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WORK TITLE: Consider Yourself Kissed
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WEBSITE: https://jessicastanley.co.uk/
CITY: London
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COUNTRY: United Kingdom
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PERSONAL
Born c. 1982, in Sale, Victoria, Australia (father a military serviceman); moved to United Kingdom, 2011; married, husband’s name Jude (a British barrister); children: three.
EDUCATION:Graduated from Australian National University.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist, copywriter, writer. Canberra Times, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia, reporter, one year; BBC, writer for Neighbours website; Australian Council of Trade Unions, staff; worked on Kevin Rudd’s campaign for Australian House of Representatives, 2007; interned for Barack Obama’s campaign for US presidency, 2008; freelance copywriter for companies including Qantas.
WRITINGS
Author of online newsletter Read.Look.Think, 2011–.
SIDELIGHTS
[open new]Multitalented Australian writer Jessica Stanley launched her career as a novelist upon resettling in England. She was born in Sale, Australia, near an air force base, with her father serving in the military. The family’s several moves entailed a stint in Malaysia, until Stanley was raised alongside a brother primarily in Melbourne. Reflecting on her family’s sky-high regard for literature, Stanley told Alice Jones of the London Times, “We held up authors as being like astronauts: people couldn’t be authors.” Her and her father’s favorite reads included Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and the Sherlock Holmes canon. Stanley advanced to Canberra to attend the Australian National University, studying English literature until shifting to politics, and then worked for the Canberra Times for a year. Gaining a position writing for the website of the BBC’s Australian soap opera Neighbours enabled Stanley to move back to Melbourne, where the series was filmed and she was embedded in the studio. Stanley’s next career moves were occasioned by the flaring of her interest in the labor movement and politics in general. She gained a position with the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) and participated in workers’ rights campaigns; then joined Labor Party parliament member Kevin Rudd’s successful campaign for prime minister in 2007; then briefly interned for U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama in 2008. In a more practical move, she became a freelance copywriter, working on advertisements and marketing for companies including Australian airline Qantas.
Around this time Stanley’s life trajectory turned, perhaps inevitably, toward Great Britain. She explained to Jones: “I grew up, maybe for colonial reasons, very interested in the inner lives of British people. I’m a part of the world, but I will never be properly a part of the world. I will always be standing off to one side looking at it, learning, observing.” An instance of heartbreak in 2009 found her vacationing in Paris, then detouring to London to see Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia, where she also had coffee with writer Jean Hannah Edelstein, an online acquaintance. Edelstein proceeded to tell a friend, Jude, then she just met the woman he would marry; when Jude later visited Melbourne, he looked Stanley up, and it was love at first breakfast. She moved to London in 2011, and they soon wed and started a family.
Upon turning thirty, Stanley felt a tinge of existential urgency and embarked upon the writing of her first novel, as time allowed between work and child care. Drawing on her experiences with the ACTU and in politics, she finished A Great Hope eight years later and achieved its release in Australia, where the narrative is set. In 2020, with publication in sight she struck up correspondence with Jonathan Franzen, who enjoyed the fan mail she had written expressing her deep admiration for The Corrections and details like a character’s “bacterial breath.” After having a copy of her novel sent to Franzen, she received both congratulations and some helpful constructive feedback.
A Great Hope revolves around the life and death of fictional politican John Clare, who rose to become head of a powerful union and helped propel Kevin Rudd’s 2007 campaign for prime minister, but who fell off the roof of his upscale home in Fitzroy in 2010. The lead-up and resolution to the mystery of Clare’s death plays out through the perspectives of multiple characters during a pivotal period in national governance. As noted by Stella Charls in Reading, Stanley’s debut novel “sets thoughtful questions around the politics of marriage and parenting against the backdrop of a landmark era where federal party politics failed a nation.” Charls hailed A Great Hope as both a “compelling” mystery and an “astute study of Australian politics” by an “exciting new literary talent.”
Stanley’s next novel was inspired by her personal life and relocation to England and takes place in her adoptive home turf of Hackney, in East London. About the limited success of her first novel, Stanley laughingly told Jones: “For some reason my Australian trade movement book did not do well internationally.” With her second novel, she gained publication in the United Kingdom as well as the United States.
Consider Yourself Kissed opens in 2013, when Australian emigrant and copywriter Coralie Bower happens to be on hand in London’s Victoria Park when four-year-old Zora tumbles into a pond while her father’s back is turned. After rescuing Zora, Coralie quietly slips away, leaving Adam Whiteman, a political journalist, to canvas area cafés until he finds his daughter’s savior. At twenty-nine and a half, Coralie is rapidly immersed in Adam and Zora’s lives, through a strategic apartment swap, long phone calls, romance, pregnancy, and shared family. But as Adam’s career advances from a middling podcast to multiple best-selling books, Coralie’s gets subsumed in domestic responsibilities and deference to Adam’s professional whims and expectations. As the nation cycles through dramatic political changes into the early 2020s, the permanence of Adam and Coralie’s relationship hangs in the balance.
The title of Stanley’s second novel derives from Mary McCarthy’s 1963 novel The Group, evoking a sense of stalled progress on the feminist front. Washington Post reviewer Karin Tanabe characterized Consider Yourself Kissed as an “emotional, highly realistic version of a 10-year relationship complicated by kids, aging parents, demanding jobs, dreams deferred and a world that feels like it’s crumbling.” The reviewer affirmed that Stanley “portrays, with stunning emotional accuracy, the feeling of wanting to constantly cry and scream and love and be loved in return, all at the same time.” Tanabe suggested that for parents who can relate, Stanley’s prose “will be an arrow to the heart.” In the New York Times Book Review, S. Kirk Walsh observed: “Amid the private dramas that come with the territory of long-term relationships, Stanley deftly animates the heightened tensions outside the home—the ascension of Conservatism with Prime Ministers Theresa May and Boris Johnson, a global pandemic—reminding the reader that it’s impossible to separate the personal from the political, particularly when one is living amid the ‘rising tides of authoritarianism.’”
A Kirkus Reviews contributor opined that Stanley “writes beautifully about the tension among wants, needs, and desires, especially in motherhood,” and appreciated how the politics play into Coralie’s “feelings of claustrophobia, weariness, and anger.” The contributor summed the novel up as a “tender and realistic cataloging of a relationship as it shifts, changes, and grows over time.” Times contributor Jones remarked that life itself “is what Consider Yourself Kissed captures so brilliantly: it takes all the small, seemingly insignificant moments of joy and difficulty, fun and darkness, that make up the reality of happy ever after.” Tanabe likewise concluded that Stanley “expertly layers the light and heavy elements of life, with a main character who is quick-witted and quietly perceptive, giving hope that a fire between two people may just survive many storms.”[close new]
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Bookseller, February 14, 2025, Alice O’Keeffe, “Jessica Stanley,” p. 6.
Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 2025, review of Consider Yourself Kissed.
New York Times Book Review, June 15, 2025, S. Kirk Walsh, review of Consider Yourself Kissed, p. 14.
Washington Post, May 28, 2025, Karin Tanabe, review of Consider Yourself Kissed.
