stephen Fry

A virtuoso performance...This is a collection of stories that will be re-reading exceptionally well, like an album of brilliant songs you keep wanting to hear again

—— Brandom Robshaw , Independent on Sunday

Funny and furious, Kennedy's tales of floundering marriages and domestic disappointment follow an anarchic path of their own

—— Independent

Kennedy's superlative work always attracts admiration

—— Lesley McDowell , Herald
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