Jem smiles, thinking of a night, exactly twelve years ago, when for a while life had felt far from simple.

As they try to find a way back to each other, back to what they once had, they both become momentarily distracted - but maybe it's not too late to recapture happily ever after. The twelfth anniversary of Ralph and Jem’s first kiss falls upon a cool, paper-dry Wednesday at the beginning of March. He’s never confessed his unwillingness to have a second child, and she’s filled with unspoken resentment at his lack of support. It's isn't necessary to read the first book Ralph's Party but for those that have I think this is a wonderful way to look at the progression of Ralph and Jem's life.

capable interweaving of older events into the contemporary narrative recording the ebbing of intimacy. For starters, what partner sods off to the US for a nice holiday, after his wife has literally only just had a baby? She worries about Ralph, they never talk anymore, but she is finding out who she is not attached to him. It is the unmistakable sound of her firstborn clattering down the stripped floorboarded stairs in her pink Lucite Barbie Princess slippers.

I felt like banging the two main characters’ heads together more than once, who were pretty frustrating, but it all makes sense in the end; It's chick lit- but readable chick lit. In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska. However, Lisa Jewell decided that 11 years later she would transport us back to Ralph and Jem's current relationship with her book entitled After The Party. Two people who were so right together are starting to drift apart And in the chaos of family life, Jem feels like she’s losing herself, while Ralph, stuck on the sidelines, feels like he’s lost his muse altogether.

It’s a long way round the houses back to reconciliation, and the route can seem frustratingly obstacle-strewn, but Jewell’s easy prose and storytelling ability make for a pleasant enough trip. My favourite characters were Scarlett and Blake(Jem and Ralphs children) A lot happened to Jem and Ralph throughout the book and it was enjoyable to see what they'd become after been together 11 years and two children later. I really enjoyed Ralph's Party by Lisa Jewell, to which After the Party is the sequel, so I was beyond excited when I found out that this book was being released and I would be able to see how life turned out for Jem and Ralph. In Ralph's Party we meet the residents of 31 Almanac Road, who consist of flatmates Ralph and Smith and their new neighbour who moves in, Jemimah.

I actually do like Lisa Jewell quite a lot, I think in the way that I really like the Whopper with Cheese, or the burgers I get at my local during the lunchtime special.It felt like I was following the characters around their home watching them act out the story which is when I know the author has grabbed me. I think I found it a struggle because I was comparing how I live my life with my husband to Jem and Ralph, and I found the story infuriating in so many ways! Lisa is a number one New York Times and Sunday Times author who has sold over ten million books worldwide and been published in over twenty-five languages. Really enjoyed her style of writing, natural flow so it was like reading a chic lit beach read but with depth to the characters so you slowly got drawn in.

And now she is here: separated, a single parent, inhabiting a desperate, heartbreaking place where she never expected to be. I don’t believe that Jem would have considered an abortion after what she went through to have children in the first place and neither do I believe Ralph would have been quite so understanding at being stood up. It is a good smile, a smile that has seen him through a ten-year career in B-list television presenting, but not quite a good enough smile to stop his killing that career stone dead after a terrible episode in the Australian jungle last autumn, in front of six million viewers. She feels it for just a moment, and then it passes, because for some strange reason things have not worked out how she thought they might during those long-ago days and now it’s just a dull echo of a moment in her life when fate, chance and destiny all came together and took her somewhere quite remarkable. She wrote and I read Ralphs party (unbelievably) 11 years ago and even back then her writing was great.Plus it was set in North London, where I grew up, and I really felt I was reading about people just like me.