ONLINE
Cut, https://www.thecut.com/ (May 30, 2025), Emily Gould, “How to Write a Literary Romance Novel,” author interview.
Jessica Stanley website, https://jessicastanley.co.uk (November 9, 2025).
Queensland Reviewers Collective, https://www.queenslandreviewerscollective.com/ (February 28, 2022), Wendy Lipke, review of A Great Hope.
Readings, https://www.readings.com.au/ (March 1, 2022), Stella Charls, review of A Great Hope.
Times, https://www.thetimes.com/ (April 25, 2025), Alice Jones, “The Politics of Love—This Summer’s Rom-com Must-Read,” author interview.
Unseen Library, https://unseenlibrary.com/ (March 17, 2022), review of A Great Hope.
I’m Jessica Stanley, an Australian novelist living in London.
I grew up in Melbourne, studied in Canberra, and worked in journalism, on the set of the TV show Neighbours, for the trade union movement, and in advertising. I moved to the UK in 2011.
My Australian first novel A Great Hope was published by Picador Australia in 2022.
My new novel is Consider Yourself Kissed (2025).
I have a long-standing email newsletter for readers and writers called READ. LOOK. THINK. — you can explore the recent archive or subscribe below.
On Instagram @dailydoseofjess, I share what I’m reading, what I’m working on, and my life in London with my husband and three children.
On Bookshop.org I’ve compiled a list of my beloved books.
My favourite novel of all time is Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, and — before I quit Twitter — my short-lived but ardent fan account @lollinghurst was featured in The New Yorker.
This website, my work, my novels and my mind are all, and will always be, AI-free.
How to Write a Literary Romance Novel
Portrait of Emily Gould
By Emily Gould, a novelist and critic, is a features writer for New York Magazine.
May 30, 2025
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Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Sophie Davidson, Retailer
This article first appeared in Book Gossip, a newsletter about what we’re reading and what we actually think about it. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every month.
You know those novels, the ones you reread every few years, that feel like having a cozy cup of tea with a very witty and fascinating old friend? Like I Capture the Castle or The Pursuit of Love? Jessica Stanley has written one of those books with Consider Yourself Kissed, which is already a hit in her native Australia and her current home, the U.K. It spans ten years in the life of Coralie, an Australian copywriter new to London, and Adam, the political reporter she falls in love with after rescuing his daughter from a dip in a duck pond. The relationship at the heart of this book survives challenges like births, deaths, Brexit and COVID. Coralie and Adam are immediately convincing and relatable thanks to the way they communicate, which is the way actual people in love do: sometimes via deep thoughts and good jokes, sometimes via texts about scheduling children’s weekend activities — sometimes both at the same time.
I am lucky that Jess is one of my good friends, though our relationship is weird in that we’ve communicated nearly every day for over a decade in spite of having only met twice IRL. She lives in London and we are on a longstanding WhatsApp group called “Novelist Moms” along with fellow writer-mother Meaghan O’Connell. The three of us met via the gentler, weirder internet of the early 2010s and kept in touch through, collectively, the births of seven children and the publication of four books. It’s hard to pick a favorite child of the seven, but I think we’d all agree that Consider Yourself Kissed is the best book Novelist Moms has produced so far. We talked a few weeks ago after Jess had just returned home from launching the book in Australia.
How did you write a book where two people convincingly fall in love, then stay in love without being sappy or creepy or cliché at all? When you’re trying to get love down on the page, what are you keeping in mind?
I think for me, the most important thing is the rhythms of speech. How you are listened to and how you listen to the other person, especially how you are funny together and how you’re speaking to each other on one level, communicating, but then what’s going on underneath all of that stuff. It was like just making music out of two people. It’s hard for me to write descriptions, really, but when two people are talking, I could go on forever. I just like that so much.
How did you train yourself to write dialogue so naturalistically?
My brother and I used to always imitate people, so we would imitate my parents and especially my dad. Half of it is the sound of your voice, making your voice sound like the person. But even more, it’s the exact words they use and the kind of introductory sounds that they make before they start speaking and that sort of thing.
But also, I suppose because my dad was in the Air Force and I went to so many different schools, and every time you move school, do you say “bathroom”? Do you say “toilets”? Do you say “felt tips”? Do you say “coloring pencils”? Do you say “colors”? Do you say “eraser”? Do you say “rubber”? Just to fit in, I had to be monitoring these tiny differences, and so I just can’t get rid of that now. I’m always noticing.
Did you know at the outset that this was what you were setting out to write?
I didn’t. I don’t even know if I’ve told you this story, but in 2020 I wrote to Jonathan Franzen — this really, really intense, and in retrospect, maybe hypomanic, email about how much I love The Corrections. I woke up one morning at 4 a.m. — that’s always a bad sign mental-health-wise — and was full of just thinking about The Corrections and the huge role that it played for me. I’m thinking about things like how one of the characters has bacterial breath, and I still always think about that.
And so I wrote to Jonathan Franzen and said how much I love the book. I don’t know how long it took, but he actually wrote back and — I think maybe because my praise had been so specific — he was really taken with it and was sort of reminiscing about how he first discovered bacterial breath and stuff like that. And then we corresponded for a bit, but then life took over. It was during COVID. But toward the end of the correspondence, he said, “And when A Great Hope” — my first book, which I was working on at the time — “comes out, get Picador to send me one.” And I was like, “Okay.” And I sent that on to my editor at the time, but I didn’t think that it would really happen.
But then they remembered and sent it. I don’t think I even necessarily knew that they had, but out of nowhere, I got an email from him saying all sorts of really nice things about A Great Hope. Really amazing, lovely things, which really helped me deal with the fact that hardly anyone had read it in Australia, and that it hadn’t sold anywhere else outside Australia, so not in the U.K., and certainly not in the U.S. But one of the things he said in the email was that he thought that I should learn to stay in scene. Start a scene and stay in it, instead of cutting away to a flashback, a memory, some backstory.
And at the beginning of writing Consider Yourself Kissed, I was like, “I just want to do a love story and I have to learn to stay in scene.” It was like an experiment: Can I start from the start and go all the way to the end? Not just start the start of the scene and go to the end of the scene but start the start of the story and go all the way as far as I possibly could. So in this case, ten years.
The couple in this book, Coralie and Adam, aimed to have an equal partnership, but somehow his career ends up taking precedence over hers. And that was the detail that the reviewer in The Guardian really focused on. She wrote, “I have long noticed that in a house with one spare room and a heterosexual couple who both work from home, the spare room is where he works with a door that shuts and perhaps even a designated desk. And she works somewhere else, always for good reasons, but always.”
Is that literally true in your house? I know at one point you had a work shed in the backyard.
I’ve moved house now and Jude works in half of the sitting room. And I work in a top-floor bedroom because I make all the kids sleep in the same room. And that’s only going to work …
Until your oldest child decides that she wants her own room.
Yeah, so I’m living on borrowed time.
Could you build another shed or that’s not really it?
To be real, I didn’t enjoy the experience of the shed because I’m always having to come in to get my tea, and then when you’ve had a tea, you have to come in to go to the bathroom. And once, when I was writing my first book in there, I left the door unlocked overnight and someone stole all the Christmas presents. And another time I left it unlocked and a fox came in and took a shit on my draft that I had printed out at the copy shop. It didn’t feel like a safe space. So I’m unwilling to try that again.
