HALLELUJAH!!! It’s been a fair while since I gave a book five stars and I was beginning to think I’d gotten too picky and would be dishing out four star’s forever... then along came this gem of a book. Expectation has been marketed as a Sally Rooney style novel. Think Normal People but with more grown-up female friendships (motherhood, careers and marriage). And I can totally see the similarities but in my opinion Expectation is better. It has the best bits of Rooney’s writing (honesty, realness and conversation that sparkles) but also so much more. It has fully-shaped and believable characters and a plot that just shimmers with real-life drama throughout. The lives of Hannah, Cate and Lissa are portrayed with such incredible description that some paragraphs left me reading them again and again as I let the beauty and power of them sink in. This was one bit in particular that spoke to me: ‘She watches the children look at the stones and their parents, more often than not hurrying back to them, grasping them by the wrist and hauling them to their feet. If she had a child, she thinks, she would not rush and pull, she would get down on the earth, she would get down beside them and look at the stones.’ Reading this as a mother definitely added to the experience but I would also say this book is for anyone who has experienced the messiness of life and likes reading about it in a raw and unfiltered way. I devoured this in very few sittings and I found it hard to leave the world of Cate, Hannah and Lissa behind. It will be interesting to see what Anna Hope produces next... I for one will be waiting in line to get my hands on it!

Thanks to Transworld and NetGalley for an advance e-copy of this title. I really enjoyed ‘Expectation’. It’s extremely atmospheric and Hope constructs characters and settings with wonderful depth. She is a writer that makes you feel as if you’re within the book - next to the characters, experiencing everything alongside them. (It probably helps that I live in London, where the majority of the book is set.) I found all of the characters and the plots surrounding them interesting, and didn’t get them confused, as I thought I would. It’s a brilliant exploration of female friendship, and will be extremely relatable to a lot of women. I’m excited to see more contemporary fiction from Anna Hope.

Every so often, and never really often enough, I read a book that blows my mind. A book that takes my breath away and that leaves me feeling a little bit bitter towards the author because why can I not do words like that. I feel like that about Expectation by Anna Hope, which I was lucky enough to be sent a proof copy of, and which I read last week. Expectation follows the life of three young women, Hannah, Cate and Lissa, best friends with their lives ahead of them, lives heavy with the exciting weight of expectation. 10 years on, in their 30's (an age close to the age I am now) things are less bright because life rarely goes in the direction we expect it too and each of them, dissatisfied with their own lot, looks greedily at the life of the others. It's a book about the power of friendship, how it can build you and break you and build you again; a book about growing up, but growing up not from teenager to adult but rather growing up into the person you are, from 20-something to 30-something to 40-something; a book about navigating your way through your own, sometimes choppy-watered, life and it is spectacular. I loved in part because it felt like a book about me. I said this last year when I read Dolly Alderton's Everything I Know About Love - that it felt like it had reached into me and laid bare all that I was. This book made me feel something similar. I, too, had a friendship group of 3 throughout much of my twenties, two girls (I still struggle to describe us as 'women') with whom I grew closer and then apart from and then oh so gradually closer again, girls who I am still friends with now even though, like Hannah and Cate and Lissa, those friendships do not look the same as they did fifteen years ago. Friends who, despite loving the bones of, I sometimes can't help but compare myself to. I've watched them live their lives and hungered sometimes for what they had and I've laughed and cried and drunk more bottles of wine than I can count with both of them. Connected yet disconnected from one, attached by invisible elastic to the other and to read a book that explored that, the power of female friendship, of how it shifts and changes, how it can be both the best thing and the worst thing, I loved it. It felt authentic - I cared what happened to all of these characters because I have been all of these characters; each one of them felt whole and real and believable to me and whilst this was a book where nothing much happened outside of the every day I feel like it was what it was because of that: it was the mundane that drove it forward because the mundane is what we live isn't it, most of us? It was the mundanity that broke my heart reading this and the mundanity that mended it. The book moves through time and from perspective to perspective which sounds like a lot - we see these three in their mid-30's, their 20's, starting at university, in their 40's and it's a structure that kept me gripped. The jumps in time were never confusing, they blended seamlessly and the snapshots they gave were fascinating and gripping. I couldn't put this book down; when I was forced to I was desperate to get back to it, I was immersed, fully, in whatever year it happened to be at the time and never ever confused. Always, a little bit at the back of m mind, feeling keenly what Cate, Hannah, Lissa, felt; I keep coming back to that don't I, how much this book made me reflect on my own life. Anyhow, my point right this second is that yes, this book is fragmented, but it's like a patchwork quilt of a novel - little fragments of a bigger picture, taken apart and put carefully back together into something incredible and I can't even tell you how much I loved it. As for the writing. Perhaps you shouldn't get me started on how incredibly beautifully written this book is because I may never stop. I posted about it on my Instagram when I was about halfway through I think and I described it as poetic, which it is, and I said it reminded me somehow of Jon McGregor's writing in that it was soft and powerful, gentle and rough and so so emotive, it's lyrical and it's beautiful and it says so much without saying anything at all and so many times it gave me goosebumps. Haunting, that's the word, and one of those books that you don't want to stop reading but that you also want to savour, one of those books that I think everybody who reads it will see something different in. I finished it and immediately wanted to start reading it again. I challenge the rest of the year to give me something better than this.

I recently had the pleasure of meeting Anna Hope in London last month. We heard her talk about this new book and was lucky enough to chat with her in person and get my proof copy signed. I had previously read and loved The Ballroom so I had exceedingly high expectations for this book. I will be honest it took me about 100 pages before I fell in love with the book, but then I certainly did - just a shame it was quite late at night by the time I started reading the last 200 pages but fear not I was now so committed to the characters, especially Hannah that I could not put the book down until I had read the very last page. Very happy to recommend on to others.

Ann Hope bookends her lovely, empathetic novel with two sunny Saturday mornings, the first in 2004 when Hannah and Cate buy breakfast to share with Lissa at home and the second in 2018 when the three, now in their mid-forties, meet for a picnic. Each of the friends’ lives are followed in narrative threads which intertwine, interspersed with snapshots from their past filling in their stories. The result is a pleasingly immersive novel which is a clear-eyed testament to the value of enduring friendship while far from romanticising it. Hope has a good eye for character: Hannah, Cate and Lissa are all perceptively drawn with depth and care but Lissa’s mother Sarah, who castigates her daughter at one point for how little her generation have made of the advances achieved by ‘70s feminism, is particularly affectionately portrayed. A quick check of Hope’s acknowledgements touchingly reveals that her mother, like Sarah, was a Greenham Common veteran. This is such an enjoyable piece of fiction. Steering well clear of the saccharine, Hope rounds it off with a satisfying ending to a novel filled with wit, humanity and compassion.