Olive: The acclaimed debut that’s getting everyone talking from the Sunday Times bestselling author

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It explores how female friendships ebb and flow as we age, and Gannon also delicately tackles postpartum depression and infidelity, struggling to connect your old life to your new and the natural jealousy that occurs among friends.

I really wanted this book to be a relatable account of a childfree character, a person who is independent, anxious, loyal and kind, like the synopsis says. Raised by Boomer parents to be independent, who know their own minds and have choices with how they live their lives, but the book also examines what happens when these choices don’t align with what their friends choose. Yes she's a little inconsiderate of her friends, and honestly it was difficult to read the interactions between Olive and Isla, given one doesn't want kids and one can't have kids. In a way, Olive’s hatefulness brings to mind the traditional portrayal of childfree women as bitter and miserable.Based on an essay Gannon wrote for The Pound Project last year, Sabotage is a 20,000-word investigation into self-sabotage and how to get out of our own way. Gannon is also the host of Ctrl Alt Delete, a careers-based podcast with more than five million downloads, featuring guests such as Ellen Page, Lena Dunham and Elizabeth Gilbert.

The narrative jumps to flashbacks and memories, a fantastic use of form to enhance the potency of the present day proceedings. The closest I have found have been eccentric spinsters and ambivalent parents, in a long line from Doris Lessing and DH Lawrence, Barbara Pym and Rachel Cusk.This book perfectly encapsulates how it feels like to be a women in your late twenties, and watching friends start to settle down/move towards different paths than they were previously on.

It's interesting going through that journey is realising that we can adapt, and sometimes we just have to let the old way of things go. In Amina Cain’s Indelicacy, a woman objects to her husband’s expectation that they will someday have children.Perhaps it is kindersucht we feel when we read novels like The Children of Men by PD James, Future Home of the Living Godby Louise Erdrich, or JG Ballard’s The Drowned World, in which children are conspicuous by their presence or absence. This is a clever choice by Gannon, immediately upping the stakes and crystallising what Olive stands to lose by not having a child.