Jonathan Cape, London, 2006. Spine lightly creased, otherwise good secondhand condition.

When we first met Paula Spencer - in THE WOMAN WHO WALKED INTO DOORS - she was thirty-nine, recently widowed, an alcoholic struggling to hold her family together.

PAULA SPENCER begins on the eve of Paula's forty-eighth birthday. She hasn't had a drink for four months and five days. Her youngest children, Jack and Leanne, are still living with her. They're grand kids, but she worries about Leanne.

Paula still works as a cleaner, but all the others doing the job now seem to come from Eastern Europe, and the checkout girls in the supermarket are Nigerian. You can get a cappuccino in the caf‚, and her sister Carmel is thinking of buying a holiday home in Bulgaria. Paula's got four grandchildren now; two of them are called Marcus and Sapphire.