Small Pleasures

London's south-east suburbs, 1957. Jean Swinney writes features for a local newspaper. Her romantic hopes have let her down, and she is nearly forty, still sharing a cramped existence with a difficult mother, with little sign that anything will change.

A young Swiss woman, Gretchen Tilbury, contacts the paper with an astonishing claim: her daughter was conceived without a man. Jean is given the assignment and must determine whether the child is a true miracle or an elaborate hoax. As she reports, she finds herself drawn into the Tilbury household. Gretchen becomes a companion, and Margaret, the girl at the centre of the claim, is odd and winning, and gradually fills a role in Jean's life that resembles motherhood.

Jean never means to develop feelings for Gretchen's husband, Howard. Yet his sharp humour, his intelligence and his gentleness pull her in, and her attachment is deep and sudden. Howard is married to a woman who is both Jean's friend and the subject of the article she is writing, and the investigation begins to stir troubling currents among all of them.

Still, Jean cannot bring herself to give up the possibility of real happiness. A reckoning is coming, however, and its cost will be hard to bear.