Liam’s broken his toe,’ Garv said. ‘His new flatscreen telly fell on it: (Liam and Elaine had every consumer durable known to man -and I stress man, not woman. Give me a mobile phone and a hair-curler and I’m happy. But Garv, being a man, yearned after digital this and Bang & Olufsen that.) ‘So tonight’s off:

But even Garv agreed that Elaine was terrifying. She-spokerealfast. Firingquestionsfromamachinemouth. How’swork? Whenareyougettinglisted? Her dynamic glamour reduced me to stammering inadequacy, and by the time I’d cobbled together an answer, she’d have lost interest and moved on. I can go without chocolate for weeks at a time. OK, days. But once I have a bit I want more, and the fluff-covered, lunch-time Mars bar had roused the hungry beast. So when I saw the boxes of handmade truffles in a chilled compartment I decided in a mad splurge of go-on-you-divil justification to buy myself one. Which is precisely what I bought for that evening’s meal. I mounted the pavement, ran into the Spar and flung a couple of pizzas and some breakfast cereals into a basket. And then Fate intervened. In the City of Angels, Maggie gets to do things she's never done before: mixing with film stars, pitching scripts, partying non-stop. From the bestselling author Marian Keyes, the hilariously heartbreaking Angels follows the tale of the fabulous and uplifting Walsh sister, Maggie . . .Of course I knew. Every time I went into town with Garv we had to call into the electrical department in Brown Thomas and stand before said telly, admiring it in all its twelve thousand pounds’ worth of glory. Though Garv was well paid, he didn’t earn anything like Liam’s telephone-number wedge. And what with our high mortgage, the cost of running two cars, Garv’s addiction to CDs and my addiction to face creams and hand­ bags, funds just didn’t run to flatscreen tellies. Cheer up, it probably broke when it fell off the wall. And one day soon you’ll be able to afford one of your own.’

I’d always lived a fairly blameless life. Up until the day I left my husband and then ran away to Hollywood, I’d hardly ever put a foot wrong. Not one that many people knew about, anyway. So when, out of the blue, everything just disintegrated like wet paper, I couldn’t shake a wormy suspicion that this was long overdue. All that clean living simply isn’t natural.

I felt as if I was falling, that I would go on falling for ever. Then, abruptly, I made myself stop. And I knew something else: I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t bear to watch the downward spiral of my marriage begin to catch other people and spin them into the vortex too. In addition to her fifteen novels, Marian has also written two collections of journalism, upon which the recent hit BBC Radio 4 show Between Ourselves is based.

It’s not really laid out properly yet,’ I said awkwardly. ‘I’d rather wait until it’s all done before I show you:Marian Keyes is a phenomenon. The multimillion copy, internationally bestselling author of some of the most widely loved, genre-defying novels of the past thirty years - including Rachel's Holiday, Anybody Out THere and Grown Ups - has millions of devoted readers around the world. Yes,’ I said. No, actually it wasn’t. She was talking about a different contract, one I hadn’t even started on. There was no point whinging to Frances that all day I’d been frantically sewing up a great deal. She was an über-achiever, well on her way to being made a partner, and she’d made hard work into a performance art. She rarely left the office and popular opinion (not that she was popular, of course) had it that she slept under her desk and washed, like a bag lady, in the staff toilets. But even if I had liked Liam and Elaine, I still wouldn’t have wanted to go out that particular night – putting on a big, fat, happy head is that much harder if you’ve an audience. Also there was a pile of scary manila envelopes to be dealt with at home. (Plus two soaps eager to tend to my needs and a couch that couldn’t do enough for me.) Time was too precious to waste an entire evening out enjoying myself.

There are some men who are so good-looking that meeting them is like being hit on the head with a mallet. Garv, however, isn’t one of them; he’s more the sort of man you could see day-in, day-out for twenty years, then just wake up one morning and think, ‘God, he’s nice, how come I never noticed him before now?’ Discover this hilarious, heart-warming story about how far one woman will go to find herself, from the No. 1 bestselling author of Grown UpsverifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ Maggie Walsh is supposed to be the sensible one - the white sheep of the family. She lives less than a mile from Mum and Dad and married middle-of-the-road Garv. But that is about to change . . .