Ruby Matthews Books in Order

Ruby Matthews is one of Nicola May's earliest recurring heroines, and the two books in this sequence show how good she is at writing women who are funny, wounded and still game enough to lurch into another bad idea. The series starts with Working It Out, where Ruby loses her job and decides on a bold plan, twelve jobs in twelve months until she finds the one she really wants. It is a great setup for a story that keeps moving.

That plan takes Ruby all over the place, from London workplaces to richer, stranger corners of other people's lives. She nannies in the South of France, works in a Harley Street clinic, waits tables in Soho and meets a cast of eccentrics along the way. The pleasure of the book is partly in watching Ruby try on different versions of adulthood, and partly in seeing how work, money, confidence and romance all get tangled together.

Ruby is not a polished, always-right heroine. She is impulsive, sharp, hopeful, bruised and often making things harder for herself. That makes her easy to root for. Even when the situations are broad and funny, the emotional question underneath is serious, what kind of life will actually make her happy, and what is she willing to change to get there?

Ruby can be messy in the best way.

The follow-up, later republished as Let Love Win, takes Ruby into sadder territory. She is dealing with bereavement, trying to start over, and discovering that grief does not move in a neat straight line. Her connection with author Michael Bell brings romance back into the picture, but the book also gives plenty of space to friendship, family complications and the Bow Wow Club support group, where wounded people meet one another with humour, awkwardness and real need.

What makes the Ruby Matthews books stand out is the mix of candour and comic timing. Nicola May is interested in sex, jobs, money trouble, loss and the ridiculous things people do when they are lonely or scared. These books are about reinvention, but they never pretend reinvention is tidy. If you want stories that feel a little brasher and more urban than the later coastal series, but still have that same belief in second chances, this is where to start.