Comfort and Joy: A Novel - Couverture souple

Breathless, ­colourful, hilarious and honest; the dialogue is sitcom-snappy and the opening scenes in Oxford Street positively Joycean (Wendy Holden Daily Mail)

So kindly and funny and affectionate that you could probably warm your hands on it. Miraculously, this is a feel-good story that manages not to be saccharine. There are a great many good jokes here . . . but concealed amid the fun, like silver coins in a Christmas pudding, is a serious theme. This is a book you could safely give to practically anyone. Snap up plenty of copies to hand around under the tree (Spectator)

I loved Comfort and Joy, a hilarious, bawdy yet touching portrait of Christmas over three years (Jilly Cooper Guardian Books of the Year)

Fabulous. Laugh-out-loud funny, moving and as cuddly as Santa Claus, this is perfect for snuggling up with over the Christmas holidays (Cosmopolitan)

Touching...it will make you laugh, maybe make you cry and keep you reading past bedtime (Lauren Laverne Grazia)

A wickedly funny, painfully honest look at families, festivities and romantic love (Marie Claire)

Tender, tough, schmaltzy, witty and heart-warming all at once. Knight has a great comic touch - there are some wonderfully rude bits and a fantastic rant about the ridiculous expectations piled on 21st-century women to be perfect - and writes with a deceptive lightness. At the heart of this funny, affectionate novel is an acknowledgement that families, like love, come in odd shapes and sizes, and that both matter more than anything (Metro)

Witty enough to make you laugh out loud, but there are moments of real emotion that keep the book from being too light (Psychologies)

A superb ear for dialogue...wonderfully comic (Evening Standard)

Riotously high in laughs and glamour. I defy a festive grump not to be cheered by it (Independent Books of the Year)

If Bridget Jones had two ex-husbands, three children, and invited her entire extended family over for Christmas...

It's December 23, and Clara Dunphy is running around Oxford Street like a chicken with its head cut off trying to pick up "a few last- minute bits and bobs." Despite the frenzy, the twice-divorced mother of three loves Christmas and always wants to make it perfect. A challenge even in the best of times, but particularly when "family" means an extended network of in-laws, out-laws, ex-stepfathers, and hangers-on, totaling sixteen. Is the madness of Christmas really worth it? Clara is a witty, blackly funny everywoman who will win over anyone who has ever longed to shut out the holidays with "a giant martini . . . and some olives."