Consider Yourself Kissed

‘Consider Yourself Kissed is a love story like no other: charming, warm, heartfelt and funny but with a truly razor-like authenticity. I absolutely loved every moment and didn’t want it to end!’ * Liane Moriarty * ‘Consider Yourself Kissed is a smart literary love story and an absorbing family drama. Jessica Stanley follows her characters over the years as they make their way in the private, intricate, fragile world they create for themselves, and in the always-changing larger world. This is a deeply appealing and winning novel.’ * Meg Wolitzer * ‘Consider Yourself Kissed is an incisive story about the complicated task of loving and being loved. There’s so much in this smart book – about class and identity, family and work. Stanley’s idiosyncratic characters are the heartbeat of this novel. I could see them, full-bodied, jumping out of the page, interesting and strange and, by the end, I missed them all.’ * Erin Riley, author of A Real Piece of Work * ‘Consider Yourself Kissed is a tender, layered novel and one of the sharpest portrayals of marriage and motherhood I've ever read. It's also warm and clever and funny. I completely inhaled it. As with all my favourite novels, I wished I could read it forever.’ * Alice Robinson, author of If You Go * 'Jessica Stanley captures all the quiet ecstasy and devastation of being a lover, a mother, a woman in the world, and wondering what is left over for yourself. In Coralie's endless labour to do everything right and try to write, I felt achingly seen. I want to hand this gorgeous book to every mum I know with a hug.' * Clare Fletcher, author of Love Match * ‘I absolutely raced through this novel which I found so smart, funny and true to life. One of those books you’ll want to give all your friends once you’ve finished.’ * Claire Powell, author of At the Table * ‘The platonic ideal of reading experiences!…So funny, so smart and deliciously well observed! A real treat.’ * Lizzy Stewart, author of Alison * ‘Fabulous…It’s clever, joyful, familiar and awkward, and so funny.’ * Nina Stibbe, author Reasons to Be Cheerful * ‘Sweet and tender.’ * Pandora Sykes, author of How Do We Know We’re Doing it Right? * ‘I loved it, I loved them, I loved the Cazaletty interior details, I loved the social politics, I loved the actual politics, I loved the time span, I loved how complicated everyone was. I already know I will read it again…A beautiful romcom for grown-ups.’ * Ella Risbridger author of The Year of Miracles * ‘A book about falling in love to fall in love with—Consider Yourself Kissed is a beautifully observed, charming, intelligent, very funny novel full of heart and warmth and life. Jessica Stanley is a rare and special talent.’ * Lisa Owens author of Not Working * ‘Set over ten years, this wonderful, sweeping novel doesn’t just make the political personal, but the personal political. It shows us how life is a series of negotiations and situations over which you have little control, but that loving and being loved is central. Beautiful and life affirming.’ * Araminta Hall, author of One of the Good Guys * ‘Consider me smitten.’ * Chris Power, author of A Lonely Man * ‘Immersive, truly funny, brilliantly smart, and full of lovable characters, Consider Yourself Kissed is a joy. In her novel spanning ten years of one woman's life, Jessica Stanley balances domesticity and politics, contemporary British history and the pursuit of love – and she makes it all seem effortless. I cried when I read the last page, simply because I was bereft that it was over.’ * Claire Dederer, author of Monsters * ‘Beautifully written, wise, funny, moving. Deftly fuses the personal and the political. A proper grown-up love story.’ * Beth Morrey, author of Saving Missy * ‘Oh, how I loved and empathised with Coralie! Consider Yourself Kissed is funny, tender, authentic and incredibly moving.’ * Jennie Godfrey, author of The List of Suspicious Things * 'Warm, funny, clever and real, Consider Yourself Kissed is at once a charming romance, a social history and a profoundly authentic study of the complex work of love. A wonderful novel.’ * Eleanor Elliott Thomas, author of The Opposite of Success * ‘A beautiful, harrowing, wild ride through everyday life, Consider Yourself Kissed is a love song to women everywhere.’ * Annabel Monaghan, author of Nora Goes Off Script * ‘Utterly brilliant—so astonishingly clever, but with a core of love. It’s generous, it’s hopeful, it’s one of the very best grown-up love stories I have ever read. And wears its smartness so lightly, but it captures the strangeness of the past few years perfectly. I could not have adored it more.’ * Daisy Buchanan, author of How to Be a Grown-up * ‘Jessica Stanley’s principal subject is romance, which she renders—in all its mess and glory—masterfully. But the real delight in Consider Yourself Kissed is how the novel confidently thinks about love more broadly: the feeling we can have for family, for work, for art and books and our homes and our friends, for the very world around us. It is an exhilarating read, a marvel of a book.’ * Rumaan Alam, National Book Award finalist and NYT bestselling author of Leave the World Behind and Entitlement * ‘Funny, tender, intelligent, and political, Consider Yourself Kissed finds the beauty and ecstasies in the life of a woman around marriage, motherhood and family, all while dissecting its complications and heartbreaks. I felt embraced in its gentle humor, and then gut punched by its deep emotion and perceptiveness. By the end I was so invested in the story that I became Coralie!’ * Sanam Mahloudji, author of The Persians * ‘I loved it. I was grinning like an idiot for the first forty pages, and crying for the next forty...It links emotional and political events so brilliantly and is incredibly funny too.’ * Emma Healey, author of Elizabeth is Missing * ‘An extremely intelligent, present and excellently written marvel of a book that I will never stop thinking about.’ * Ore Agbaje-Williams, author of The Three of Us * ‘Consider Yourself Kissed is ringingly original and just absurdly good. Jessica Stanley captures all the tenderness and brutality of young motherhood without dulling either, and the relationships and writing are so bracingly, deliciously fresh that I wish there were a fresher word than fresh. And that the book were 1000 pages longer.’ * Catherine Newman, New York Times bestselling author of Sandwich and We All Want Impossible Things * ‘I'm annoyed I didn’t write this book myself. Combines rom-com breeziness with sharp political observation, plus one of the best depictions of stepmother-hood I’ve ever read.’ * Madeleine Gray, author of Green Dot *