Workplaces aside, I think that specter of male precedence hovers over almost all the heterosexual partnerships that I know of. And in the book, Coralie wonders how the world can be made fair when two people who love each other can’t even manage it. Do you feel like you’re closer to being able to answer her question now?
This is my main theoretical preoccupation: How can humans, who are a mess, ever get anything done or ever make anything better? Maybe if I was pushed to answer, I would say it’s something about childhood that if everyone could just be loved when they were young, we’d all be happy and better. But every certainty I thought I had about politics and what is good and bad politically I’ve had to get rid of because things are just going so badly and I don’t know what to do about it.
Some people ask me how I managed to write this book in one year when my other book took me eight years, as you know. I truly think one of the main reasons is that in 2020 Jude took over the laundry and he does the laundry now. He always did the dishwasher and cleaned the kitchen. But that was fine because I cooked and shopped. But then he also took on the laundry, which is such a big job for a family of five. And that has made an enormous difference in my day-to-day life. So often when people ask me — especially women, and especially women with young children — “How on earth did you manage?,” that is what I tell them.
So just to talk about your first novel for a minute, it’s a book with sections written from many different characters’ points of view. What did you learn by writing in that way? I saw a lot of drafts when you were working on it, including some fascinating parts that didn’t end up in the finished book, and it sort of felt to me like you could have gone on writing it forever. What did you learn from that process that informed the way that you decided to work on your second book?
It took eight years to do the first one, and you’re right, as soon as I had the six or eight main characters in the book, and I had their points of view, I could just go on and on and on forever. And it was almost compulsive to me. I could have written about 20 years of each person’s life. I wonder if that was defensive time-wasting because I wasn’t ready to have any writing in the public domain. So I was just going to go on and on forever spinning my wheels. And then when that book was published and it was well-reviewed and all my friends bought it and nothing too awful had happened to me as a result of writing a book that I thought, Okay, now I’ll try again.
I’d had a lot of unconscious fears about what would happen to me if I expressed myself in public. Then I got them out of the way. I had also been in therapy that whole time. One of my parents had died. I was really happy in my family life. I just felt more safe and strong and able to say, “Here is something that I have made. I hope you enjoy. And if you don’t, that’s fine.” There were things I learned on a craft level, but it was also personal growth that I had to go through to say, “I’m a legitimate person with a legitimate need to express myself. I have some skills in that area.”
So you sort of had to write a book in order to write a book.
Do you have any advice to writers who are just starting out and who, like you, don’t come from the MFA world and who don’t live in a place that has a literary scene? I mean, you do live in a place that has a literary scene now, but you didn’t when you lived in Melbourne.
I was always a reader, and the transition to being a writer was much more difficult. But it really helped to have friends who were writers to see that they’re normal people with struggles, that they weren’t born with a magic aura or magic powers. That they read a lot, thought a lot, and wrote a lot, had a lot of disappointments and rejection, but kept going and then put their work out there.
From the outside, it might look amazing and enviable, but from the inside, observing my friends who are writers, I can see that for every amazing piece of attention you do get a nasty email. The important thing is to take being a writer off a pedestal, but to take reading and working much more seriously than you could ever dream. Just to work like mad and to try and separate off from ego stuff.
But everyone who writes has felt unspecial and is in many ways unspecial. You don’t have to have anything special about you at all. It’s just a job. I always thought that to be seen writing was almost like being seen dancing in the nude or something, that it was embarrassing and masturbatory, and one of the most shameful things you can do. I suppose I just had to come to a middle point where it’s not magical, but neither is it shameful. It’s just something you do.
You have a long-running newsletter called READ.LOOK.THINK where you collect everything fascinating and worthwhile that you encounter online. How would you define your sensibility?
I like women writers. I like people who are always really thinking about themselves and being honest about their feelings. And I never share anything where it’s trend-based and especially not when the emotions are trend-based, the emotions or observations. We go through periods where everyone talks about the same thing and I never share something that everyone’s talking about in the same way. I started it in 2011 to get freelance work, because that was when I moved over to the U.K. One of my jobs was to do an online brand presence for a big advertising-agency group. And then I thought, Well, I’m not going to be able to take this blog with me. I should do one for myself.
Because I was sharing commerce and brand stuff in the work one, I just wanted to keep this one perfectly safe from all of that stuff. I had always been really interested in politics, the emotions of politics. So no facts about climate change, but facts about how people feel about climate change. And I like to share very unstyled interiors of interesting people. And I occasionally share things like, “These are the pens that my children use.” Or, “This is a tinted moisturizer that I use.” And without fail the thing that is dumbest to me is the most clicked every time. Always, if I share what storage box I got for the kids’ stationery, that will be what people click. And often I think about giving up the newsletter because I don’t think it’s good for me to be seeking things online anymore. Sometimes I have this perfectionist feeling, this kind of all or nothing feeling of wanting to be a books only person and not have anything come into my life from the internet anymore.
But I’ve just met so many people through the newsletter, and I think that nobody would’ve bought or read my Australian first book if I didn’t have the newsletter, not a single person. And when I went to Australia just now for my Australian tour, apart from friends and family, the people who came were people who read my newsletter. So I don’t think I could ever stop doing it because I feel like I’m not a majorly outgoing person in real life, the newsletter is sort of like my digital stand-in, and people get to know me through that, and then I get to know them after that. It’s like an interim knowing, and it would be really hard for me to give up that interim knowing.
I’ve never met a person who reads as much as you do. Not just novels and memoirs, but newspapers, magazines, blogs, newsletters, Instagram. You’ve read The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst 200 times and you used to maintain the @lollinghurst Twitter account, which quoted the particularly funny and perfect lines in the book. I know you revere your fellow Australian author Helen Garner. But if you could only pick three books to bring with you to … not a desert island because that’s too unpleasant of a situation. But let’s say a nice sort of mountain sanitarium. They have good meals and you get plenty of sleep, and you know you’re only going to be there for a month or so, but the only thing is you can only bring three books. Which three would you bring?
I actually do know the answer. The first would be Helen Garner’s Diaries. Technically that would count as three books in Australia because they were all published separately, but over here they were published as one big chunk, about 800 pages. They are of unlimited interest to me, and I always find something new every time I read them, and they’re very funny. And of course, The Line of Beauty, I would take as well, because it is my comfort book at this point. Two hundred times sounds like a lot, but it isn’t just opening the paperback and going all the way through it. It’s also that I have it on my Kindle app, on my phone. Often I try and wean myself off the internet, and so that’s when I turn to the Kindle app and just read that book, in those times when I’m on the bus or whatever.
And then the third book — this is now revealing a secret about myself — is Psychoanalytic Diagnosis by Nancy McWilliams. It’s like a mega-thick textbook. There’s something about the book where it feels like mainlining humanity. And Nancy McWilliams also is very funny, so her tone is just extremely welcoming to me.
Apparently the cello is the instrument most like a human voice. And to me, these books are the cello of books. The way they sound when I’m reading them is as if someone is talking to me.
