She's got such a clear, relateable voice, and she really knows how to keep readers turning the page. It seems that her writing has evolved so much since Ralph’s Party and The Truth About Melody Browne seemed so more mature than her earlier novels so when I heart Lisa was writing a sequel to Ralph’s Party – her debut! They both live in the same postcode and equidistant from Scarlett’s school and Blake’s childminder, and the children barely notice the difference. Flipping between their perspectives and illuminating their desires, fears, and sometimes clumsy actions, [After the Party] entertainingly marches its characters along the path to finally growing up.

There’s no definitive starting point that marks the potential beginning of the end for Jem and Ralph, it just seems to be the way life has gone for them. Lisa Jewell can tell a story, adding just enough mystery and interesting observation to ease you through without thinking you've sullied your mind somehow. Not really one that I’d recommend but I would def recommend lisa as an author, just perhaps some of her more recent books. While Jewell's writing flows easy and her prose can be quite evocative and lyrical, the characters and plot make this a Do Not Recommend.This was different, but in a vapid, self-loathing way where I actually found myself in a horrible mood after reading because it was so depressing - yet the obstacles put in the way of the characters were just stupid. As a mother, I feel the same when I go out (once in a blue moon), kind of out of place but nostalgic for my "just-me" past. I don’t believe that Jem would have considered an abortion after what she went through to have children in the first place and neither do I believe Ralph would have been quite so understanding at being stood up.

In becoming a parent, Ralph feels like he has lost things he can barely articulate like the chance to reinvent himself and the freedom of his unencumbered relationship with Jem. He didn’t show up at six so I phoned and left messages on his voice mail—nothing—then I got through to him just now, literally about three minutes before you walked in. When she gets there, she glances down, as she always does, into the basement pit of the house at number thirty-one.His paintings just don't look or feel the same and Jem feels like she is Ralph's wife and the children's mother - she's lost who she is. She sighs again, feeling the weight of things she needs to do now that she has the children for the next few days: baths to run, stories to read, clean clothes to sort out. A young family, a house-proud family with enough money to renovate the run-down flat they’d bought a year ago, and enough foresight to have done it when the lady of the house was four months pregnant with their first child, unlike Jem, who had spent the last night of her first pregnancy on a mattress in the dining room of her sister’s flat, her possessions piled around her in gigantic cardboard boxes, like a township, waiting for a woman in Camberwell to sell her flat to a man in Dulwich so that the owner of their new house in Herne Hill could sign the completion forms and hand them their front door keys. There are also some serious themes dealt with throughout which makes it all a bit depressing and sad at times but nevertheless real, which for me makes Lisa Jewell stand out from some of her contemporaries in the world of women's fiction.