Book review - The Ugly Sister by Jane Fallon

If you haven’t discovered Jane Fallon’s books yet, then trust me, you’re in for a treat.

Her first, Getting Rid of Matthew, was touching, pacy and made me laugh out loud. While many heroines have a burning ambition to find a man, this one featured a woman who is desperate to ditch hers. She tries everything to convince her married lover that she’s had enough of him and his dirty laundry, from not brushing her teeth (eek!) to (double eek!) leaving incontinence pads scattered around the bathroom.

Fallon’s fourth novel, The Ugly Sister, is out next week and tackles the thorny issues of beauty and ageing. It tells the tale of two sisters who were once close but have drifted apart. Cleo, the elder, is one of those annoying women who seems to have it all. She’s a stunning supermodel who was spotted by a model agency scout at the age of 16 and has never looked back. She’s got a lovely husband, two daughters and a luxurious, four-storey house in Primrose Hill.

Younger sister Abi, on the other hand, has spent her entire life in Cleo’s shadow. A single mum who works as a librarian and struggles to make ends meet, she’s astonished when out of the blue Cleo invites her to stay for the summer. The sisters have led separate lives for 20 years and Abi, whose daughter has just set off on her gap year, reckons this may be the chance to rebuild their once close relationship.

But as Fallon reveals, Cleo’s life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Her career’s on the slide, her marriage is far from love’s young dream and her children are spoiled rotten. So much so that the ten year old refuses to travel on the tube and expects to be waited on hand and foot.

Jane Fallon's partner is Ricky Gervais, and before turning to novels, she was the award-winning producer behind TV shows like This Life, Teachers and 20 Things To Do Before You’re 30. The Ugly Sister isn’t quite as sharp and witty as her first novel, but it’s an entertaining read all the same. It zips along and has some perceptive insights into sibling rivalry. As Fallon herself says: "Sibling rivalry is a classic forum for drama and storytelling. We all have such conflicted and complex feelings about our families, even those of us who have grown up in a happy, loving nuclear set-up."

The Ugly Sister by Jane Fallon is published by Penguin at £7.99

PS: The film of I Don’t Know How She Does It has managed to irritate virtually every woman I know. Stay-at-home mums are furious at being portrayed as smug know-it-alls who bake cakes and spend their days at the gym. Working mums are livid at the way Sarah Jessica Parker (aka hot-shot financier Kate Reddy) arrives at the office with porridge on her lapel, nits in her hair and reminders for her son’s birthday party scrawled across her hand. And career women are fed up at being stereotyped as humourless workaholics who insist they don’t want children. In fact the only thing I liked about the adaptation of Allison Pearson’s 2002 novel was SJP’s divine Mulberry handbag.

Cosmo Blog Awards 2011 - House With No Name is shortlisted!

Today started off like any other day. Morning traffic trundling past the window at a snail’s pace. Son crunching his way through a bowl of Golden Grahams before school. Me trying to think of 101 reasons not to go to the gym – I signed up at a new one last week, nodded enthusiastically through my induction session and, er, haven’t set foot in the place since.

Then something brilliant happened. I discovered that House With No Name has been shortlisted for the Cosmopolitan Blog Awards 2011!

I’m still in shock but thank you so much to everyone who nominated me. I love blogging and am completely over the moon to have been shortlisted.

House With No Name is in the Lifestyle category – alongside some fantastic blogs. If you’d like to vote for me, I’d be very thrilled and incredibly grateful. To vote please click here. You need to enter your email address, then select the Lifestyle Blog with Handpicked Media category. Click on House With No Name and then on Vote.

A big thank you again – and good luck to all the shortlisted blogs!

Romantic novelists Katie Fforde and Kate Lace at the Chiswick Book Festival

I adore literary festivals. So I was over the moon when the organisers of the Chiswick Book Festival asked me to chair a talk on romantic fiction by bestselling writers Katie Fforde and Kate Lace. The session was called My Big Fat Summer of Love (an amalgam of their two latest titles – Summer of Love by Katie Fforde and Gypsy Wedding by Kate Lace) and covered everything from how they began their illustrious careers to their own favourite romantic novels.

The pair, who are great friends, were fun, informative and inspiring. They’ve both chaired the Romantic Novelists’ Association in the past (indeed, Katie is now president), and several members of the audience were so enthused that they came up at the end and asked how they could join.

