A Friend of the Family: The addictive and emotionally satisfying page-turner that will have you hooked

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Their 40th wedding anniversary is coming up so dad plans a big surprise party and all the boys come home. I loved this book because it has everything: colourful and lovable characters, lots of intrigues, laughs, sorrows.

It is a great anytime read, but if anything a "great busy person read," because the chapters are short. I only read this because I have loved almost everything else I have read by Lisa Jewell (her thrillers). He does this thing where he holds their hands and looks deep into their eyes and they go all gooey inside and wind up spilling everything to him.I highly recommend A FRIEND OF THE FAMILY, I would encourage everyone to put this at the top of their summer reading list. Emotional familial relationships and enigmatic eccentric characters which show people are very much individuals but also part of the bigger picture that life throws us. Jewell's light style can be deceptive; her anatomisation of twenty and thirty-something urban relationships is at times uncomfortably keen .

I wonder whether after reading their stories you will also think that all 3 boys were spoilt too much by their parents or whether we just saw them at their lowest points of their lives. The book knits all these stories together and it leaves you with a warm feeling about being part of a family.The author does a great job describing the characters, so that you get a good rounded sense of each one and even wish you were a "friend of [their] family.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. It was an easy read and I felt quite sad after it ended because I liked the characters and wanted to know how their lives continued. Lisa Jewell transcends the British chick lit genre by creating complex characters with problems many readers can relate to. The previous Lisa Jewell books I've read were suspense thrillers, this was more a love triangle and it wasn't thrilling in any way.It's something a little bit different from the normal run of the mill with strong characters and an interesting story with a bit of a moral thrown in.

Then Tony realizes he doesn't really want Milly and that them doing anything would be a huge mistake. And it's Ned's ex girlfriend Monica's fault he chose to dump his long-term girlfriend Carly and move to Australia with her. He meets a girl on the job and they hit it off, but when Ned makes a move, she turns him down stating that he hasn't grown up yet. Sean is the middle child, a successful novelist with a "perfect" new girlfriend who throws him a curveball announcement he cannot deal with.The character for whom the book is titled appears so infrequently the first half of the book I kept wondering why he is even in the story. The only criticism I have of A FRIEND OF THE FAMILY, is that a bit of the information about pregnancy was slightly inaccurate (such as she states that the pregnant character was unable to take any medications, not even Tylenol or a cough lozenge). The three brothers are dysfunctional and spoiled, and the blame for their problems is shunted onto the women in their lives. Whilst we have a mysterious incomer to the family in the form of an unexpected lodger, the title of this one could mean any member of this family, are they actually looking out for one another or just playing it that way on the surface.