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|title=Unfaithfully Yours

|author=Nigel Williams

|publisher=Corsair

|date=July 2013

|summary=A social drama comedy with edge – this book of letters is definitely entertaining.

}}

When Nigel Williams first really burst on to the best-seller list, a couple of decades ago, it was with a book set in Wimbledon that really quite tickled a younger me – and my mother. But then he produced two more in the same series, and we soon decided he was a bit of a one-trick pony, and could never be sure how much of the trilogy we'd read, or be too eager to read more. Flash forward, and Williams has certainly branched out – his setting this time is Putney. Wimbledon Common is now Putney Heath, and so on. But here he provides an epistolatory novel – and if there's one kind of novel to make me prick up my ears it is one built from letters. It is the blatant two-and-fro timing of the narrative, and the succinctness that characters are formed with, that strike me as obvious benefits of such a book – and Unfaithfully Yours has those and many more.

Well, obviously not, in this instance, for it is the darkness that prevails in this book in the end. The death of the eighth member of the group is greeted as trivial by many of our narrators, but it’s not the only serious, edgy note this novel manages to contain. We are, after all, joking about infidelity, missed opportunities perhaps, horrendous middle-class characters definitely. I can see the balance between light and shade being the crux upon which your opinion of this book hangs – certainly, for me, the serious, blacker sections were too black to contain comedy, and were just too sincerely nasty to be seen as humorous.

I must thank the publishers for my review copy.

{{amazontext|amazon=1472106741}}