The writers began the afternoon by telling the audience about their roads to publication. Kate Fforde said that when her children were little she had a “serious Mills & Boon addiction" – one book a day in fact – and decided to have a go at writing one herself. In the end she wasn’t published by Mills & Boon but it was a fantastic way to learn her craft. She hasn’t looked back since her first novel, Living Dangerously, was published in 1995. She also praised the “hugely supportive” RNA. Meanwhile Kate Lace began writing as a young army wife with three small children, first writing for an magazine for army wives, then non-fiction, including Gumboots and Pearls about life as an army wife, before turning to fiction.

They also discussed exactly what makes a good romantic novel. Katie reckons that the key is to create “a believable love story,” and stressed that the happy ending must be “credible,” while Kate said that there must be some “grit in the oyster.” When it comes to planning novels, Kate said she knows where her books are going to start and finish, but doesn’t tend to plot everything in advance. Katie reckoned that if you plan too much, you’ve already told the story and “sort of lose interest.”

They both start work early – Katie is on Twitter at the crack of dawn but then concentrates on writing for the rest of the day. Kate works from 9am till The Archers starts at five past seven. Kate said that “scary deadlines” keep her nose to the grindstone, but Katie emphasised that it's important to take time to think about her characters and where they are going. Sometimes her best ideas emerge when she’s gardening or cooking.

They’re both voracious readers, but asked about their own favourite romantic novels, chose utterly different titles. Katie adores Georgette Heyer while Kate reckons Tolstoy’s War and Peace is the “absolute best love story” she’s ever read.

Finally, the two writers gave us a tantalising hint of the treats we’ve got in store. Katie’s next book is called Recipe for Love and is set in a TV cookery competition (it will be out next year) and she’s currently researching another one set in the world of antiques. Meanwhile Kate is busy writing about the glamorous world of rowing. Watching handsome, Lycra-clad rowers in action, she added, is no hardship at all.

PS: Actress Isla Blair is one of the loveliest people I’ve ever interviewed. I spent a day at her house years ago with a stylist and photographer for a Country Homes & Interiors profile. The following session at the Chiswick Book Festival featured Isla talking to her son Jamie Glover, the actor and director, about her new book. A Tiger’s Wedding tells of her childhood in India during the last days of the Raj and I can’t wait to read it.

Oxford - my favourite city

I’ve got a serious moving house habit. One that dates back to my childhood, when my father was in the RAF and we moved houses (sometimes countries) every year. I was always the new girl at school – the Billy No Mates who didn’t have a clue who to give my dinner money to or where to hang my PE bag.

It's a habit that's stuck. We’ve moved house an embarrassing 12 times in the last 25 years, and just like me, my children have been to a ridiculous number of schools. Friends who still use antiquated address books grumble that our page is a mess of crossings-out and ask why we can’t stay in one place for a while.

But now we live in Oxford, we might just do that. Samuel Johnson wrote that “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life” and I feel the same about Oxford. One of the most beguiling cities in the world, it’s got everything – fine architecture, breathtaking views and a reputation for academic excellence second to none.

It’s a city that’s always been associated with creativity, ideas and innovation. The best-known architects of their age designed some of the country’s most inspiring buildings here – from Sir Christopher Wren’s magnificent Sheldonian Theatre (above) to James Gibbs’s Radcliffe Camera, a domed library built to house medical and scientific books. Oxford has also inspired some of our greatest writers. Lewis Carroll, creator of Alice in Wonderland, was a mathematics don at Christ Church, the Inklings, a group of writers that included CS Lewis and JRR Tolkein, used to discuss their work in the Eagle and Child pub in St Giles and Matthew Arnold immortalised the city’s “dreaming spires.”

Oxford is renowned for doing things first. It boasts the UK’s oldest botanic garden, as well as the exquisitely-restored Ashmolean, the first public museum in the world. William Morris launched the UK’s first mass-produced car here in the 1920s and it was at Oxford’s Radcliffe Infirmary in 1941 that penicillin was first used on a patient, founding the science of antibiotics.

The city’s moved with the times too. Once renowned for its Brideshead Revisited image, it’s probably just as famous these days for Inspector Morse and BMW’s stylish Mini, which is manufactured at the company’s Cowley plant.

Perhaps the best thing about Oxford is the passion it inspires in tourists and residents alike. Crime doyenne PD James said that “the air buzzes with intellectual argument and laughter.” What more could you ask of a city?

My favourite restaurant - Quod, 92-94 High Street, Oxford.
My favourite cinema - Phoenix Picturehouse, 57 Walton Street, Oxford.
My favourite pub - The Trout, Godstow Road, Wolvercote, Oxford.
My favourite bookshop - Blackwell's, 48-51 Broad Street, Oxford.
My favourite place for coffee - The Grand Cafe, 84 High Street, Oxford.
My favourite walk - A stroll through University Parks or across Port Meadow.

