The Constant Mistress - Angela Lambert

Laura King is a liberated, intelligent and successful woman: successful not only in her career but also with men. Although she has never married, hers has been an active and emotionally fulfilled life. Suddenly, at the age of forty-four, she learns that she is suffering from a rare liver disease, and has only a year or two to live.

In typically flamboyant style, Laura invites her ex-lovers to dinner.

There she announces the unusual part they are to play in her final months. As The Constant Mistress unravels Laura’s past, racing against time, Angela Lambert focuses on the relationships between men and women, sisters, parents and friends. Laura’s last months concentrate her mind both on the tug between domesticity and freedom, between fidelity and desire; and, above all, on the experience and aftermath of passion.

This is a novel about the dilemmas of the privileged generation of women who came to adulthood after the Pill but before Aids. Did they really have it all’?