Mother, writer, worker, sister, friend, citizen, daughter, wife. If she could be one, perhaps she could manage. Trying to be all, she found she was none.
Coralie has grown up in Australia but needs to escape some ghosts there. At twenty-nine, adrift in London, she meets witty, sexy, generous Adam—and his charming four-year-old daughter. Falling in love is fun, romantic and reassuring. And then?
Coralie yearns for children of her own, and to become a writer. Gradually, with Adam, who has a blossoming career as a political commentator, she builds the home and family she’s longed for.
But her trips back to Australia change her perspective. Ten years on, she realises something important is missing: herself. When she reaches breaking point, the results surprise everyone.
In this unforgettable story about what ‘happily ever after’ might truly mean, Jessica Stanley writes about life as we live it. Against the backdrop of a turbulent decade in politics, she reveals how our intimate dramas can get tangled up with the public events of our times.
An honest, entertaining and intelligent portrait of a woman in love, Consider Yourself Kissed will capture your heart.
andConsider Yourself Kissed
‘Consider Yourself Kissed is a smart literary love story and an absorbing family drama. Jessica Stanley follows her characters over the years as they make their way in the private, intricate, fragile world they create for themselves, and in the always-changing larger world. This is a deeply appealing and winning novel.’
‘Consider Yourself Kissed is an incisive story about the complicated task of loving and being loved. There’s so much in this smart book – about class and identity, family and work. Stanley’s idiosyncratic characters are the heartbeat of this novel. I could see them, full-bodied, jumping out of the page, interesting and strange and, by the end, I missed them all.’
‘Consider Yourself Kissed is a tender, layered novel and one of the sharpest portrayals of marriage and motherhood I’ve ever read. It’s also warm and clever and funny. I completely inhaled it. As with all my favourite novels, I wished I could read it forever.’
‘Jessica Stanley captures all the quiet ecstasy and devastation of being a lover, a mother, a woman in the world, and wondering what is left over for yourself. In Coralie’s endless labour to do everything right and try to write, I felt achingly seen. I want to hand this gorgeous book to every mum I know with a hug.’
‘I absolutely raced through this novel which I found so smart, funny and true to life. One of those books you’ll want to give all your friends once you’ve finished.’
‘The platonic ideal of reading experiences!…So funny, so smart and deliciously well observed! A real treat.’
‘Fabulous…It’s clever, joyful, familiar and awkward, and so funny.’
‘Sweet and tender.’
‘I loved it, I loved them, I loved the Cazaletty interior details, I loved the social politics, I loved the actual politics, I loved the time span, I loved how complicated everyone was. I already know I will read it again…A beautiful romcom for grown-ups.’
‘A book about falling in love to fall in love with—Consider Yourself Kissed is a beautifully observed, charming, intelligent, very funny novel full of heart and warmth and life. Jessica Stanley is a rare and special talent.’
‘Set over ten years, this wonderful, sweeping novel doesn’t just make the political personal, but the personal political. It shows us how life is a series of negotiations and situations over which you have little control, but that loving and being loved is central. Beautiful and life affirming.’
‘Consider me smitten.’
‘Immersive, truly funny, brilliantly smart, and full of lovable characters, Consider Yourself Kissed is a joy. In her novel spanning ten years of one woman’s life, Jessica Stanley balances domesticity and politics, contemporary British history and the pursuit of love – and she makes it all seem effortless. I cried when I read the last page, simply because I was bereft that it was over.’
‘Beautifully written, wise, funny, moving. Deftly fuses the personal and the political. A proper grown-up love story.’
‘Oh, how I loved and empathised with Coralie! Consider Yourself Kissed is funny, tender, authentic and incredibly moving.’
‘Warm, funny, clever and real, Consider Yourself Kissed is at once a charming romance, a social history and a profoundly authentic study of the complex work of love. A wonderful novel.’
‘A beautiful, harrowing, wild ride through everyday life, Consider Yourself Kissed is a love song to women everywhere.’
‘Utterly brilliant—so astonishingly clever, but with a core of love. It’s generous, it’s hopeful, it’s one of the very best grown-up love stories I have ever read. And wears its smartness so lightly, but it captures the strangeness of the past few years perfectly. I could not have adored it more.’
‘Jessica Stanley’s principal subject is romance, which she renders—in all its mess and glory—masterfully. But the real delight in Consider Yourself Kissed is how the novel confidently thinks about love more broadly: the feeling we can have for family, for work, for art and books and our homes and our friends, for the very world around us. It is an exhilarating read, a marvel of a book.’
‘Funny, tender, intelligent, and political, Consider Yourself Kissed finds the beauty and ecstasies in the life of a woman around marriage, motherhood and family, all while dissecting its complications and heartbreaks. I felt embraced in its gentle humor, and then gut punched by its deep emotion and perceptiveness. By the end I was so invested in the story that I became Coralie!’
‘I loved it. I was grinning like an idiot for the first forty pages, and crying for the next forty…It links emotional and political events so brilliantly and is incredibly funny too.’
‘An extremely intelligent, present and excellently written marvel of a book that I will never stop thinking about.’
