Sue is a 45-year-old GP, trying hard to marry work and family life while coping with the symptoms of her encroaching menopause. Her daughter Frankie, is just 14, beautiful and fun, but also at the age of swift change when teenagers can be at their least attractive, focused only on clothes, friends and boys.

As Sue remembers all the agonies and ecstasies of her own teenage years , Frankie is both excited and aghast at hers - and can't decide whether her mother is to be her enemy or her best friend. And meanwhile, Sue's husband Matthew is exhibiting his own signs of mid-life crisis, buying a motor bike and flirting with Frankie's friends. Poor Frankie is stuck between a mother who tries desperately to bond with her in the changing rooms of Top Shop, and her father, who will insist of being his own version of a hip young man. And then Sue discovers she's pregnant...

Told in the form of e mails from Sue to her sister, and the inimitable voice of Frankie in her diary, this is a lovely, wry novel which looks, with a refreshing twist, at life at its most challenging stages.