The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life - Hardcover

"The writing is unobtrusively brilliant. I can't remember enjoying and admiring a new novel more."—Elizabeth Jane Howard, author of Marking Time

"Utterly captures the sense of quiet desperation of ordinary lives . . . and the ways in which life turns on a sixpence."—Kate Mosse, author of Sepulchre

"Hugely funny. . . . But beneath the Wodehousian surface, it is a serious book about men, women and children with complex inner lives trying to find happiness and coping with disappointment."—Daily Telegraph

Laura is a happily married mother of two who begins to question her choices when her first love resurfaces after twenty years. She’s forced to compare the passion of that relationship with the domesticity of her suburban life. What if she’d stayed with him? Would she be happier? And what is happiness, really?

Little does she know that many others in her gentrified English village, including a rector who’s lost his faith, a frustrated school teacher, and a successful single mother who can’t get over her ex, are struggling with their own personal crises.

Two of William Nicholson's screenplays—Shadowlands and Gladiator—have garnered Academy Award nominations. He is the author of five previous novels and lives in Sussex with his wife and three children.