Few authors share Margaret Forster's extraordinary ability to transform the ordinary day-to-day activities of unremarkable people into compelling fiction... Written with brilliant and exquisite sensitivity

Written with enormous sensitivity and compassion

The kind of novel into which you plunge with satisfaction

Accomplished...moving

Written with insight, wit and tremendous style

Forster's empathy and lack of sentimentality, as well as her quick ear and eye for the telling detail, command attention, while her skills as a storyteller ensure the reader's avid curiosity about what happens next

Forster excels at depicting ordinary lives.Beautifully controlled

Forster's prose, is, as always, clear, robust and unpretentious

Pristine writing

Insightful and intelligent

Wonderfully comic and touching

Interweaves a variety of thoroughly imagined life stories and predicaments with quiet, effective skill

I have greater admiration for Margaret Forster than for most novelists. A very fine, continuously interesting, and often moving work, all the better because it is so firmly rooted in the ordinary world of everyday experience

Cadwalladr also captures the desperation at the heart of most good comedy. She maintains the tragicomic balance to the end and has the confidence to chose the right, realistic ending over the wrong, romantic one

A hilariously funny and moving chronical of three generations of the Monroe family told through the eyes of Rebecca in the 1970s. It is not just a habit of quoting proverbs and a recipe for sherry trifle that have passed down the maternal line. There's a habit of broken marriages, dubiously fathered children and untimely deaths.

Rebecca Monroe is really stumped when it comes to her family's behaviour. Why, on the day Charles and Camilla got married, did her mum lock herself in the loo and refuse to come out? Was it due to the collapse of her chocolate cake, or because Rebecca's grandmother ended up marrying her first cousin?

Pondering what it is that makes her clan click, Rebecca is determined to discover whether it is genes or fate that affects the different generations.

A fun little romp about the joys of family and the genes we inherit.

Touching and surprising...A moving account of the personal and social pressures that shape our childhood experiences and resonate throughout out lives

This exciting first novel by a talented writer is a moving exploration of family life in the twenty-first century...You won't want to put this book down

Hilariously funny and moving chronicle of three generations