I read Expectation by Anna Hope in two days on a delightful end-of-summer break in Pembrokeshire with friends. I can’t remember how I discovered it or where I got the recommendation from but I enjoyed every minute. It’s a book about exactly my era of coming of age and figuring out what to do with your life as your friends around you make different choices, start and finish relationships, try out different career paths and decide whether or not to have children.

Hannah is the sensible one, a great career she has invested time and effort into, a lovely flat and a solid marriage to husband Nathan, until failed rounds of IVF put them under strain. Lissa is the flighty actor, who showed such promise but now finds herself at ever more depressing auditions, navigating a feeling of not having achieved her potential and a tricky relationship with her artist and activist mother. Cate is in the early throws of motherhood having found a kind and reliable man and moved out of London to Canterbury but feels stifled by the life she has chosen.

The jumping about in time is clever as you see where the characters have come from and what has shaped their current choices and the references to food and music took me straight back to what I was doing in those years, remembering I was also constantly playing the album Clandestino by Manu Chao that summer. It was a delightful dip back into my past through the eyes of these three flawed, complex and very real women. Fabulous.