The politics of love — this summer’s rom-com must-read
Jessica Stanley, author of the debut novel Consider Yourself Kissed talks to Alice Jones about leaving Australia, finding a husband in London and her nerdy news obsession
Portrait of a smiling woman sitting in a pink armchair.
Jessica Stanley: “The journey from 29 to 40 … I felt like a truck had hit me”
Alice Jones
Friday April 25 2025, 5.00pm BST, The Times
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Q:Which institution is recognised by Guinness as having the world's oldest rugby club?
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Forget Emma and Dexter, move over Marianne and Connell — the summer of 2025 belongs to Coralie and Adam. They are the protagonists of Jessica Stanley’s Consider Yourself Kissed, a sparkily enjoyable romantic comedy that, like One Day and Normal People, leaves you feeling bereft at the final page.
The couple meet when Coralie, a 29-year-old Australian newly living in London, rescues Adam’s four-year-old daughter, Zora, from the pond in Victoria Park, east London, which she plops into while admiring the ducks. Coralie is a copywriter and aspiring novelist, funny and bookish. Adam is 37, divorced, a political journalist, and, in his own words (a red flag, this), looks “like a young Colin Firth”. Over a decade, we follow them as they fall in love, have children, lose parents, build careers and new kitchens, write books (him) and fail to write books (her), as the political turmoil of 2013 to 2023 — from Brexit to Covid — plays out noisily in the background.
Book cover for Jessica Stanley's "Consider Yourself Kissed," featuring an illustration of a pigeon carrying cherries.
Stanley, 43, would be the first to admit that it is very much a case of writing what she knows. Like Coralie, she arrived in London, aged 29, from Melbourne, quickly married her husband, and had three children. Like Coralie, she was a copywriter (among other things) before turning to novel-writing. Like Coralie, she pushed her literary ambitions aside — when Coralie first meets Adam, she literally buries her manuscript under a sofa cushion, then under the bed, then goodness knows where for a decade — as life took over.
The idea for Consider Yourself Kissed came to Stanley at the joint 40th birthday party she threw with her husband. “I found moving over so lonely and crazy-making — to leave everyone that I knew behind and start a new life. And if I could have flashed forward then to my 40th birthday — with my husband, our children, our friends and our friends’ children, it would have been a dream come true,” she says. “But the journey from 29 to 40 … I felt like a truck had hit me. No sooner would one crisis pass than a new crisis would come.”
If that sounds dramatic, then the examples she gives me are slightly less so — career tangles, chickenpox, “just inexorably one thing after another” — but that’s life. And it is what Consider Yourself Kissed captures so brilliantly: it takes all the small, seemingly insignificant moments of joy and difficulty, fun and darkness, that make up the reality of happy ever after.
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She knew she wanted to write a “love book” and set it on her home turf of Hackney, east London. Now she had her structure — “a woman who moves to London, from aged 29 to 40, job done,” she says. She wrote Consider Yourself Kissed in the margins, seizing time around school holidays, copywriting and an unexpected stint of jury service. Her husband, Jude, a barrister, had been working to become a KC — “He was the main character in our marriage for a full year.” When he made it, he told her, “it’s your turn now” and took the children away for a week. A week! Still it was enough to get her started, and within a year, she had written a novel (If you want something done quickly, ask a busy mother). “And I loved every minute of it. I made myself laugh writing it,” she says. “I mainly wish I was still writing it.”
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We are sharing a slab of banana loaf outside Violet Cakes, Stanley’s local bakery, where Coralie also goes to write when she has the odd hour to herself. “Adam’s flat is just down there,” Stanley says, pointing down Wilton Way past a tree that is just coming into blossom. Victoria Park and its pond are a stroll away: Stanley’s daughter once fell into it, of course. “So now she thinks she’s Zora,” says Stanley. “And I put my parental neglect in the book, ha ha.”
Still, I must know — where did Adam come from? He’s not a barrister. At the start of the novel he is a rising political journalist on a magazine. Halfway through, he becomes the parliamentary sketchwriter for The Times. At the time, the couple have a two-year-old and are trying for another baby. It is chaos, personally and professionally. “If Brexit had made things more difficult in Wilton Way,” Stanley writes, “a long election campaign (and another book project) would decimate what little amity remained.” She gets the ins and outs just right — the sinking feeling when a late vote coincides with parents’ evening, the mapping of school holidays onto parliamentary recess, the last-minute WhatsApps after a TV appearance. And I should know because I’m married to Adam, I mean, Tom, who is The Times’s parliamentary sketchwriter in real life.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Stanley says, laughing. Has she been hanging out with my husband? “I don’t know anyone actually,” she says. “But if there is a podcast about politics, I have listened to it. I have read any behind-the-scenes media book, Emily Maitlis’s book, Nick Robinson’s book about the 2015 election. Even before I moved over, I was obsessed with British politics.”
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Stanley was born in a small town called Sale near an air force base. Her father (like Coralie’s) was a military man. Her mother looked after the children, then worked for Tennis Australia. The family moved around — including a stint in Malaysia — but Stanley mainly grew up in Melbourne, in a household where books were “venerated”. She and her father read Rumpole of the Bailey, Brideshead Revisited and Sherlock Holmes. “We held up authors as being like astronauts: people couldn’t be authors.”
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She studied English literature at the Australian National University in Canberra, then changed (“I fell in love,” she says, cryptically) to politics. After university she spent a year working as a journalist on The Canberra Times, then wanted to move back to Melbourne so got a job on the BBC’s Neighbours website. “I was embedded in the studio so if a soap magazine wanted to ask Dr Karl a question, I would do it,” she explains. “It was like clocking in at the Neighbours factory.”
Alan Fletcher in a blue shirt and tie, wearing a stethoscope.
“I was embedded in the Neighbours studio, so if a soap magazine wanted to ask Dr Karl a question, I would do it.”
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Then, as she puts it, she remembered she loved the trade union movement. With the Liberal prime minister John Howard in power, she got a job with ACTU, the Australian equivalent of the TUC, and began campaigning for workers’ rights. She followed it with the 2007 campaign for Labor’s Kevin Rudd and a stint interning for Barack Obama in 2008. Then, short of money, she moved into copywriting, working on campaigns for Qantas and the like. All the time she was at her desk, she was writing — making up stories about her friends, sending them long elaborate emails “on my employers’ time”.
She has always been interested in the “inside of things”, she thinks: politics, media, television — and now the workings of her adopted country. “I grew up, maybe for colonial reasons, very interested in the inner lives of British people,” she says. “I’m a part of the world, but I will never be properly a part of the world. I will always be standing off to one side looking at it, learning, observing.”
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So how did she end up in London? In 2009, recovering from a heartbreak, she took a trip to Paris and saw that Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia was playing in London, so flew over on a whim and looked up one of her “internet friends”, the writer Jean Hannah Edelstein, for a coffee date. Afterwards, Edelstein went home and told her neighbour, Jude, “I’ve just met the woman you’re going to marry.” When he was visiting Melbourne a little while later, Jude looked up Stanley, who was unaware of their romantic destiny. She suggested breakfast at 8am on his last day in the city. “And at 11.30am he said, ‘Should we have a second breakfast?’” She moved to London to be with him in 2011: their children are now aged 11, 9 and 8.
