‘Girls,’ said Django, and the pureness of his audible pain was not for himself, but for those he loved most on whom he was about to inflict it. ‘Girls.’ Carefully he put the tray down. He did not know in whose eyes he should look. So he looked at her. ‘Girls. This is your mother.’

Chick lit isn’t my usual genre, but I do dabble very occasionally, and I really enjoyed this – the story of three sisters, brought up by their uncle, whose love lives and career are all in slight disarray, then completely disrupted by the reappearance of their long-vanished mother. North has a very credible and compassionate way of getting into people’s heads. Nobody is an angel, nobody is completely evil either. And the ending is not a completely happy one, but does bring some resolution, and sometimes that’s all you can ask. Apparently North had written a novel about each of the three sisters previously; I’ll keep an eye out for those.