Jessica Stanley’s Consider Yourself Kissed opens with what could be a rom-com cliché: Coralie Bower, a young Australian in London, rescues a child from a pond in Victoria Park and promptly meets the girl’s charming father, Adam. Except this isn’t really a rom-com at all. Over the following decade, Stanley dissects the relationship between Coralie and Adam with scalpel-like precision, revealing how the gloss of a “meet-cute” corrodes—or maybe just grows more layered and complex, and perhaps takes more work—when it collides with ambition, in-laws, and the everyday grind.

This is a novel grounded the novel felt in the modern world. The background hum of Brexit, covid, and the endless parade of prime ministers keeps the book firmly tied to its time. For me, working in medicine, where careers tend to advance by steady increments rather than sudden leaps, it was a reminder of how different the pathway can be for other people. As a journalist, Adam’s professional success relies on pouncing at exactly the right moment, usually to the detriment of everything else. Stanley makes painfully clear how disruptive that opportunism can be, not just for him but for the people who happen to love him… and all with no guarantee of the leap being worthwhile in the end.

Coralie’s slow erosion into invisibility is convincingly drawn. Adam’s career needs always seem to trump her own ambitions, and while she reflects wryly on it, Stanley never lets the humour disguise the sting. The family entanglements are especially well done: the in-laws provide some of the sharpest comedy in the book, even while reminding us that ‘family’ is rarely a neutral force in relationships.

The writing itself is witty, sharp, and attentive to the little things — the contents of a child’s backpack, the oddities of a Hackney terrace house, the coded silences of a dinner with relatives. Stanley has a very good eye for often unnoticed domestic details.

This isn’t glossy escapism, nor is it political satire. It’s a novel about the messy way people actually live: the compromises, the small betrayals, the laugh-out-loud absurdities of family life, all set against the backdrop of a country lurching from one crisis to the next. I thought it was excellent: truthful without being joyless, and funny without being frivolous.

I’d recommend it.