Why can't more books be this funny, well-written and wise? I, who read at every available moment, and have a stack of good books waiting to be read, actually savored Mrs Fytton's Country Life twice. Please, please read this book if you need a fine laugh. Read it twice, in fact.

Mavis Cheek is to "women's fiction" (for lack of a better term) what Janet Evanovich is to mystery. This is one of the wittiest, brightest, funniest books I have read in a long, long time.

With quiet, droll but absolutely side-splitting humor, Cheeks, a shining star if there ever was one, tells the tired old cliched story of a first wife whose husband has left her for a younger, blonder, bimbette. And after all those years of devotion, too! Before you groan aloud and stop reading this review, believe me when I tell you that this is NOT the ordinary tale!

Angela Fytton, the spurned wife, is not one to take rejection quietly, and is not above casting aspersions on her (ex)-husbands er...manly equipment to wifey number two. Angela embarks on a diabolical plan to get her husband back. Part 1: Buy a huge, rambling house in the country that doubles as historic artifact. Start making one's own honey and talking to the hens (whom she threatens with coq au vin recipes if they don't behave). Part 2: Send one's obnoxious teenaged children (boy and girl) to live with Daddy and Bimbette and New Baby Brother. Part 3: Well...you have to read the book.

Does Angela get her husband back? Does Binnie the Bimbette (yes, Binnie) survive her predecessor's truly outrageous onslaught? Will the baby survive his teenaged siblings? Will Ian the ex-husband survive both wife number one and wife number two without resorting to bondage (one of the shortest but funniest paragraphs I have yet to read)?

Read it and find out...and rejoice that there is a wildly funny British wit on the loose! I was thrilled to find that Cheek has written [other] novels, and plan to investigate her other books as soon as possible.

I travel annually to the U.K with my husband (he is British i am American) and I often go to the book shops and buy a suitcase full of books to take home. Mrs. Fytton's is the last of the run from my last trip and it is a fine read! Mrs. Fytton the first spends her early days as the queen of the household mother, business woman, wife, interior decorator, bon vivant a veritable whirlwind of activity. Just a little Martha stewart crossed with a dose of Delia Smith and just a dash of Erica jong. By keeping up the smooth external veneer of a woman firmly in love with the idea of woman's liberation whilst secretly harboring a desire to please her man at all costs she loses her husband to a "younger blonder model". For revenge she leaves London, dumps her two teenage children off with her ex, his new wife and their new child and moves lock stock and pickling jar to the country to become a domestic goddess and win back the heart of her former husband. I have found myself on numerous occassions chuckling out loud on my commute on the train at the eccentricities of Mrs Fytton's neighbours. I love Mavis' style and will look for one of her other novels to read in the future.

I never read anything by Mavis Cheek, but I saw this and thought, "what a cute little summer read this ought to be." This book is alot more that just a May/December romance... it's a story about a woman who is emotionally, sexually and morally conflicted, which I believe all persons can relate to at some point in their lives. It's not just about an affair, it's also about sibling rivalry that can be so cruel it can manifest itself into adulthood realtionships and decisions. Dilys, the main character, really learned an enormous amount about herself and the people that are most important in her life, which often, gets completely overlooked due to the trials of everyday living.

This book had me howling out loud one minute and quietly crying with recognition the next. The heroine is indeed heroic and quite how anyone would be able to manage the duplicitous behaviour she exhibited is beyond me, but I loved it!
I usually read much darker works than this but Mavis Cheek brought a ray of sunshine into my life and I am so pleased to have found her. More power to her elbow.

Dilys Holmes has survived a difficult childhood and dysfunctional family and has been happily (if not ecstatically) married for many years. Now she is about to throw it all over for a mad infatuation with Matthew, a younger man with piercing blue eyes. Living a double life with two men is not easy, but Dilys proves surprisingly adept as her life hurtles toward disaster.

That is the basic plot, complicated by layers of family conflict and the surprising revelations of her "difficult" elderly aunt Eliza, who turns up with her own tales of adulterous intrigue, and becomes Dilys' co-conspirator. So how does it turn out? Will Dilys leave Francis and all she holds dear to run off with Matthew? Will she come to her senses? You will just have to read it and see.

The book is extremely well written. The bright, brassy Brit-speak added another dimension of entertainment for me; the characters were utterly engaging; the tension mounted to excruciating levels, and the surprise ending was--well--just right. I recommend this one highly. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber

An avid Cheek fan, I found this book thin in plot, and was disappointed the dog did not play a bigger role. On the other hand, it does capture in her inimitably hilarious way the life of a newly single mother with a self-absorbed ex-husband. And the episodes with the neighbor's rabbit were Cheek at her best. Read this, but not as your first exposure to this wonderful British novelist and brilliant comic writer who deserves wider exposure in the United States.