It wasn’t as though the topics and themes were inventive - but the writing was so seamless-readable - engaging - and real... that I’m glad I spent time with these characters. They worry. The worry about climate change— they worry about knife crime and gun crime— they were about their own relative privilege. It's a thoughtful, compelling story of friendship and finding happiness. In many ways Expectation is a story of ordinary life and the triumphs we can find in each day. I found it realistic and thought-provoking. I read this slowly and chewed on it, and I sincerely appreciate the author’s messages.

Expectation by Anna Hope – Shiny New Books Expectation by Anna Hope – Shiny New Books

Queenie Jenkins is a twenty-five-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, straddling two cultures and slotting neatly into neither. She works at a national newspaper, where she’s constantly forced to compare herself to her white middle class peers. After a messy break up from her long-term white boyfriend, Queenie seeks comfort in all the wrong places…including several hazardous men who do a good job of occupying brain space and a bad job of affirming self-worth. Ten years on, they are not where they hoped to be. Amidst flailing careers and faltering marriages, each hungers for what the others have. And each wrestles with the same question: what does it take to lead a meaningful life?

The more I think about the handling of Lissa's character, the worse it all seems. She is repeatedly stated to be the most beautiful member of the group. At the very beginning of the book, she is introduced as the one who stays out late and wakes up hungover. The party girl. And yet she is also the only one of the main three we ever see working - we see Hannah at work, but the author never actually describes the work itself, only the phone calls from the fertility clinic that Hannah steps out of the office to answer. Whereas we see Lissa attend multiple auditions, rehearse with other actors, star in a Chekhov play, and eventually return to her soul-destroying gig as a life drawing model. First off, this novel is a slow burn. The book starts off on the slow side and then gradually gets more and more interesting as it progresses. Do you ever feel the pressure to do it all? I’m sure we all do at times, probably even more so right now. Expectation is about three women: Hannah, Cate, and Lissa.

Anna Hope

Lissa is an actress who’s fed up of the grind. Cate’s a new mum who is lonely in her marriage. Hannah’s strenuous IVF journey has left her husband feeling shut out. Expectation follows Lissa, Cate and Hannah across the three decades they have been friends, charting their successes and failures, their rows and reconciliations. In any long relationship there are bound to be hurdles. Some of them prove surmountable for these three women. Some of them don’t. An intimate, sharply funny novel about a couple heading toward their wedding, and the three friends who may draw them apart But life is complicated, and so are relationships, especially when they span decades. Time takes a toll. Little annoyances can become big over the years; resentments can fester. Few obstacles are more difficult for a friendship than when someone gets easily what someone else is struggling so hard to achieve, like Cate’s new baby and Hannah’s torturous battle to become pregnant. Both women are aware of the awkwardness of the situation, and they try to ride it out, but some things are hard to overlook. That they can’t be honest with each other about how they really feel makes proper communication impossible. It’s perhaps the most relatable aspect of this book – not everyone will have been in that exact situation, and yet everyone knows what it’s like to not be able to say what you want to a friend for fear of hurting their feelings. It isn’t fun. Expectation, published in 2019, was called ‘devastatingly perceptive and emotionally wise’ by The Guardian. It is being adapted for the screen by Clemence Poesy and Haut et Court films in Paris. An intimate, bracingly intelligent debut novel about a millennial Irish expat who becomes entangled in a love triangle with a male banker and a female lawyerIt’s been a while since a novel has spoken to me quite so viscerally (I devoured this in a day). Maybe it’s because I’m at the ‘pivotal’ stage in my life where the heroines of Expectation are at their most hopeful, alive with the hope of it all - and to comprehend the possibility that in ten years' time I might not be where I had hoped is devastating. Expectation by Anna Hope delves into the disappointed lives of three women, as years after graduating university, the gap between the lives they imagined for themselves, and the ones they ended up living, has inevitably widened.