When Phoebe married Duncan Moon, she imagined they would get around to loving one another. But she hadn't bargained on the stifling effect on her husband of his alarming family, nor the many ways in which the family would contrive to exclude her from their affluent but hollow lives. It is only when Phoebe reads the hidden diaries of her father-in-law's ex-mistress that she learns the truth about the Moons - and discovers love where she had never thought she'd find it. In this wickedly funny first novel Maggie Makepeace paints a devastating portrait of upper middle-class family life. By turns hilarious, painful, tragic and unexpectedly poignant, this is black comedy at it startling best.

Author Biography

Maggie Makepeace came to writing late in life, having begun her career as a zoologist. She had a number of jobs in scientific research and Wildlife Trusts, the most rewarding of which was a 3-year contract on a Scottish estuary studying the social behaviour of shelducks. For a brief time in the 70s she was a television presenter for Yorkshire TV and London Weekend, and gradually became more interested in the psychology of human behaviour, especially communication - or the lack of it - and in the way that some people attempt to control the lives of others.