AND GOD CREATED THE AU PAIR - Softcover

Smets

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007185200 ISBN 13: 9780007185207

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2010

Synopsis

An achingly funny novel on modern motherhood and married life, as told through the e-mail correspondence of two sisters. When your family snapshots resemble NSPCC ads and it takes a quick-witted au pair to prevent your guests from burning alive, you have well and truly arrived in motherhood... Charlotte and Nell are sisters who live thousands of miles apart, each coping, or rather not coping, with the incalculable demands of motherhood. The daily battle to avert domestic disaster and keep up with the Dickenson-Jones's is abated only by their hilariously candid e-mail exchange. They address some crucial questions, such as: if your son hasn't noticed that you've given Benny the hamster away, it is safe to assume he's forgotten? What is the unassailable law of nature that guarantees a cool, elegant paint, chosen with a loving homemaker's care, will dry to the colour of greying ham? And will a glass of chardonnay make it all better? Charlotte and Nell are separated by continents but united in tales of over-busy lives and family mishaps - how to cope with children demanding their attention 24/7, husbands who are oblivious to the madness their world has become, as well as coming to terms with the fact that they are no longer the youthful free spirits they once were. And God Created the Au Pair is perhaps what Bridget Jones might write if she got married, had children and began to wonder whether being single had its advantages after all...

About this title

Review:

‘An unputdownable book that, extraordinarily, made me yearn for a dozen more children, a menagerie of household pets and a perpetual case of builders. Essential comfort reading for any mother. Please can we have a sequel, soon’ Frances Osborne, author of Lilla’s Feast and mother of two

From the Author:

We hope you'll find this book very good fun to read. It was fantastically enjoyable to write and we laughed throughout the process. The story is fictional though based on our lives and the lives of our large extended family, various friends, neighbours and pets. If there are times you'd rather drink a cup of weedkiller than have another coffee with your neighbour, wish your hamster would just get on with it and die and have to drive a fork into your thigh to stay awake at high-brow dinner parties, then we think you'll enjoy this story. However if you are politically correct and disapprove of bitching it's probably best avoided.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0007185200
• ISBN 13: 9780007185207
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384