Days like these - Rebecca Tyrrel

Bright, funny and utterly compelling, Rebecca Tyrrel's voice is both refreshingly honest and deliciously self-deprecating.

Taken from her popular column in The Sunday Telegraph Magazine, this series of previously published pieces is at once funny, acerbic and infuriating.

Filled with a cast of characters and themes such as the author's husband Matthew Norman's medical neuroses; her son Louis's obsession with Dr Who; her own imaginary shrink who lives in the garden shed; Tim, the car dealer; and the 'we have no friends' syndrome, this is a novel that will make readers laugh out loud with a sense of self-recognition. Fans of the column will love to revisit, and new readers will delight in it.

'In this wonderful, deadpan, inventive selection from her pieces, we think we see a life which Tyrrel encourages us to believe is so banal, so hedged about with dullness and repetitive detail, so constrained by her husband's relentless refusals and demands, that our own lives simply have to be better by comparison . . . but of course, the real success is Rebecca Tyrrel. She isn't just clever and funny with an exquisite sense of the ludicrous; she is also reliable because she doesn't, except in an acceptable, comfortable way, make use of other people as she pursues her erratic and sharp-sighted way about her daily life'. Joanna Trollope, Sunday Telegraph