Single mum seeks sex

India Knight has done it again. Don't You Want Me? is, if anything, better than its predecessor, My Life on a Plate, and miles funnier and ruder than anything else of its kind. While her chick-lit competitors are still floundering about with heroines looking for Mr Right, or worrying if Mr Right is actually Mr Wrong, Knight has leapfrogged over the lot of them in her creation of Stella. At 38, Stella has already sloughed off her yearnings for Marriage and Children, having divorced a husband and produced a daughter by another man, from whom she has also parted. What's more, they're all still friends. No, Stella's problem is she's not getting any sex, and it's her quest for it, together with her life as the richish single mum of a toddler called Honey, that drives the story.

Stella's choices for coitus are not great: first there's Frank, her lodger, with whom she shares her gorgeous Primrose Hill home. "On paper, yes, foxy in the extreme. On paper, I'd read about him and shout 'Go on my son' to myself. On paper, I'd be the one having sex with him ... But this isn't paper, and while all of the above are true, there is one insurmountable problem." Frank is ginger. "He makes the average carrot look pretty peaky." We know how she feels.

Then there's Dr Cooper, a plastic surgeon to whom she is introduced at a dinner party. "His skin is tight, polished, absolutely porelessly clear in a way that you don't see much in men of his age, which is roughly late forties-ish at a guess (flattering lighting in here, though)." They sit next to each other at dinner, she drinks and flirts, he responds by "performing cunnilingus on a fig". It's an absurd scene, and one of the funniest, only to be followed by another, when Dr Cooper takes her back to his "shag pad", calls her "Hot Lady" and plays Barry White. Think Roger Moore in his final, sad performance as James Bond. Later, Stella finds out that he is well over 60.

The other possibles include the nextdoor neighbour and an Ali G look-and-sound-alike called MC Yungsta, who DJs, but is really called Adrian and has "very piercing, greenish eyes".

Knight doesn't stint on the men's physical attributes, yet she is careful to leave us to imagine for ourselves Stella's own size and appearance. And it's not as if she can't do description. There are clothes tenderly detailed, interiors beautifully sketched, heady scents, mostly by Guerlain, and, of course, food. Plenty of that. Stella, who is half-French, loves her grub, as Frank observes: "The way to your heart is through your stomach."

She is merciless, too, about how grotesquely we overcoddle and indulge our children nowadays. "Why are certain kinds of middle-class people so weirdly keen on dirt?" Stella asks. She takes Honey to the playgroup from Hell, called Happy Bunnies, observing: "They're a dull-looking lot, and then there's the person directly to my left. She is an elephantine woman, wearing - can this be possible in 2001? - a tightly belted, pastel-blue jumpsuit. Her toenails are gnarled and filthy. One enormous, veiny breast is out, being suckled voraciously by a malevolent-looking child with avian eyes. He must be at least four years old. Christ." Sound familiar?

If that doesn't, what can happen when your exes get together and compare notes just might. Her portrayal of three men screeching and oinking and laughing together is toe-curlingly painful. You sense that she has drawn closely from her own experiences and feelings, and while so often that makes for cliché, here that's precisely what makes it work. She is a genius at truffling out the comic moments in everyday life and at relaying smutty dialogue in a way that's hilarious rather than offensive. Even being able to guess at the start how the story will end doesn't detract from the enjoyment. Oh India, you Hot Lady.