In the Wee Small Hours

Book excerpt: Life just keeps getting more complicated for Annie Baker. Her sister Lizzie's pregnant and wants Annie to be her birth-partner - she's planning an active labour, in water, with lots of candles and music. Her partner Matt isn't too sure, although he's bought some new swimming trunks just in case. Annie's friend Leila has got a new man, Tor, and she's getting heavily into yoga, while Kate from the village has somehow ended up having an affair with her own ex-husband. And as for the men in Annie's own life, it just gets worse. Her seven-year-old son Charlie is now officially Pagan, and desperate for his own pet pheasant. Boss Barney is building a bit of a reputation for TV commercials involving stunts, so if she's not lurching around the North Sea in a trawler, she's stuck up a crane. Then there's Uncle Monty to keep an eye on, a retired mole-catcher who collects bric-a-brac. He's eighty-three and a few sandwiches short of a picnic, and has just threatened the Meals on Wheels lady with a shotgun and refuses to leave the farm where he's lived all his life. And as if all that wasn't difficult enough, Mack comes back from New York, just when Annie was beginning to think she might be able to cope without him ... For everyone who fell in love with Annie Baker and her Only Boy for Me, here's what happened next. And for anyone who's ever wondered how to combine motherhood, the country life and a career in town, and why pheasants make that weird clicking noise, this is essential reading.