IIt felt like he was everywhere last summer. On every train I took, and from every deckchair I sank into, I saw the distinctive teal dust jacket and yellow edges of the pages of sadness and happiness, Meg Mason’s novel about Martha and Patrick Friel, a couple on the brink of collapse. “An observer of my marriage would think that I have made no effort to be a good or better wife,” Martha says, heartbreakingly, at the beginning of the book. “They couldn’t say that for most of my adult life and my entire marriage I’ve been trying to become the opposite of myself.” It’s a cliché to call a book “witty and cute”, even worse, “funny and sad”, but as
