A Thoroughly Modern Marriage is out tomorrow! It is available for pre-order right now in Kindle or paperback, and one of the most helpful things readers can do for authors is to either pre-order their book or buy it early doors, because the Amazon algorithms absolutely love this.

It is a feel-good summer read about friendships, family, belonging and what happens when you find love in unexpected or complicated places, and if you enjoyed my first two books, Two for Joy and To Have and to Hold then I am pretty confident you will love this. It is also perfect for fans of contemporary writers such as Lucy Dillon, Lucy Diamond, Elizabeth Noble or Mhairi McFarlane.

I am contemplating whether I could have a post-launch party later in the summer or early autumn, but for now this launch is strictly virtual. Right now it involves me sitting on the sofa in the dining room, which extensive experimentation has revealed as being the coolest place in the house at the moment, and emailing everyone I know with a message which basically says ‘Hi, I really like you, and would have loved to invite you to my book launch. But Covid means I’m not having one, so you will miss out on the prosecco, home-made cake and social chit chat, but pretty please could you buy the book anyway.’

Virginia Woolf famously declared that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”. I am hoping that lots of people rushing to buy the book will provide some money, but I am totally with her on the room of one’s own point. I am sharing the sofa from which I write with a picture book, a tween paperback, my husband’s rucksack, a box of tissues, a shopping tote bag and three pairs of children’s summer pyjamas. (Note – I only have two children). The dining table has no room for my laptop because it is covered with more children’s books, sun cream, hair detangling spray, a colouring book, a pencil case, a pot full of felt-tips, today’s post, some art-work brought home from school, my Kindle, my diary, a notebook and two magnets. Most of these are not mine, they are simply the detritus that has accumulated since the last time I did a quick tidy round (yesterday morning I think!) . But right now, I have to leave for school pick-up in 45 minutes, and any time I spend tidying is time not spent blogging or book launching, so I am trying to block the chaos out. A writer’s life is not a glamorous one.

I hope you are all surviving the heat wave, and that those of you with children in school manage to crawl through these last few days to the end of term, but right now go and buy A Thoroughly Modern Marriage because it is the absolute perfect thing to read in the garden tomorrow, a glass of something chilled in one hand.