Expectation: The most razor-sharp and heartbreaking novel of the year

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Cate thinks) “ why should it matter what her friends are doing? Why should her happiness be indexed to theirs? But it is.” Hannah asked Lissa to speak to Nathan.....thinking Lissa could influence Nathan to change his mind about the IVF treatments. Jesus," says Hannah, laughing. It always astonishes her, the crap Lissa puts up with. "Well, if you don't get the part, you could always do a one-woman show, Directors I Have Known and Been Rejected By." The three friends meet in the mid 90's , Lissa and Hannah at a course called Feminisms,and Cate who joins their group , sleeping on Hannah's sofa when she has nowhere else to go.

The White Rock: From the bestselling author of The Ballroom

With “fresh and honest” (Jojo Moyes) prose, Queenie is a remarkably relatable exploration of what it means to be a modern woman searching for meaning in today’s world.” - Queenie 4. After I Do - Taylor Jenkins Reid The year is 2004 and they are living in a three-story Victorian townhouse on the edge of the best park in London fields. Hannah, Cate and Lissa are young, vibrant and inseparable. Living on the edge of a common in East London, their shared world is ablaze with art and activism, romance and revelry – and the promise of everything to come. They are electric. They are the best of friends. Ten years on, they are not where they hoped to be. Amidst flailing careers and faltering marriages, each hungers for what the others have. And each wrestles with the same question: what does it take to lead a meaningful life? EXPECTATION is a novel of the highs and lows of friendship – how it can dip, dive and rise again. It is also about finding your way: as a mother, a daughter, a wife, a rebel. Most of all, it explores that liminal space between expectation and reality, the place – full of dreams, desires and pain – in which we all live our lives. Expectation by Anna Hope – eBook Details In her first year of motherhood after an unplanned pregnancy, Cate is constantly exhausted, spiraling into self-doubt and postpartum anxiety. Her husband Sam seems oblivious, but maybe she’d prefer he remain in the dark. How can she admit the unthinkable—that she misses her freedom?

In this sharply observed novel set in and around London, three college friends, now in their thirties, must come to terms with the gap between the lives they imagined for themselves and reality in the face of marriage, fertility struggles, and loss. This story chronicles around a year in their lives, and the changing dynamics between each of them. Hannah and Cate were best friends before college, and Lissa joined their group in college. Each woman has something the other wants—Lissa has freedom, Hannah has success, and Cate has a family. As time goes on, the balance of friendships continue to shift, as jealousies and arguments push them away and, sometimes, bring them closer together. I found it fascinating to read about their ever-evolving friendship and the conflicts simmering under the surface, both interpersonal and individual. The struggles that each woman is facing are so relatable and understandable. It was kind of cathartic to read—to see the passage of time and how a friendship might stretch, change, deepen, or fade. So this novel is a bit of a bold choice as the characters are already leaving their twenties. But this will be a recurring theme on this list, as I think a lot of the lessons of our twenties are learned too late, so by reading their reflections, you can aim to learn the same lessons a little sooner. But life is complicated, and so are relationships, especially when they span decades. Time takes a toll. Little annoyances can become big over the years; resentments can fester. Few obstacles are more difficult for a friendship than when someone gets easily what someone else is struggling so hard to achieve, like Cate’s new baby and Hannah’s torturous battle to become pregnant. Both women are aware of the awkwardness of the situation, and they try to ride it out, but some things are hard to overlook. That they can’t be honest with each other about how they really feel makes proper communication impossible. It’s perhaps the most relatable aspect of this book – not everyone will have been in that exact situation, and yet everyone knows what it’s like to not be able to say what you want to a friend for fear of hurting their feelings. It isn’t fun. Successful Hannah, married to Nathan would kill to be in Cate's shoes as she undertakes another round of IVF. Her expectation of being able to get pregnant has been cruelly dashed and her marriage is reduced to her ability to conceive, this need has become all consuming.

Anna Hope - Penguin Books UK Anna Hope - Penguin Books UK

The most razor-sharp and heartbreaking novel of the year, EXPECTATION is a novel about finding your way: as a mother, a daughter, a wife, a rebel. This is a love story about what happens when the love fades. It’s about staying in love, seizing love, forsaking love, and committing to love with everything you’ve got. And above all, After I Do is the story of a couple caught up in an old game—and searching for a new road to happily ever after.” - After I Do 5. Rachel’s Holiday - Marian Keyes Queenie Jenkins is a twenty-five-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, straddling two cultures and slotting neatly into neither. She works at a national newspaper, where she’s constantly forced to compare herself to her white middle class peers. After a messy break up from her long-term white boyfriend, Queenie seeks comfort in all the wrong places…including several hazardous men who do a good job of occupying brain space and a bad job of affirming self-worth.

2. Beautiful World, Where Are You? - Sally Rooney

Which brings me to the second reason I'm in the one percent. This is a book with two themes: babies (having them, not having them, difficulty having them) and the tension between motherhood and career. Wow. Groundbreaking. It wouldn't be interesting even if Hope had something new to say on the subject, which she definitively does not. She throws some half-hearted activism plot points into the mix, presumably to earn the title quote of 'what happened to the women we were supposed to become?' Can't tell you, because I can't identify with any of the characters at any age. They worry. The worry about climate change— they worry about knife crime and gun crime— they were about their own relative privilege. This book does get compared to Sally Rooney’s books (Conversations with Friends and Normal People). I’m a big Sally Rooney fan and there is merit to that comparison. The writing style, tone, and pacing are similar in a way.