The characters are so real that you just do not want to let them leave your life. We meet Kate and Callum who had a passionate affair, Kate was young in her early twenties and Callum old and married, he should have known better, was he looking for some excitement in his ‘mid-life’ what was Kate really hoping for? Sadly, for Kate it ended and left her bereft and heartbroken. Callum carried on with his life his secret hidden. There's been a trend popping up recently, at least in my life, of unlikeable characters. No, this isn't a thinly veiled attempt to shame my colleagues and peers or my nearest and dearest in the national press, but rather a nod to the books and TV programmes I've been consuming. Louise O'Neill's recently released Almost Love struggles to present you with even one character you feel deserves your pity or empathy or forgiveness. When Kate was twenty-two, she had an intense and passionate affair with a married man, Callum, which ended in heartbreak. Kate thought she’d never get over it. Jones dips in and out of these many lives and these many timelines and between London and Edinburgh, but never once loses you, and never once stops you from wondering when redemption will come for Kate and Callum, or will it ever come? Kate gets the hardest time. Her issues with food and alcohol surface again and again. Her mental health struggles are framed through Matt’s concerned eyes. Her obsession with her appearance and her desirability build and build, while her fragility only occasionally pokes through. In contrast, those weaker souls: the acquiescing Matt, the unsuspecting Belinda, the bumbling Hetty, they begin to shine. They give you something to root for.

This book is very well written and the characters are exceptionally strong, making them easy to love, hate and maybe even relate to. The Judd Apatow Netflix series, Love, recently wrapped up with its third and final season, does the same at the outset. You are forced to question why you should be rooting for any of these less than shiny happy people, and yet you are. Or at the very least in both cases, you're chomping at the bit to see what happens to them. Callum is married to Belinda and they have two children with another on the way. Everything seems to be going well now after surviving an affair twenty years ago when he cheated on Belinda with aspiring actress Kate, just hours after meeting her. It's an affair that threatened to end their marriage and hurt so many people. So when seventeen years later Callum and Kate meet by chance, marriages and lives are threatened again. On reuniting they both find it impossible to stay away from each other and the troubles begin.

And the really frustrating thing is that while we follow everyone in narration, that doesn’t actually lead to us learning more about any them. Kate and Callum between them make some pretty radically awful decisions in the spur-of-the-moment, but we only read the action, not the internal reasoning. So one moment Callum is refusing an attempted kiss from Kate, then while she’s on the phone to someone, Callum suddenly has a hand on her leg that’s creeping up her skirt… it’s completely baffling that these moments are communicated in such sparse sentences (actually very similar to the directions of a script?) but never interrogated by the characters themselves, in the moment. It reads very much ‘Slot A into Slot B’. Never Greener provides no laughs, so again if it's Nessa from Gavin and Stacey you're after, you'll be disappointed. These are sad and messy lives and what redemption there is hard earned both by the reader and the characters. But those characters are well rounded and believable, their yearning and heartache is palpable, and their flaws are stark. And just like with Apatow's Love, or O'Neill's Almost Love, you're uncertain for much of the book who you should be rooting for, if anyone. But you'll get there, don't worry. Emer McLysaght Seventeen years later, life has moved on – Kate, now a successful actress, is living in London, married to Matt and mother to little Tallulah. Meanwhile Callum and his wife Belinda are happy together, living in Edinburgh and watching their kids grow up. The past, it would seem, is well and truly behind them all. Kate è diventata un'attrice famosa, ha un marito e una figlia, ma il suo animo è tormentato, non riesce a godersi le gioie della vita. Quando rivede Callum dopo diciassette anni, la stessa passione tra i due scoppia ancora. Fino a quando non vengono ancora una volta scoperti. Le loro vite cambiano e questo non per forza positivamente. I have to admit that Kate's husband Matt and his old friend Hetty were by far my favourite characters and I hurt when Matt hurt and I wanted to cry when he cried. I loved Hetty for her absolute loyalty to him and was desperately sad when even their relationship when awry for a while.

Now, I wondered if I was just being really harsh on this book – because my hopes were up? But then I read this Guardian books review, and I was relieved to find someone else who had the same frustrations; “Jones may have a good novel in her, but even her spark can’t set this soggy material alight.” Ouch. But – accurate.Gosh this is going to be a difficult book to review. I’m going to start by saying that I did enjoy Never Greener, the debut novel by actress Ruth Jones but I didn’t love it and I am unsure whether it was the fact I was reading it as an audiobook (is that right? Am I reading it if I am listening to it?!) but I struggled with it a little in places. Saying that though, Ruth Jones really can write people and she writes them incredibly well. Kate is brittle, fake, toxic and a huge contrast to her kind, loving, compassionate husband Matt (who I really liked). Callum and his wife Belinda are both brilliantly written and the insights into relationships of both couples are drawn with an expert eye and deft touch. It is also laugh out loud funny in places with clever observations of emotions and the complications of life. Imposterò questa recensione diversamente da come ho sempre fatto. Non mi è possibile spiegarvi un po'di trama prima, perché è un libro un po' complicato. Tutto ha inizio nel 1985 quando Kate ha ventidue anni e incontra Callum, un uomo sposato con una donna stupenda e con tre figli. Tra i due la passione scoppia all'improvviso e non riescono a stare lontani. Quella che doveva essere una storiella diventa amore. La storia, grazie ai salti temporali, ci porta al 2002.

How long does it take to become a national treasure? It’s not a label bestowed lightly, but Ruth Jones is well on her way to earning it, thanks to her much-loved TV projects, Gavin & Stacey and Stella, which mixed drama and comedy to heartwarming effect. Her screen work has that elusive quality of the top-notch writer, a “voice” that wins you over instantly. Many will have come to love Ruth Jones for her role as Nessa Jenkins in the hit TV comedy Gavin and Stacey and also her other roles she has become so well known for as well as a script writer, but now we can add author the list. Released on 5th April is Ruth Jones’s debut novel Never Greener (Bantam Press). This one blew so hot and cold for me. One minute you love the flawed messed up characters the next you hate them. What they are doing to each other what they are doing to themselves. They are all in the end of believable and unbelievable at the same time. London and Edinburgh the two main settings one way to win you over. There was too much cheating which nearly made me round down. However something stopped me how human they all are. You do not have to like all details about a person and vice vesra it is written well. It felt like we only got glimpses of insight, Kate is definitely carrying a great deal of darkness but why? The most interesting character is Belinda and I almost feel that this story would have been better told from her personal perspective, but that has been done before.

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I'm so conflicted with this, on one hand I sped through it wanting to find out more but on the other hand I really didn't like Kate or Callum and am struggling to understand their reasons for acting so badly.

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And if most happy stories are based on finding reality better than a dream, this is not a happy story. At least theirs is not.