Adultery in Cape Cot

The generation of female journalists writing novels about the plight of the single career woman is growing older, and, since most of the story lines ended in the well-worn tradition of happily ever after,

Now comes Sabine Durrant, Guardian journalist, cohabiting partner and mother of two, with this first novel, a satire about the sacrifices, resentments and horrors involved in giving up the day job to bring up the kids.

Maggie Jones is 36 and lives with Jake and their two boys, a baby and a toddler, in Chestnut Drive, Morton Park, which locals refer to as "Cape Cot", "known to have the highest concentration of under-fives in Europe". Maggie and Jake have been together since they were at school. They are not married and Jake works long hours in his advertising agency, while Maggie stays home performing the relentless routines of childcare.

One day she bumps into another old school friend, Claire. She was the glamorous one in their class, the one who was "certainly the first, and probably the last, to go all the way behind Pizza Hut in Morton High Street". She's still looking fabulous: thin, fashionably dressed, well-slept. Single, in other words. Both girls feel more than a twitch of envy for the other, but none the less their friendship is reignited.

So when Jake starts spending even more time "at late meetings", working weekends abroad and behaving strangely around Claire, Maggie gets suspicious. When she sees them in a restaurant she concludes an affair must be underway. In retaliation she begins her own, with the local handyman, an Australian ginger-eyed blond, who, she confides to a friend, "has great muscles. You could see them under his T-shirt, they sort of rippled sweatily." But it fails to bring her any sense of triumph, only guilt and more misery. You see, she still loves her man. Almost all Maggie's other friends are, inevitably, mums too: single mothers, overworked GP mothers, expectant mothers, married mothers. It is a world of unremitting motherhood, of birthing pools and prenatal yoga, of Duplo and Calpol, of Fireman Sam and Teletubbies, of double buggies, cradlecap, nits, piles and poo. It's also a world where people eat at Le Caprice, make Nigella's almond and orange blossom cake and order clothes from the Toast mail-order catalogue. These observations about the lives of urban middle-class, middle-aged families are sharp and sometimes funny; her conclusions about resentment and unutterable boredom incontrovertible. But those of us who still are living through, or who have finally emerged from, those sleep-deprived Weetabix-splattered years would do almost anything not to be reminded of them. Funnily enough, Maggie's own favourite escapist reading is ... Georgette Heyer.