Expectation: The most razor-sharp and heartbreaking novel of the year

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Educated, in touch with their wants and desires , their expectations are that life will meet them at their points of need. In the current day we find Cate living with a new husband and baby in Canterbury, struggling to cope and desperately rehashing memories of a past relationship. It's a disconnetion rather than a dissatisfaction, as though in their own way, the goals that all three chased have led them to a place that they feel lost in.

Set over the course of five days in 1920, WAKE weaves the stories of three women around the journey of the Unknown Soldier, from its excavation in Northern France to Armistice Day at Westminster Abbey. There's even a bit where Lissa brings up her abortion and dutifully bursts into tears, because heaven forbid that a woman terminate her pregnancy and not regret it later. Without spoilers I’ll just say that I found some of Lissa’s actions impossible to understand to the degree that it fractured the experience of reading the novel for me and I also struggled to see Cate as as fully fleshed out a character compared to the other two.Most of all, it explores that liminal space between expectation and reality, the place – full of dreams, desires and pain – in which we all live our lives. The characters are well-described and the situations that they find themselves in are convincingly portrayed and I would have liked to have learnt more about each of the women and also more about the supporting characters - particularly Lissa’s mother who seemed to have lived a full and interesting life; I also would have liked to have read a little more about some of the peripheral characters, such as the young woman Cate met at a playgroup who was in a same sex relationship and who helped Cate to see things in a different light.

Siin raamatus on kolme naise lugu just nendest ootustest ja sellest, mis siis tegelikult kõigest välja tuli. We expect so much from ourselves,and feel we owe the world so much that we don't actually stop and be kind to ourselves anymore. Cate’s childhood friend, Hannah, is the deputy director of a charity and married to a university lecturer, Nathan. She throws some half-hearted activism plot points into the mix, presumably to earn the title quote of 'what happened to the women we were supposed to become?

The author captures the cyclical devastation of infertility and the dissociative fog of having a newborn with equal sensitivity and skill. Expectation opens in 2004 and has the kind of structure that I find irresistible, exploring themes of friendship, motherhood, love and feminism through the lives of Hannah, Cate and Lissa who share a house together in their twenties. Hope's novel is being compared to Sally Rooney's award–winning 'Normal People', but I personally found this author’s lower-key writing style more accessible and her characters rather more believable.

Each of the characters resonated with me and I’m in awe of the way Anna Hope captures what it means to be a woman , right here, right now, with all the precision of a surgeon’s knife. This book is rich with emotional depth and beauty, it grapples several heart-breaking issues and slowly, subtly, draws the reader further and further into an exquisite story.Sie kennen sich aus Schul- und Studienzeiten, haben gemeinsam eine alte Villa in London bewohnt und früher viele Träume und Hoffnungen geteilt. Maybe it’s because I’m at the ‘pivotal’ stage in my life where the heroines of Expectation are at their most hopeful, alive with the hope of it all - and to comprehend the possibility that in ten years' time I might not be where I had hoped is devastating. The artist mother, a Greenham Common activist, who had brought up her daughter in such a haphazard way that the daughter has a chip on her shoulder she carries around until the inevitable reconciliation due to illness. Cate has the most potential of the three, but gets the least screen-time, and the most intriguing aspects of her past are barely explored.

The central question of the book, and actually the thing that most drew me in, was in the title Expectation, ‘what happens when we don’t fulfil our own expectations of ourselves? But this is the modern feminist fallacy-given the choice, the opportunity, why do we always feel like we are failing? That said (and off my soapbox), I found this an interesting and rather entertaining read and although I wouldn’t quite agree with the advertised hype (“Jaw droopingly good’; “Left me breathless” etc) this worked well for me as a down-time read and it is now being very much enjoyed by a friend.EDITOR'S CHOICE: I enjoyed this contemporary novel about the gulf between the expectation of how life will turn out and the reality. through competitiveness, envy, jealousy, transgression, guilt, genuine emotional intimacy, and love. They live a comfortable London life and yet for all her external successes, Hannah is desperately unhappy because of her inability to conceive despite repeated rounds of IVF.