Stanley was working as a freelance copywriter at the time and, suddenly panicked about turning 30, embarked on her first novel. Fitting it into hour-long bursts around work and childcare, she took eight years to write A Great Hope, a multiple point-of-view saga about Australian politics. She “poured everything” into it, but its publication coincided with the pandemic and she couldn’t fly to Australia for the launch. “For some reason my Australian trade movement book did not do well internationally,” she says, laughing. “So I put aside the idea that writing a book could change my life.”
Oliver Coleman, Dan Stevens, and Alex Wyndham in a publicity still from the BBC's *The Line of Beauty*.
Stanley’s model for her book was Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty
ALAMY
She is just beginning to write her next novel, which will also be set in London, although there will be no Westminster backdrop this time. “I can’t have that same dedication to the sport of politics because it’s not fun any more,” she says. Her model for Consider Yourself Kissed was Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, which is also set against elections and years of Conservative rule. She is a big fan — and by big I mean she has read the book 200 times. She used to run a Twitter account (@Lollinghurst) dedicated to quoting the novel and once bought the same trainers as the author because she liked them so much when he wore them at a reading. “But I’m not insane,” she says.
She doesn’t seem it. Instead, she comes across as someone who has written the book they were always meant to write — only life got in the way of it for a little while.
Consider Yourself Kissed (Hutchinson Heinemann £16.99 352pp) is published on May 8
The Australian author's UK debut is an East London-set romcom that acknowledges the challenges of "happily ever after" in the real world. Alice O'Keeffe reports
'If people assume that any of it is real, that's fine with me. And if people think that it's all made-up, that's also fine with me," says Jessica Stanley, cheerfully. We are discussing Consider Yourself Kissed, a romcom that roams well beyond the act of falling in love to consider how two people succeed, or not, in keeping love, even when life, in all its messy and exasperating glory, gets in the way.
The novel's protagonist is Coralie Bower, who, like the author herself, is an Australian expat in London. One freezing March day in 2013, Coralie meets and falls in love with a British man. The novel then follows the couple over a decade, as they find out first-hand what living "happily ever after" actually entails. Over video call from her home in East London, where she has lived since moving to the UK in 2011, Stanley observes that "emotionally I am familiar with every element of the book".
Consider Yourself Kissed opens with a deft Hollywood-style "meet cute" in which quick-thinking Coralie rescues a small child whose passionate love of ducks has led to her falling into the pond in Victoria Park, Hackney.
The four-year-old girl--Zora--turns out to be the daughter of Adam, who is amicably divorced from Zora's mum. It is the sparkling beginning of a beautiful romance but love in the real world must survive against all sorts of competing demands: careers, house renovations, bereavement, in-laws and, perhaps the ultimate test of a couple's relationship, raising children. "The struggle-slash-joy of having a family and having kids," as Stanley puts it.
The novel is set over a turbulent decade, not only in Coralie's life, following her over her entire 30s, but also in British politics. Political events from 2012 to 2023 included five Prime Ministers and Brexit and these are woven into the narrative of Consider Yourself Kissed. Not least because Adam is a political journalist whose career really takes off. It turns out that Stanley has--or did have--a deep interest in politics.
UK politics "looms so large for Australians", says Stanley, who changed from English Literature to Politics part way through her degree at Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. She even took Alastair Campbell's Diaries to read on holiday years ago ("which is ridiculous", she says now, laughing, wishing she'd spent her time in the pool instead). In order to make Adam convincing as a political journalist, she needed to immerse herself in the news, something she says she would struggle to do in 2025's febrile political climate. "I could never write something like that again because I just can't follow the news. You know, I'm now allergic to the Today programme. I think I have Coralie say that the 2015 election, she didn't know it at the time, but it was the last normal election. And I sort of feel like that, at some point, perhaps around Brexit, things got unhinged and I was happy to follow the unhinging, but now I can't be involved."
Consider Yourself Kissed is Stanley's first novel to be published in the UK, but in Australia her debut, A Great Hope, was released three years ago. Set around the trade union movement, it had taken her eight years to write, and she poured everything into it--"[It felt like] this was my one shot"--but publication proved to be a bruising experience. It came out in 2022, at the tail end of the pandemic when Australia's borders were still closed. Stanley did an online launch and it was well reviewed but still. "It was really nice, but equally, it was as if it didn't happen. So, I was like 'OK, so publishing a book is not what I expected, should I even try and do this again?'"
She grappled with doubts but then: "I remembered how much I loved writing it, being 'in' it, having a place to go in my mind and a secret thing that was for me." First though, she had to set aside "everything that was kind of ego-related--am I a writer? Can I do this? Do people care about what I have to say? I put that all to one side and I just did it for love and about love."
She was inspired by the lore that Nancy Mitford wrote the enduring classic The Pursuit of Love in just three months. "I was thinking, what if I could just hype myself up, have a fun day at the desk and that was my job done. You know, instead of torturing myself," she says, laughing.
She wanted to set Consider Yourself Kissed over a long time frame, and was influenced by Elizabeth Jane Howard's Cazalet Chronicles, which she re-read over lockdown and found a great comfort. This five book series set over decades shows that crises in life always pass: "They're gathered around the radio to see if the Second World War is going to happen, then they have to go and cook a meal. It's nice to have every part of life in a book."
She was keen too, to write something that readers would take comfort in. "How can I write a comfort read that is genuinely comforting? In that I can only feel comforted by someone who has a full understanding of how bad things can be. I feel like, if someone understands that things can be very bad, then I can receive comfort from them."
She describes Consider Yourself Kissed as a "grown-up love story" and the love in the novel extends far beyond Coralie and Adam. "It's family, extended family, families you very carefully create for yourself, friends, people you're tied to in some way and have to make the best of."
Stanley has a presence on social media, a strong author website plus Substack and Instagram, and I wonder if she sees this as a prerequisite for a career as a novelist now. "Well, I feel like if I didn't have my newsletter and my Instagram, no one would have bought my first book. Almost every sale was touched by my Instagram, my newsletter in some way." But now she is less sure, given the recent changes around moderation by Meta. "I found Instagram and Substack to be the two most thoughtful and friendly places online. But now I'm just concerned. I wonder if maybe we've had the heyday of how good social media can be, and maybe it will be time for us to retreat into our caves a bit."
Or indeed retreat into a comforting book. Stanley hopes this message shines through Consider Yourself Kissed: "It doesn't matter who you love or who loves you, or where the care is coming from. It's the care and the love that makes life worth living. Even in really difficult times."
