Getting It Right

Book excerpt: A London hairdresser’s life begins to change dramatically when he meets two very different women at a party in this delightful social comedy. Thirty-one-year-old Gavin Lamb is a shy hairdresser in London’s West End. Self-educated, he likes Mozart and can quote Tolstoy, but being something of a late bloomer, he still lives at home with his parents. Although he’s a master of the styling chair, he simply can’t work out how to be around women—not least his own mother. And the misguided efforts of his best friend, Harry King, don’t do much to assuage Gavin’s unfulfilled dreams of love. One night, he reluctantly attends a party where the hostess, Joan, is a grotesque vision in an orange wig and silver lamé. Joan is rich and married, and Gavin soon finds himself opening up to her. That same night, he meets Minerva Munday, who’s taking a nap on one of the guest beds. Minerva crashed the party and claims to hail from a royal bloodline. Both Joan and Minerva—polar opposites—will transform Gavin’s life in ways a lot more exciting than his nightly fantasies. But true love continues to elude him. Will he ever get it right? The bestselling author of the Cazalet Chronicles has written a witty and perceptive comic novel that went on to win the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year Award and inspire the 1989 film starring Jesse Birdsall, Jane Horrocks, and Helena Bonham Carter. A man looking for love in all the wrong places, Gavin may come to realize his soul mate has been in front of him all along.