A. THE HUSBAND’S SECRET by Liane Moriarty
Cecilia is leading the perfect suburban life but everything falls apart when, while her husband is away on a business trip, Cecilia accidentally finds a note on which her husband has written “Only open this if I am dead”. His alarmed reaction to her discovery and immediate early return from his trip pique Cecilia's curiosity, especially when she asks him about it and he rather shiftily says: "Oh, err, it's nothing – don't open it." Of course, she opens it. That is the initial hook, and it's a powerful one.
The unsettling words that she read forever changed the life of this once contented wife and mother; yet this well-intended posthumous missive also becomes the spur that enables Cecilia to connect with two other women recently pushed towards crossroads.
What's great about this novel is that it makes you care absolutely equally about the plot and the characters. It's a moving story about relationships, redemption, guilt, love and just about every other important thing but Moriarty also questions more mundane ideas. Simultaneously a page-turner and a book one has to put down occasionally to think about and absorb.


B. HOUSE OF FUN by Simon Hoggart
Simon Hoggart’s work is a collection of his finest political sketches, taken from the past 21 years. He was more than just witty; he was wise. His sketches provided a kind of translation service, converting politicians' jargon into intelligible English - invariably to the politicians' disadvantage -.
Although knowledgeable about politics, he never made you feel like an ignorant outsider; you always felt that in Simon you'd found a kindred spirit, albeit one far hilarious and sharper than you could ever be.
This book will have you chuckling, giggling, sniggering, and sometimes despairing. It is instant history with added cracks.
Taken as a whole, House of Fun amounts to a sort of light-hearted alternative political history of the past two decades. The book is divided into eras rather than chapters, each named after the reigning prime minister: John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron.

C. I’VE GOT YOUR NUMBER by Sophie Kinsella
This novel is totally irresistible: tightly and boldly plotted, hilarious, romantic, witty and clever. It is so well-written that you fall in love with the hero as if he were a real person, and root for the heroine as if she were your dearest friend.
Everything starts when Poppy Wyatt loses her priceless antique engagement ring - which has been in her fiancé’s family for three generations - during a pre-wedding brunch at a fancy hotel and a few minutes later, her phone is nicked by a mugger. However, in a hard-to-believe twist of fate, she ends up finding a perfectly good phone in the garbage bin in the hotel lobby. Anxious to get the ring back, she takes the phone and gives out the new number to the concierge and all her friends. But the phone has an owner and, understandably, he wants it back.
Kinsella's latest should be exactly what her fans are hankering for. And physical therapist
Poppy is easily as charming and daffy as her previous loved character, shopaholic Rebecca Bloomwood.

D. FARTHING by Joe Walton
Farthing begins like an English country-house murder mystery. The story opens in 1949 when Lucy, the sole surviving child of the family that owns Farthing estate, comes back to her girlhood home with her husband, David, a Jewish who escaped Hitler's France. David is cordially loathed by all present - the Farthing set - who tolerate him with hypocritical good cheer but, when a member of the family is found murdered, all suspicion turns to David.
Walton paints the scene evoking the period when country-house mysteries were at their height, and raises the expectations of a typical mystery among the social elite. Gradually the reader comes to discover that this is not in fact our universe; in this one, England's portion of WW II never really happened, because in 1941 the government, currently led by political conservatives nicknamed the Farthing Set, made peace with Hitler.
What distinguishes Walton’s Farthing is her gift for taking a familiar storyline and crossing it with an unexpected twist to present something new. Few books have moved me as much as Farthing; it's one of those novels I'll be returning to many, many times.

E. THE WOMAN UPSTAIRS by Claire Messud
How angry am I?" asks the narrator at the beginning of this novel. "You don't want to know. Nobody wants to know about that." It's a bravura opening that dares the reader to say: "Fine, then," and put the book to one side; Actually, I was a little put off by this opening, on the old-fashioned grounds that I would prefer to be shown, rather than told of, this woman's anger.
But after the explosive opening the book settles down, and we learn that our narrator is called Nora Marie Eldridge, that she is 42 and that until recently she taught third-grade children at a school in Massachusetts.
Into her life, five years before that angry opening, had come a family: Reza Shahid, a beautiful young boy of exotic background and faulty English, joins her class and Nora gets to know his family.
This is not, you intuit fairly quickly, a novel rich in incident. I think about four things happen in it, maybe five. When eventually we get to see why Nora was so angry, we discover it’s because an extraordinary betrayal that comes out of the blue. So this is, after all, a very grown-up novel, and it doesn't have one of those clichéd covers that are foisted on female authors these days.