Homewrecked

<p><strong style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Longlisted for the Somerset (CIBA) Award for Contemporary Literature · Finalist Wishing Shelf Book Awards 2025</strong></p><p></p><p><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Are you the Jack Mathews I met on Santa Catalina Island twenty-one years ago?</em></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>One message. Sent on a whim during lockdown when the world stopped and there was nothing left to hide behind.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Elizabeth Lambert has everything she was supposed to want - an old-money husband a daughter a life that looks right from the outside. What she doesn't have is enough.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Jack Mathews is the boy she loved at fifteen and never forgot. Now he has a wife three children and a life already under strain.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>What begins as nostalgia becomes something far more dangerous: a virtual affair that feels more real than their actual lives - because the people they become in it are the people they'd rather be.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>But they haven't accounted for Jude.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Jude isn't a footnote. She's a mother who built something real - and when she sees what's happening she has no intention of stepping aside.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>As lockdown lifts Elizabeth makes her move - renting a house overlooking Jack's family close enough to feel inevitable too close to be anything but deliberate.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Desire turns to obsession. Fantasy collides with reality. And something is going to break.</span></p><p></p><p><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Homewrecked</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> is razor-sharp darkly funny and quietly devastating - a novel about longing marriage and the stories we tell ourselves just before everything falls apart.</span></p><p></p><p><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>For readers who loved 'Big Little Lies' - but wanted it darker sharper with more bite.</em></p>