Don't You Want Me?

India Knight busted the happy-ever-after cliché in her divorce novel, My Life on a Plate. This time it’s sex and the single mum that’s on Ms Knight's knowing agenda. Forget gritty realism though, in Don’t You Want Me the only element of kitchen sink drama in this frothy tale is whether there’ll be enough roasted leg of lamb and rosemary to go round. And it’s an important question to Estella de la Croix, she’s a woman of appetites. Leading lady Stella has two ex-husbands, a very large house, gorgeous clothes and a sweetly blonde toddler called Honey. She even has an artist lodger, who is lovely, but too ginger to be fanciable. Everything is superficially perfect, except for one thing, the lack of sex. "I have no-one to sin with" wails Stella, and decides to do something about it. There follows a gruesomely confessional account of over-age drinking and drugs. And one-night-stands with a perma-tanned plastic surgeon--(sleeping with him is like "contorting an Action Man into unlikely positions") or an equally unappealing DJ, a thirtysomething man who thinks he’s 17. And although Stella can be very witty on the dating game and middle-class laissez-faire parenting, less amusing is her scatological humour, or bad taste jokes about the handicapped. By the end of the novel Stella has decided that casual sex is not for her, a relationship is what she really, really wants. And her lucky partner? Well let’s just say that ginger Frank isn’t a red herring.--Eithne Farry