My Favourite Mistake by Marian Keyes

My Favourite Mistake is the 16th novel by Marian Keyes and the seventh featuring the wonderful Walsh family, which was published last month. I was very happy to find it for half price in Sainsbury’s. My Favourite Mistake is Anna Walsh’s second time in the spotlight. We first meet Anna properly in 2004’s Anybody Out There. I vividly remember reading it at a holiday house in Fowey, when my eldest was 3 and my younger son only 11 months.

For anyone who doesn’t know, the Walsh family are five sisters, plus their parents. There are now also various children, partners and exes. The sisters and their mother are loud and argumentative, but also very caring. They love clothes and make-up and especially enjoy talking about men and sex. They first appeared in Watermelon in 1995 and have more or less aged in real time.

Anybody Out There is all about Anna becoming a young widow, following a car accident. Between Anybody Out There and My Favourite Mistake, she has built a life and a career in New York. At the start of the book, she is 48 and has split from her partner, Angelo. She’s had enough of her glamorous and pressured career, so goes home to Ireland and her crazy family.

Without a job, Anna agrees to help out old friends, Colm and Brigit, with their luxury retreat in a small town. But the locals aren’t happy about the development. Can a former beauty PR from Dublin and New York help the locals accept the plans?

Unfortunately, Joey Armstrong is also working on the project. Joey and Anna have a long history of romantic near misses and she wants nothing to do with him. But she’s only working on the project for a few days. Can they manage to put their past behind them?

My Favourite Mistake is a wonderful read. There’s nobody quite like Marian Keyes and there’s no family quite like the Walshes. I just love the language they use and all their little quirks – like always turning up early for everything and having no boundaries with anything.

If you’re looking for something to put a smile on your face, you need to read My Favourite Mistake. Do you need to read all the previous Walsh family novels? Not really! It’s nice getting to know them over time, but you can also get to know them just from this one. If you want to know the Walshes as proper grown ups, rather than the young women of the earlier novels, you could read Again, Rachel first.