Imprint
Hutchinson Heinemann
Publication
8th May 2025
Formats
HB (9781529154757,
16.99 [pounds sterling]); EB
(9781804954003, 16.99 [pounds sterling])
Rights sold
Four territories including the US (Riverhead)
Editors
Helen Conford, Emily Batley
Agent
Lizzie Kremer, David
Higham Associates
Extract
Laundry she could do. Tidying wasn't a problem. She made up her daughter's bed with the summer duvet, and the handmade quilt that said FLORENCE. She arranged Catty with his long legs crossed, his plush black arms open in a hug. Maxi's special toy was a sheep; she laid him on his side in the cot. The colourful magnets went in one basket, the Duplo in another. Upstairs, she made Zora's bed with sheets she'd brought in from the clothesline. They were warm and smelled of the sun. Her tired mind surveyed her luck--a home, the children, Adam. In so many ways, her dream. Something was wrong with Coralie, something that set her apart--she couldn't be in love, but she couldn't be out of it either. If she didn't love, she was half a person. But if she did love, she'd never be whole. Her hands shook as she packed her bag. Mother, writer, worker, sister, friend, citizen, daughter, (sort of) wife. If she could be one, perhaps she could manage. Trying to be all, she found that she was none. A high summer night, still light outside the seagulls soared and screamed. She loved him so much, more than anything. But when Adam came home, she'd be gone.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 The Stage Media Limited
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O'Keeffe, Alice. "Jessica Stanley." The Bookseller, no. 6101, 14 Feb. 2025, pp. 6+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A829486287/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d52c1ff7. Accessed 19 Oct. 2025.
Stanley, Jessica CONSIDER YOURSELF KISSED Riverhead (Fiction None) $30.00 5, 27 ISBN: 9798217044993
A young woman builds the life she thinks she wants over the course of a decade.
Stanley's expansive sophomore novel follows one couple over the course of 10 years. On the verge of 30, Coralie Bower has recently relocated under duress from Australia to London. She works as a copywriter at a brand agency and harbors dreams of writing a novel. One morning at a cafe, she has an alarming yet charming meet-cute with Adam Whiteman, a political journalist, and his 4-year-old daughter, Zora. Adam, a divorcé, has a cordial relationship with his ex-wife, Marina Amin, and shares custody of Zora. Coralie and Adam's chemistry--which is heavily rendered through playful banter--is immediate. Seemingly overnight, Coralie becomes a stepmother and moves into their family home, her life grafted onto theirs in ways she cannot quite see yet. The novel follows the couple's relationship as they navigate home renovations, parental loss, unexpected career trajectories, parenthood, global turmoil, and complicated family dynamics. With the novel set between 2013 and 2023, politics weighs heavily on its plot--including a revolving door of British prime ministers and the Covid-19 pandemic. While Adam's career catapults with every political scandal, Coralie struggles to manage her career, their shared home, and an overwhelming share of the childcare. The unending politics can feel exhausting at times, but also helps amplify Coralie's feelings of claustrophobia, weariness, and anger. Stanley writes beautifully about the tension among wants, needs, and desires, especially in motherhood. When Marina gets pregnant, Coralie can admit her desire to be a mother: "The gap between having a baby and not having one yawned so large. Not having one: your longing made you silly, at the mercy of fate, a clichéd figure of fun, mockable." However, when she becomes a mother, Coralie realizes she is both closer and further from herself in equal measure. This realization, which leads to the novel's climax, offers Coralie the opportunity to find herself again.
A tender and realistic cataloging of a relationship as it shifts, changes, and grows over time.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Stanley, Jessica: CONSIDER YOURSELF KISSED." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A837325583/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=29bee0c3. Accessed 19 Oct. 2025.
It's a made-for-the-movies beginning. On a sunny day in 2013 in London's Victoria Park, a British man's young daughter jumps into a pond to see the ducks up close and ends up face down in the water. While he's got his back turned, she has stopped moving, her coat floating around her. Who should notice but Coralie Bower, an attractive, single 29-year-old, who recently moved to Britain from Australia. She jumps in and saves the girl without hesitation. Then she slips away, forcing the girl's father to search every cafe in the area so that he can show his gratitude. Think of chasing Cinderella, but replace the glass slipper with a latte.
That's the beginning of "Consider Yourself Kissed," Australian writer Jessica Stanley's sophomore novel, and it's a perfect setup for a romantic comedy of errors. The dad in question, Adam Whiteman, is charming and intelligent with the good looks of Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy - minus a few inches in height. He's a great father to 4-year-old Zora, amicably divorced, a rising-star political journalist and a pro-level conversationalist. As for Zora, she's impish and sweet; one of her first questions to Coralie: "Are pigs waterproof?"
Adam and Coralie's conversation turns into a date, and their banter is enviably good. Coralie is a copywriter with novelist dreams and a complicated family and relationship history back in Australia. Adam writes political news and hosts a podcast "regularly in the top twelve, or fifteen, in the News bit of UK iTunes." He also likes to give a modest shrug and admit he does "a bit of ... Broadcast." He's ambitious, just the right amount of intellectual, and he's completely taken by Coralie.
When they swap apartments so she can get some sleep away from the roar of the neighboring pub that keeps her up most nights, they go through each other's books and talk on the phone about A.S. Byatt novels and political biographies. It's electric, and they're not even under the same roof. Before Page 40, the two are living together. That's the point where "Consider Yourself Kissed" - a title that sounds adorable but is really a sign-off used by a total rake of a man in Mary McCarthy's "The Group" - could go two ways: rom-com fantasy or domestic reality. Stanley chooses the latter.
While "Consider Yourself Kissed" is certainly romantic at times and has very funny moments, it is mostly an emotional, highly realistic version of a 10-year relationship complicated by kids, aging parents, demanding jobs, dreams deferred and a world that feels like it's crumbling.
In 2013, when the story begins, Coralie is in her 20s and knows she wants children, so she's thrilled when she gets pregnant. But just as she becomes a mother, Adam's career begins taking off, leaving her very much alone. Soon she feels like so many women do when navigating kids, partner and job: like she's failing everyone, especially herself. "Mother, writer, worker, sister, friend, citizen, daughter, (sort of) wife," she reflects. "If she could be one, perhaps she could manage. Trying to be all, she found that she was none."
Stanley portrays, with stunning emotional accuracy, the feeling of wanting to constantly cry and scream and love and be loved in return, all at the same time. For parents who have gone through it, her writing will be an arrow to the heart. And for those who haven't, she deftly shows why Coralie would want simultaneously to go to a rage room and to quietly feed her child.
The one person who doesn't understand this duality is Adam. When Coralie - who is being overlooked at work for promotions because they take "commitment and sacrifice" - expresses her anger, saying: "I can't keep the whole house quiet so you can be free. I can't work full time so you can post all day on Twitter!" Adam replies, "Tweeting is sort of w-" and then thinks better of it.
Adam is a bit successful when they meet, but by 2017, his campaign book has hit No. 8 on the Sunday Times Bestsellers List and his Boris Johnson book No. 10. Professionally, he's killing it. And Brexit offers more opportunities to excel. Coralie sees his achievements as nothing more than a byproduct of her partner's "overwhelming lust for status, attention, and success." And as Adam works late nights, she becomes the de facto manager of all domestic duties.
"But what other dreams do you have?" Adam dares to ask her. And that's the question that keeps the pages turning. Can a woman like Coralie hold on to enough of an identity to keep dreaming, and manage to protect romantic love when life gets in the way?
Right behind Coralie's emotional journey is a heavy backdrop of British politics. There's more about Boris Johnson, Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn and Brexit than some readers will care for, especially those outside the United Kingdom, but the references do anchor the story in a tumultuous time. For as Coralie goes from 29 to almost 40, she and her country change dramatically.