Baking, learning Welsh and hill-walking - the Duchess of Cambridge's new life

“Lonely Kate moves Pippa in.” That’s the headline emblazoned in pink and white lettering across the cover of this week’s Grazia magazine. The story inside claims that while Prince William works all hours as an RAF search and rescue pilot, his bride is becoming “increasingly isolated and bored” at home in remote North Wales.

I’ve no idea how accurate the report is but if it’s true then I’m not surprised she’s fed up. Apparently she fills the lonely hours by baking, learning Welsh and hill-walking. Not the most scintillating pastimes for a 49-year-old, let alone a young woman of 29.

Palace aides are reportedly so concerned that Kate’s lifestyle is too middle-aged that the magazine says the royal couple have decided she’ll spend every other week in London – with her sister Pippa by her side.

Marrying into the Royal Family can’t be easy but since Kate is talented, clever (she’s got a 2:1 art history degree from St Andrew’s University) and personable I don’t understand why she doesn’t work. As Noel Coward once said, work is “more fun than fun,” and if Kate had more to occupy her days I bet she’d be more fulfilled.

Seasoned royal watchers often remark that it’s impossible to combine a royal role with a career, but William and Harry seem to manage just fine. And Princess Anne’s children, Peter and Zara Phillips, too. But if Kate really can’t find a career that uses her skills, then why doesn’t she roll up her sleeves and throw herself into full-time charity work? She wouldn’t have time to be bored.

PS: The new film of Jane Eyre (above) is a triumph from start to finish. Australian actress Mia Wasikowska is brilliant as Charlotte Bronte’s eponymous heroine, plain and mouse-like one minute, passionate and brave the next, while Michael Fassbender is the best Mr Rochester I’ve seen in years. The real star of the show, however, is the wild, windswept Derbyshire landscape. Gazing at the majestic moors and high stone crags made me want to move north on the spot.

Life and Fate on Radio 4's Start the Week - and bumping into an old friend

Another upside of working from home (see previous blog), is that every now and again you can escape from work without a grumpy boss raising an eyebrow.

So yesterday I walked to St Peter’s College in Oxford to listen to a special recording of Andrew Marr’s Start the Week. The beautiful Victorian chapel was packed to the gunnels for the event, one of a series of discussions to mark Radio 4’s forthcoming dramatisation of Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. It promises to be one of the must-listens of the year, with Kenneth Branagh and David Tennant starring, yet I’m ashamed to admit that until this week I barely knew anything about Grossman.

But as Marr (shorter and more dapper in real life than I’d expected) and his guests – historian Antony Beevor and writers Linda Grant and Andrey Kurkov – revealed, Grossman’s story is a tragic, but fascinating one.

Scientist turned writer Grossman was a formidable journalist. Writing for Red Star, the Red Army’s newspaper, he wrote eyewitness accounts of the Soviet retreat, the defence of Stalingrad and the fall of Berlin. He was also the first journalist to reach the hideous Nazi concentration camp of Treblinka.

After the Second World War, he became increasingly critical of the Stalinist regime. In the early 1960s, after he submitted Life and Fate for publication, Politburo ideology chief Mikhail Suslov decided it could be published – but not for 200 years. KGB officers raided Grossman’s flat and seized the manuscript, copying paper and even his typewriter ribbons. Grossman died in 1964 assuming that nobody would ever read his novel. Actually, it turned out later that he’d given a copy to a friend and a network of dissidents managed to smuggle it out of the country.

Many critics now compare Life and Fate, the history of a nation told through one family’s eyes, to War and Peace. In fact Linda Grant told the Oxford audience that she’d not only failed to finish War and Peace but that she reckons Life and Fate is a better novel. That was enough for me. After the talk I dashed straight round to Blackwell’s in Broad Street to buy a copy. Not only that, when the Radio 4 dramatisation starts on September 18 I’m going to be glued to the radio. Meanwhile you can hear the Start the Week debate on Monday at 9am.

PS: “That’s funny,” I thought as I headed home along a packed Cornmarket. “From the back that man walks just like my old friend Pete Davies. He’s got exactly the same long stride and laid-back manner.” Pete and I were at school together but he lives 200 miles away in Yorkshire and I haven’t seen him for 15 years. The closer I got the more extraordinary the likeness of his walk seemed. I shouted “Pete” in a discreet way, just in case the man turned out to be a complete stranger. And guess what? The man turned round in puzzlement, glanced at me and glanced again. Slowly recognition dawned on his face. It was Pete!