Nathan, the cad, ends up having an affair with Hannah's friend Lissa - more on whom in a moment - and it looks as though Hannah will have to find fulfilment on her own, without a baby and without a husband. This is a book with two themes: babies (having them, not having them, difficulty having them) and the tension between motherhood and career.

Despite knowing she is lucky to be alive and have a family, she feels lonely and trapped, any aspirations she once nurtured have been curtailed or abandoned.Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit. Hannah and Lissa are both still in London, Hannah and her husband Nate are struggling to conceive while Lissa is still chasing her dreams of an acting career. It was like her whole personality was constructed around wanting to have children and if you took that away from her, there was nothing left to her character and for me that’s incredibly weak characterisation.

I feel like this book perpetuates the idea that your 20s are fun, carefree, joyful, full of colour, and your 30s are droll, exhausting, disappointing, depressing. There is, of course, more - but to reveal more would spoil the story for those who have yet to read the book. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from.It hit so many important points for me in quite an emotive way and for that reason I think it’s a fantastic read that many other women may find cathartic. But what is it all worth - the beauty, the parties, the doomed attempts to forge a career - what is it all worth, Anna Hope seems to ask, without a baby to make your life truly complete? The three girl friends: the one who is so obsessed with having a baby that she drives her husband away; the lost drifter who falls pregnant and marries too fast; the beautiful, wild one who has never settled down.

THE MUST-READ SUMMER 2020 RICHARD AND JUDY BOOK CLUB PICK’If you wished Normal People had tackled female friendship, try Expectation’ GRAZIA’Profoundly intelligent and humane. Set over the course of five days in 1920, WAKE weaves the stories of three women around the journey of the Unknown Soldier, from its excavation in Northern France to Armistice Day at Westminster Abbey.It seems to me that the author left no room in the narrative for a woman to be okay with being childless.