A fiercely ambitious and talented thirty-five-year-old hedge-fund manager at the London firm of Edwin Morgan Forster, Kate Reddy is a successful woman in a notoriously sexist business. Her trouble is that her other life, as a married mother of two young children, is hopelessly at odds with her day job. Her architect husband, Richard, is sweet and feckless and would never dream of replacing the paper towels in the kitchen, and Richard's mother keeps telling Kate that her poor boy is looking thin. The children's nanny, Paula, is haughty, spiteful, and inclined to emotional blackmail. The housekeeper doesn't clean anything down low (bad knees) or up high (vertigo).

Kate can juggle nine different currencies in five different time zones and get herself and two children washed and dressed and out of the house in half an hour (though occasionally with the baby's banana oatmeal smeared on her Armani suit). She can read Guess How Much I Love You? to her son while scanning the prices on a stock ticker. She can do it all (it seems)—but the stress is ridiculous. Smug stay-at-home mothers at her daughter's school, members of what Kate calls the Muffia, are always asking her when she's going to start working part time. How long can she go on like this?

In a novel that is at once uproariously funny and achingly sad, Allison Pearson captures the guilty secret lives of working women—the self-recrimination, the comic deceptions, the giddy exhaustion, the despair—as no other writer has. Kate Reddy's conflicts—How are we meant to pass our days? How are we to reconcile the two passions, work and motherhood, that divide our lives?—get at the private absurdities of working motherhood as only a novel could: with humor, drama, and bracing wisdom.