Can a novel that mentions May's 150 cookbooks, with a protagonist who sheds tears over domestic suffocation rather than heartbreak, be considered a romance novel? Of course. Because readers want different things from romance, and real and raw are two of them. "Consider Yourself Kissed" expertly layers the light and heavy elements of life, with a main character who is quick-witted and quietly perceptive, giving hope that a fire between two people may just survive many storms.
- - -
Karin Tanabe is the author of seven novels, including "A Woman of Intelligence," "The Gilded Years" and, most recently, "The Sunset Crowd."
- - -
Consider Yourself Kissed
By Jessica Stanley.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 The Washington Post
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Tanabe, Karin. "'Consider Yourself Kissed' nails the complex emotions of motherhood." Washington Post, 28 May 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A843172447/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=56cce029. Accessed 19 Oct. 2025.
In the novel ''Consider Yourself Kissed,'' a wife and mother faces many of the same hurdles in 2016 that women did decades ago.
CONSIDER YOURSELF KISSED, by Jessica Stanley
Jessica Stanley's entertaining new novel, ''Consider Yourself Kissed,'' is a variation on the girl-meets-boy genre with all of the obligatory elements of love, ambition and family, set during a tumultuous political decade in England. Funny, smart and memorable, this contemporary romance offers a lucid example of how humanity can endure amid a daily churn of horrendous news.
The reader meets Coralie in 2013: A copywriter and aspiring novelist, she's recently moved to London from Sydney. (The author, whose first novel, ''A Great Hope,'' was published only in Australia in 2022, is also an Australian now living in London.) ''Although she was totally alone,'' Stanley writes, ''Coralie Bower, aged 29 and a half, was certainly not unhappy!'' Soon Coralie meets Adam, a divorced journalist, and his charming 4-year-old daughter, Zora, in a chance encounter in Victoria Park. Let's just say a lot happens during their initial meeting -- and then in the subsequent 10 years, in both Coralie's personal life and the political landscape of the United Kingdom.
Fans of Mary McCarthy's 1963 novel ''The Group'' will recognize in Stanley's title the sign-off of Harald Petersen's letters to his future wife, Kay Strong. After Adam finds the book beside Coralie's bed, they start signing their texts and emails ''C.Y.K.'' In a 1962 interview, McCarthy said her novel ''was conceived as a kind of mock-chronicle novel. It's a novel about the idea of progress, really. The idea of progress seen in the female sphere. ... It's supposed to be the history of the loss of faith in progress.''
This is exactly what Stanley sets out to do in her novel: chronicle one woman's pursuit of fulfillment on multiple fronts, while updating McCarthy's concerns -- with the tensions between female identity and domesticity, motherhood and creativity -- for a newer generation. In due course, the reader meets the extended family -- Adam's ex-wife and her Tory husband; Zora's ''gay grannies,'' Anne and Sally; Coralie's brother and his considerably older boyfriend; the siblings' estranged, narcissistic father; a poodle named Madonna. We learn about Coralie's broken relationship with her mother, who is battling terminal cancer back in Australia and who provides the context for the protagonist's underlying quest for unconditional love.
It is enjoyable to read about this idiosyncratic blended family and their efforts and failures to care for one another across an eventful decade that sees births and deaths, renovations and resentments, as well as Brexit and Covid. When Anne asks Coralie when she is planning to get pregnant during their first visit, Coralie thinks: ''Who was Anne to snap on her latex gloves, slice and dig into Coralie's chest, yank out her most cherished private dreams, and examine them like an excised tumor? She wished she'd phoned her own mother when she'd had the chance. But that would have left her empty in a different way.''
Amid the private dramas that come with the territory of long-term relationships, Stanley deftly animates the heightened tensions outside the home -- the ascension of Conservatism with Prime Ministers Theresa May and Boris Johnson, a global pandemic -- reminding the reader that it's impossible to separate the personal from the political, particularly when one is living amid the ''rising tides of authoritarianism.'' Covering it all as a political commentator in newspaper articles, a podcast and several books, Adam sees his career ascend while Coralie remains in her dead-end brand-agency job and shelves her dreams of becoming a novelist.
Like ''The Group,'' ''Consider Yourself Kissed'' asks whether women can escape the constraints of gender when it comes to the precarious balance of partnership and selfhood. ''The price Coralie paid for love was fear and getting lost,'' Stanley writes. ''Something was wrong with her, it set her apart -- she couldn't be in love, but she couldn't be out of it either. If she didn't love, she was half a person. But if she did love, she'd never be whole.''
Whether or not ''a room of one's own'' is truly viable for Coralie, or for women in general, in an era of socially regressive politics, Stanley's delightful novel reminds her readers of the joy, humor and even subtle hope that can be experienced during life's lowest moments.
CONSIDER YOURSELF KISSED | By Jessica Stanley | Riverhead | 326 pp. | $30
S. Kirk Walsh is the author of the novel ''The Elephant of Belfast.''
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Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 The New York Times Company
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Walsh, S. Kirk. "'Group' Activity." The New York Times Book Review, 15 June 2025, p. 14. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A843996894/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=239efe3c. Accessed 19 Oct. 2025.
A Great Hope
by Jessica Stanley
Reviewed by
Stella Charls, Mar 2022
Every so often a novel comes along with a magic, broad appeal; an inevitable conversation starter. Jessica Stanley’s A Great Hope is that kind of magic novel; a literary, multi-generational family saga that’s ambitious, smart and wholly engaging. Here is a book that wields a page-turning plot and gripping, complicated characters. You’ll gulp down all 400 pages, then push it fervently into the hands of everyone you know. Like Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies, or Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap, A Great Hope has a lot of timely things to say about families, politics, power and what we value. And it’s a hell of a lot of fun.
Set in Melbourne and Canberra between two landmark federal elections (Rudd’s in 2007 and Gillard’s in 2010), this is a family saga wrapped around a murder mystery. It begins a year after the death of Australian politician John Clare. John has fallen to his death off the roof of his swanky Fitzroy home. It seems like an accident, but as his inner circle grieve and process their loss, it soon becomes clear that John’s relationships were more complicated than they might appear. Drawing on the alternating perspectives of a complex cast of characters (including John’s wife, children and mistress), Stanley sets thoughtful questions around the politics of marriage and parenting against the backdrop of a landmark era where federal party politics failed a nation.
Stanley’s political page-turner could not be released into the world at a better time than this 2022 election year. Over the course of A Great Hope, we witness John’s rise, from head of a powerful union to key player in the Kevin07 campaign. The three years that followed were truly pivotal in Australian politics, and Stanley explores this moment in history with a razor-sharp touch. A Great Hope is both a compelling mystery and an astute study of Australian politics by an exciting new literary talent.
Reviewed by Wendy Lipke
Anyone interested in Australian politics would find this book interesting as it encompasses the time in Australia when a long entrenched political party was defeated. What followed was a time of musical chairs as the leadership of political parties changed quite frequently. The book reveals some of the workings of the union movement and other influencers who try to manipulate the public. The author, Jessica Stanley, was born in regional Victoria and grew up in Canberra and Melbourne. She worked in journalism and politics before moving to London in 2011. This allows her to write about politics and the ACTU with authority. Within this environment is the story of one family and its breakdown.
