Mothertime

On Christmas Eve, the Townsend children at 14 Camberley Road in North London have finished decorating, and the house glows in the firelight with the feeling of the season. That calm ends when their mother, Caroline, comes home unsteady. A former beauty and an actress who never quite made it, she is divorced, drinks heavily, and has just been abandoned by her lover, Bart. With Christmas at risk of being ruined once more, the household faces a choice: something drastic has to be done.

The novel is a comedy about a fractured family, looking closely at marriage, the turbulence of adolescence, and the defences people build to conceal their own neediness.