Deborah Moggach Books in Order

Three very different sisters, dutiful Claire, restless Laura and watchful Holly, come of age under the same roof. Moggach turns sibling rivalry, first love and the pull of leaving home into a sharp, tender family story.

Kate Cooper is trying hard to be the perfect wife and mother when she meets Sam, the funny aspiring novelist next door. Over one hot summer, desire, marriage and neighboring lives begin to slide dangerously out of place.

In London, abandoned editor Claudia, cosmetics rep Steve, his drifting wife June and a secretive librarian become tangled together. What starts as loneliness and curiosity builds toward an affair, and one seemingly small meeting changes several lives.

Christine and Donald Manley arrive in Karachi hoping for a fresh start, only to be pulled into a web of expats, locals and clashing expectations. It is a funny, uneasy novel about marriage, desire and East-West misunderstandings.

A girl growing up on a pig farm near Heathrow slowly realizes that the love shaping her life is dangerously warped. One of Moggach's darkest novels, it is a stark coming-of-age story about abuse, shame and survival.

Viv agrees to have a baby for her sister Ann, hoping to ease a private heartbreak. But when the arrangement involves Ann's husband and real feelings start to surface, love, loyalty and motherhood become painfully entangled.

Thrown out by his wife, coach driver Desmond decides on a reckless new mission: finding the son he has never met. His road trip becomes a sad, funny search for purpose, masculinity and whatever family he still has left.

Marianne falls hard for Salim and walks into a marriage shaped by love, mistrust and deep cultural difference. When he takes their children back to Pakistan, her personal crisis becomes a desperate fight to get them home.

Struggling actress Jules lands the job of standing in for glamorous star Lila Dune, and the closeness starts to unsettle her. Moggach turns showbusiness envy and blurred identity into a tense, slippery psychological thriller.

Buffy, a fading actor with three ex-wives and a loyal dog, thinks love might still rescue him. Then Celeste begins digging through his former marriages and family secrets, and his chaotic romantic life gets even messier.

When seventeen-year-old Hannah is kidnapped, her wealthy family scrambles to meet the ransom demand. Her return is only the start, as guilt, money and buried tensions tear through the household and change everyone involved.

After a heart attack, builder Gordon Hammond leaves his wife of forty-five years for a younger nurse. The shock sends his wife Dorothy crashing into the lives of their daughters, and the whole family begins to come apart.

In seventeenth-century Amsterdam, merchant Cornelis commissions a portrait of his young wife Sophia, with dangerous results. As Sophia and the painter fall in love, desire and greed collide against the frenzy of the tulip boom.

Natalie is bright, bored and stuck in a dead-end accounts job when an easy fraud seems to offer a way out. Her gamble spirals into damage she never meant to cause, in a sharp story about greed and consequence.

A group of older Britons head to Bangalore after an entrepreneur offers an affordable retirement hotel in India. Moggach mixes comedy and culture clash with a sharper look at money, mortality and the chance to begin again.

In 1916, Eithne Clay runs a shabby South London boarding house with her son Ralph and their maid Winnie. War, desire and class tension close in when a local butcher enters their lives and old secrets start to stir.

Retired actor Buffy escapes to rural Wales and tries to save his run-down bed-and-breakfast with Courses for Divorces. The guests arrive bruised, needy and funny, turning the hotel into a comic refuge for the recently heartbroken.

Petra falls in love with her best friend's husband just as other women, from Texas to China to West Africa, are hiding troubles of their own. Moggach braids romance, betrayal and global intrigue into a restless, wide-ranging drama.

James needs full-time help, so his children hire Mandy, who quickly becomes indispensable to the old man. As Mandy draws closer and family stories shift, Phoebe and Robert begin to suspect that something is badly off.

After her husband leaves, lonely Pru discovers an odd thrill in turning up at strangers' funerals. What begins as a desperate plan to meet grieving widowers becomes a darkly funny story about loneliness, reinvention and risk.

This volume gathers stories from Smile and Changing Babies, along with pieces not previously collected in book form. It shows Moggach at shorter length, funny, rueful and sharply observant about love, family and the awkwardness of being human.