Joseph Connolly's Summer Things is the ultimate clever English farce. Genteel Chanel-wearing Elizabeth loves nothing better than orchestrating the lives of her friends and neighbours and is given ample opportunity to do so when she goes on holiday to a smart English seaside resort with her man-mad sister Melody and her neighbours, Brian (DIY fanatic and obsessive collector of manhole covers) and clucky, baby- crazy Dotty. Estate-agent-husband Howard has his own private reasons for wanting to stay at home, while seventeen-year-old daughter Katie is off to Chicago on an illicit vacation with an older man.

In Summer Things Connolly blends to perfection that sort of smutty, innuendo-driven humour that the British are so good at with sharp social satire, exposing the lies frequently embedded in the very foundations of cosy middle-class married life and laying bare the secret tragedies hiding within the rib-cages of even the most ludicrous of his characters. Within this captivating web of deception, lie some truly unexpected twists. --Anna Davis