Watermelon, published in 1995, the same year she got married. My usual reaction would have been to back away and hope I never ran into her, but I was in this new place.' The result was 'It was one of those 'Oh my God' moments. Unfortunately, editor Kate Cruise O'Brien wanted to see it. When she got out she packaged her stories off to the Irish publisher Poolbeg with a letter falsely claiming she was working on a novel. She didn't stop drinking at first, but she did start writing, completing five stories in the next few months before she returned to Ireland after a suicide attempt and finally went into rehab. 'I thought, I would like to do that,' she recalls. She was a suicidally unhappy single 29-year-old stuck in a dead-end London admin job and increasingly forgoing heavy social drinking for the convenience of private binges when she read a short story that had won a writing contest in a magazine. But is she as on her own as she really believes?'A warm and hilarious page turner' Good Housekeeping'Reading a novel by Marian Keyes is like sitting at the kitchen table with your nicest, most confiding friend.Besides, happy endings do happen after all, the cozily married, best-selling, 42-year-old author is living one herself. So when James slips back into her life, desperate to put things right, Claire doesn't know whether to take a chance on a past she'd feared she'd lost for ever or face an uncertain future on her own. While Anna is too busy having out-of-her-head experiences. Helen wants to share the new toy (she means baby Kate).

And runs home to Mum and Dad.But while her parents are sympathetic, Claire's younger sisters are less so. So she follows the instincts of all self-respecting adults in tricky situations. 'On the day she gives birth to her first child, Claire Walsh's husband James tells her he's been having an affair and now's the right time to leave her.Right for who exactly? Exhausted, tearful and tiny bit furious, Claire can't think what to do.

'Failed relationships can be described as so much wasted makeup. Watermelon, Marian Keyes's very first novel, tells the extremely funny and wonderfully touching tale of a woman who thought she had it all - until the day she discovers that it's all gone.

Watermelon marian keyes review