The story begins with a brief description of a man falling to his death in 2010. Was it suicide or murder? The story from then on is set to reveal that answer. Through the lives of the remaining family members and a mistress, what happened leading up to and just after the fateful fall is slowly revealed.
Jessica Stanley’s writing includes some irreverent descriptions of political leaders. She has a down to earth way of writing and describes things in a unique way. I particularly liked how one character ‘loped off like a King’s Cross ibis’ (41) and another ‘opened her handbag and stirred the contents until she found her keys’ (54). I could imagine a reptile emerging when I read ‘she slid out of her giant battered shoebox of memories’ (86).
With the death of the husband, father and lover, those left behind examine their own lives. It is at this point that the writing becomes more focussed on personal relationships and the political scene drifts away. The wife and mother had always resented that, within the family, she felt that ‘she didn’t exist’ (360). ‘She kept the home fires burning and used herself as kindling’ (372). She believed that her relationship with her husband was one of shrinking. ‘Shrinking the parts of her she thought he didn’t like or respond to’ (362) leaving their relationship locked in a titanic battle with no ‘off ramps’ (339). She is also described as a plant – born shooting out in all directions, being tightly pruned when young then as she grew, she tightly pruned herself (362).
Both children had become disconnected from their mother and their own lives appeared to be rudderless. They felt their mother was critical of all they did. It is in this section of the book that I felt the author was holding a mirror up for all readers. Her reference to hanging clothes on the line caused me to squirm. With some of the actions described, I’m sure, most readers would do the same. However, she goes on to show that by being more open and talking about family situations and feelings, lots of the discord within families can be overcome.
A Great Hope, by Jessica Stanley, is a book about politics but also it is a story about sex and death, love and betrayal. It throws light on manipulation within the political sphere especially leading up to an election. Relationships within families between husband and wife, parents and children are also examined. The story highlights how each family member perceives a situation in light of their own feelings. This might not correspond with how others in the same situation see it. Maybe this is the great hope – that family members will take the time to communicate how they feel and see things so that nobody feels abandoned. I’m puzzled as to why the title on the book has no capital letters and the city skyline is upside down on the cover.
For a debut novel this writer has produced an interesting and insightful story.
A Great Hope
by Jessica Stanley
Quick Review – A Great Hope by Jessica Stanley
On March 17, 2022 By The Unseen LibraryIn Australian, Drama, Quick Review
A Great Hope Cover
Publisher: Picador (Trade Paperback – 22 February 2022)
Series: Standalone
Length: 406 pages
My Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Amazon Book Depository
Intriguing new author Jessica Stanley produces a compelling Australian political drama, A Great Hope, an intense read that looks at the impact of the mysterious death of a politician on his family, set to the backdrop of a turbulent time in Australian politics.
Plot Synopsis:
John Clare was a titan in Australian politics. The head of a powerful union and a key player in the election of Kevin Rudd as prime minister in 2007, he had long been tipped as a future leader himself. Supporting him in his push for power were his elegant wife Grace, his troubled children Sophie and Toby, and Tessa, the mistress he thought would stay secret.
But now John has fallen, brutally, to his death. A terrible accident – or was it?
In the wake of losing John, his inner circle mourn and rage, remembering and trying to forget the many ways he’d loved and disappointed them. An adoring and unreliable father; a grateful and selfish husband; a besotted and absent lover; an authoritative and compassionate leader; a failed politician in an era when party politics failed a nation. As those around him reassess everything they knew of and felt for John, a new idea of what love and power really mean begins to emerge – as does the true cause of his death.
Gripping, propulsive and ambitious, A Great Hope untangles the mystery of John’s fall through the eyes of those who knew him best – or thought they did. Deftly displaying the clash of the political and the personal, this is a novel for our times, from a brilliant and forceful new Australian writer.
This was an excellent novel which I think did a great job telling a unique story by exploring some of the more controversial elements of recent Australian politics. A Great Hope’s story is a great blend of personal drama, political intrigue and contemporary historical fiction, with a little bit of mystery thrown in as various characters attempt to understand the death of John Clare and the impact he had on the world.
Telling the story from a variety of different perspectives, including those of his family, his mistress, and other related figures, Stanley presents a complex and winding narrative that proves to be very compelling at times. Initially set one year after the death of John Clare, the story jumps around the various point-of-view characters, and the readers are shown not only their present situations and opinions but also the origins of the characters as well as the full events that led up to the night John Clare died. While this does produce a cluttered story with a few odd moments (such as the unnecessary and graphic sex scenes), the reader is soon treated to a unique story that cleverly builds up to the finale while also exploring the various key characters. You get a real sense of everyone featured in the novel, especially those closest to John Clare, and their complex lives and relationships with the political heavyweights. Unfortunately, most of these characters are pretty terrible people who are fairly insufferable and hard to enjoy. While this was no doubt the intent, to show the strain and ugliness a political life brings out, there are barely any relatable or redeemable figures here (honestly the only character I particularly liked was the mistress, Tessa, which is a bit odd when you think about it).
While this lack of likeable characters did slow the flow and my enjoyment of the story a little, I managed to power through the last 200 pages in a single sitting. There are some interesting resolutions and revelations towards the end, and I enjoyed seeing some of the storylines come full circle, especially those that are set up in the present and then expanded on in the flashbacks. The resolution of who or what caused the death of John Clare was pretty interesting and a little surprising, but it fit nicely into the unique feel and storytelling of A Great Hope.
One of the most distinctive elements of A Great Hope was the author’s intense and in-depth examination of Australian politics in the early 21st century, particularly around the 2007 and 2010 elections. This is mainly because the author, Jessica Stanley, was herself involved in some of these campaigns, particularly in 2007, when she served as one of the party’s social media consultants (similar to main character Tessa). As such, this book contains some compelling and fascinating insights into the election campaign, candidates, and voters, particularly those associated with Australia’s major left-wing party (the Labor party), which really added to my enjoyment of the book. Some of the more intriguing and compelling political moments of this period are scattered throughout A Great Hope, and I deeply enjoyed seeing the author’s take on what happened and why. The author also examines the growing impact of social media during this time, as well as other intriguing elements about campaigns and party politics. However, readers should be warned that these political elements do start to get very upsetting as the book continues, especially as Stanley dives into the failures of government, the increased political hostility, the rejection of climate change by the opposition, and the inherent sexism that defined the era between 2007 and 2010. This stirred up some unpleasant memories of the political landscape of the time, but I did find this to be an interesting and captivating part of the novel, and I really appreciated how much these unique and realistic inclusions added to the story.
Fantastic new author Jessica Stanley got off to a great start here with A Great Hope, producing an intriguing and distinctive novel that makes excellent use of the author’s political insights. While I had some issues with the story and characters, A Great Hope ended up being quite an entertaining book, and I was very interested in seeing how everything came together, as well as all the clever political inclusions. I look forward to seeing what Stanley writes in the future, especially as there are so many memorable moments in Australian politics to set a story around.