Bestseller Jojo Moyes pens a satisfying tale about a bestselling author

We All Live Here
Jojo Moyes
Penguin Random House

Jojo Moyes is an international bestseller, cornering the holiday read and book club markets.

Her success is based on the fact that she does what she does very well. She deals in human relationships: complicated, difficult but working their way to a conclusion that will satisfy her readers. She makes sure her stories include plenty of comedy and a spice of tragedy.

Here we have Lila, who wrote a big bestseller self-help book on how to have the perfect marriage, only to have her husband immediately leave her for a glamorous fellow mother who she cannot avoid seeing at the school gate. Then her own mother died suddenly, and her devastated, kindly but slightly ineffectual stepfather moved in with her and her two daughters, followed soon after by her real father, a down-on-his luck and terminally unreliable B-list actor.

Inevitably, Lila meets two men. One is a handsome single father, another habitué of the school gate, while the other is a fellow her stepfather gets hold of to come and organise her out-of-control garden. But, of course, things become complicated in all kinds of ways – I don’t want to give away spoilers. Lila is also in dire need of money, and her publisher wants her to write a new book, this time about how to cope as a newly single woman. They want it to be lively, raunchy and funny.

The trouble is Lila is not remotely coping. Her efforts to comply with her publisher’s wishes are going to go spectacularly wrong as she struggles to deal with her own post-divorce angst, her elder daughter’s teenage angst and her father and stepfather’s mutual animosity and elderly angst. Add in the demands of her younger daughter’s teacher — will Lila take charge of the costumes for the class production of Peter Pan — and this is what she doesn’t need. It is also not the basis for the lively bestseller her publishers want.

Moyes, of course, brings everything to a satisfactory conclusion, and it is skilfully done. Lila begins to see what she is doing wrong, and slowly starts to settle her life on a more even keel. There is plenty of humour along the way, and several touching scenes. It all makes for a satisfying if undemanding light read.