Getting Rid of Matthew

So out of the thousands of titles he could have chosen to launch the book club, why did he select Getting Rid of Matthew as his first pick?

He explained: "I thought this was a cracking debut from Jane Fallon and I'm already looking forward to her second novel. It's not highbrow stuff by any means, but Fallon writes her way out of the chick-lit straitjacket in a very sassy way.

"She takes an interesting look at relationships in the 21st century and puts complacent men on trial. I think male and female readers will both get a kick out of this story."

ABOUT THE BOOK: Some reviewers would probably categorise this novel as chick-lit but publishers Penguin preferred to market it as chick-noir - that's chick lit with a dark side.

The premise of this funny book is not how to get a man, it's how to get rid of one, and as a man I was drawn to this story because I was curious to know what women are thinking when they are about to dump their partners.

This may be a book marketed mostly for women, but it's a compelling read about relationships so its appeal is broad, and I think male readers will get a kick out of it too.

Fallon uses the storytelling skills she learned as a TV drama producer to get readers rooting for the main character, Helen, early on. She's a single girl in her late 30s who lives on her own in a crummy flat in London and you can't help feeling sorry for her.

Her married lover Matthew comes across as a self-centred, arrogant philanderer, with few redeeming features apart from being rich and handsome, although Fallon ensures that other men in the novel don't get quite such a rough ride.

There's a fast pace to the narrative which kept me turning pages and plenty of plot twists.

But it's the author's easy-going, almost conversational style which I thought was the book's major selling point.

Here's a brief outline of the plot without giving too much away. Helen is approaching 40 and finds herself in a long-term affair with her boss Matthew, who is married and much older than her.

Helen demands more of his time, but initially he refuses to leave his wife Sophie and his two daughters and Helen is left frustrated and alone in her flat with just her TV dinners for company.

However, Helen is then stunned when Matthew finally decides to leave Sophie and moves into his flat - and it's at this point that Helen realises she no longer wants him . . .

At the start of the novel, Fallon switches the reader's viewpoint between Helen's life and Matthew's wife Sophie.

Then, after Matthew has left Sophie, Fallon keeps the plot twisting with Helen befriending Sophie, using a false identity. Finally, Helen ends up falling for Matthew's son.

CRITICISM: If I was going to make one small criticism, it would be that the story might have benefited from dropping one or two plot twists near the end to reduce the book's length by about 50 pages, but on the whole I found this a witty and engaging read.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JANE Fallon was born in north London, the youngest of five children of Irish-Catholic extraction.

Her parents ran a newsagents and the family of seven lived in the flat above. On days when it snowed and all the paper boys skived off, Jane would be sent out to do the paper rounds.

The shop had a small paperback book stand and Jane would write "novels", (eight handwritten pages, plus illustrations) and try to persuade her father to sell them. He refused, of course.

When she was a teenager Jane attended Slough Convent School, where the highlight was the day one of the elderly nuns died and the whole school was compelled to line up two by two, to be shut in a room with the body for two minutes.

Aged 14, she decided she wanted to be a lawyer. Consequently she arrived at University College London to study for a law degree and soon realised it was a grave error.

Two months later, having been told by the English and History of Art departments that they would give her a place but only for the following academic year, she switched to History because they said "start tomorrow". She got a third.

On leaving, she was unemployed for 18 months and trying to ignore the job advertisements which her father used to cut out of the paper and send to her, when one arrived which was for a Girl Friday in a Theatrical and Literary Agency. She got the job.

She then worked for several years as a script editor before ending up as the series script editor at EastEnders. Later she met Tony Garnett at World Productions, who was in talks with the BBC about a new show, This Life, about a group of young solicitors living in the capital.

Jane ended up producing both series, 32 episodes in all. She went on to produce Undercover Heart, a six-part crime drama for the BBC starring Daniela Nardini before developing and executive producing Teachers, still Channel 4's most successful ever drama.

One night in October 2004, when she couldn't sleep (she is a lifelong insomniac) she came up with the idea for Getting Rid Of Matthew.

At the same time, she realised that she never wanted to make another TV show again. So she didn't - she gave in her notice and wrote a novel instead.

Writing proved to be a joyous experience, enabling her to continue her new life style of spending all day in her pyjamas.