Don't You Want Me? - Softcover

Knight, India

Softcover

ISBN 10: 024195178X ISBN 13: 9780241951781

Publisher: Penguin, 2011

Synopsis

Don't You Want Me? is the second novel by bestselling author India Knight.

Sex - there's a lot of it about. So why isn't Stella getting her fair share?

Admittedly she's got a few handicaps: she's the wrong side of thirty-five and a single mum (to the adorable Honey), while her hot-blooded Frenchness turns English men pale. Mind you, the men she meets are either perma-tanned show-offs or poorly socialized podgers. On lot have shockingly shiny white teeth; the other lot have, well, wives. What's a girl to do?

Dividing her time between London's most PC playgroup (most popular kids' names: Ichabod and Perdita) and lessons on the art of pulling from her cheeky housemate Frank (shame he's got ginger hair everywhere), Stella is seriously starting to wonder if she'll ever have sex again.

'Miles funnier and ruder than anything else of its kind' Evening Standard

'Fabulously funny . . . ace' Heat

'Delicious cleverness and funniness . . . slips down as easily as strawberry soufflé' Sunday Telegraph

India Knight is the author of four novels: My Life on a Plate, Don't You Want Me, Comfort and Joy and Mutton. Her non-fiction books include The Shops, the bestselling diet book Neris and India's Idiot-Proof Diet, the accompanying bestselling cookbook Neris and India's Idiot-Proof Diet Cookbook and The Thrift Book. India is a columnist for the Sunday Times and lives in London with her three children.Follow India on Twitter @indiaknight or on her blog at http://indiaknight.tumblr.com.

About this title

Review:

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

Review:

Miles funnier and ruder than anything else of its kind (Evening Standard)

Delicious cleverness and funniness . . . slips down as easily as strawberry soufflé (Sunday Telegraph)

Fabulously funny . . . ace (Heat)

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 024195178X
• ISBN 13: 9780241951781
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272