The common thread and main topic is love, under all its forms : parental, brotherly, friendship, romantic love, love of life. Its unlike the other books of hers that I’ve read and is a go to author for me, as it’s listed as contemporary fiction and romance. The female characters are only there as plot devices and to cause issues in the lives of the male characters.

Lisa Jewell transcends the British chick lit genre by creating complex characters with problems many readers can relate to.With barely ten pages to go everything is going perfectly and gets tied up witb a neat bow just as Gervase decide's to disappear from the London family home. I loved Ralph's Party and Thirtysomething -- cute chick novels -- but her writing took some impressive proportions with One-Hit Wonder, and she has outdone herself with A Friend of the Family.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. They've all found themselves at a crossroads of sorts and so have kind of come to rely on the family home and the unit to support them at these interesting times. The previous Lisa Jewell books I've read were suspense thrillers, this was more a love triangle and it wasn't thrilling in any way. Then Tony realizes he doesn't really want Milly and that them doing anything would be a huge mistake.One of the things that Lisa Jewell always does so well is to drip feed a small amount of information at a time when it comes to character development so we find out something about one character and then the story moves on to find out whats going on with another character so you have to keep turning the pages and reading on to find out how that information fits with the story and how the other characters are going to react to that!