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The Single Mums Move On – Janet Hoggarth
About the book
Can neighbours become more than good friends...
After her husband left her, Ali and her daughter Grace enjoyed living in what became known as 'the Single Mums' Mansion'. However, with her best friends Amanda and Jacqui moving on, it's time for Ali and Grace to make their own way. Thankfully, a chance conversation leads to them moving into the infamous South London gated community known only as 'The Mews'.
In 'The Mews' everyone lives in each other's pockets and curtain twitching is an Olympic sport. The neighbours are an eclectic bunch – from Nick the alleged spy, Carl the gorgeous but clearly troubled Idris Elba lookalike, to Debbie who is about to face the hardest fight of her life, and TV agent Samantha who is not as in control as she likes to pretend.
Each day brings another drama, but along with the tears, real friendships grow. And her neighbours' problems might unlock the key to something Ali has yearned for all along...
Based on a true story – you'll never be able to look at your neighbours quite the same way again...
Perfect for fans of Marian Keyes, Mhairi McFarlane and Helen Fielding.
Extract
Here comes the bride, sixty inches wide… Ali, you bloody heifer, why did you eat so much at Christmas? I silently fumed. My embonpoint was bursting out of my prom-style bridesmaid’s dress, causing mild upper thorax asphyxiation and creating a fleshy shelf upon which I could probably rest a round of drinks. An irksome label was irritating my back; it hadn’t been there when I’d tried the dress on in Coast months ago. I was like a dog chasing its tail, unable to reach the label without shedding the entire outfit. I couldn’t face wrestling my boobs back into the dress so I left it as it was.
Jacqui, in a better-fitting version of my dress, her hair a stunning blond Farrah Fawcett bouffant, zipped a jittery Amanda into her striking grey chiffon ball gown.
‘Five minutes, girls,’ I warned Amanda’s daughters, Isla and Meg.
They nodded, dressed in their identical dusky-pink John Lewis bridesmaids’ dresses, delicate fresh gypsophila flower crowns adorning both their heads like angelic halos. Sonny, Amanda’s little boy, was the ring-bearer, waiting with Chris at the town hall in a mini-me dark grey suit, a picture-perfect box-fresh family. Amanda’s dad, suited and booted, sat on the over-stuffed blue velvet armchair by the door, looking like he was recounting his speech in his head. I felt a sharp pain below my ribs; Dad was never going to make a speech or walk me down the aisle in the vintage cream lace dress I’d always imagined myself in, even if I actually got that far. My latest boyfriend, Ifan, had spouted all sorts of romantic shit when we’d first met a year ago in Kebab and Stab after Jacqui’s leaving drinks. He’d recited Dylan Thomas to me in bed and said he couldn’t wait for me to have his babies, but as soon as he moved in three months later, real life tightened the drawstring on the blissful honeymoon period.
‘He’s so handsome!’ Jacqui had swooned after I’d sent her a picture. ‘You finally got the rock-star boy you always wanted.’
Ifan worked in an achingly trendy men’s clothes shop in Covent Garden and had aspirations of becoming a model after posing for a few moody Instagram photo shoots for the store. He was certainly pretty enough and young enough (eight years my junior at thirty-three) and an improvement on all the hideous men I’d encountered in my recent dating past. We had spent the first week together tucked up in bed incessantly shagging – he was a veritable Clit Eastwood – until I was struck down with killer cystitis, weeing razor blades every time I went to the loo. I had to sneak him out under cover of darkness before my five-year-old daughter, Grace, surfaced. She slept in my bed so Ifan and I had appropriated the spare room as our shagging palace, a broom cupboard with a narrow single bed armed with a sagging mattress rammed against one wall like a coffin awaiting a corpse. I had earmarked it for Grace when we moved in, but the damp was now so tenacious that her clothes in the wardrobe had started growing mould on them, and I couldn’t afford anywhere else, even with housing benefit. I wanted to be near my friends, Amanda and Ursula, but flats in East Dulwich were so out of my league.
About the author
Janet Hoggarth has worked on a chicken farm, as a bookseller, children’s book editor and DJ with her best friend (under the name of Whitney and Britney). She has published several children’s books, the most recent ones written under the pseudonym of Jess Bright. Her first adult novel The Single Mums’ Mansion,a huge bestseller, was based on her experiences of living communally as a single parent.
Follow Janet:
Twitter: @Janethauthor
Facebook: @JanetHoggarthAuthor
Pre-order links:
Amazon: https://amzn.to/2J3YhI1
iBooks: https://apple.co/2XYgIlB
Kobo: https://bit.ly/2J3YiM5
Google Play: https://bit.ly/2vtRDTC
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