Darling: A razor-sharp, gloriously funny retelling of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love

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The book then follows all of the family – but primarily Linda on her pursuit of love, taking in London and Paris as well as Norfolk. Linda’s life is charted from early adolescence, and takes in her loves and losses, successes and failures.

Linda’s daughter Moira (deathlessly described by Mitford as a ‘howling orange in a fine black wig’) is gaily abandoned in the original; here she remains a beloved, if semi-detached, family member. In her journalism Knight has written often about the importance of cosiness, and here she has the perfect cosy autumn read. The book is narrated by Frances, a cousin of the Radlett siblings, who has been sent to live with her Aunt Sadie and Uncle Matthew by her flaky mother. In the author’s reimagining, Linda and her siblings grow up as “utter freaks” on the sprawling Alconleigh farm in north Norfolk.Irascible patriarch Uncle Matthew is a reformed rock star and his notorious Great War entrenching tool a bloodstained Brit award he used to brain a drummer while ‘high on pharmaceutical-grade cocaine’. I avoided watching, because the Wes Andersonification of my greatest literary succour seemed likely to burst every vein in my eyeballs.

Darling belongs in the pantheon of books that feel a bit like opening up a doll’s house to show the impeccable precision of the world within. Other authors have come along in my reading journey that have been right up my street - Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels are my all time go-to for comfort reading and never fail to raise a wry smile.They also have their own codes, words, abbreviations – which as a mother of 4, and with our own family ‘things’, I totally understand. She wears her heart on her sleeve and doesn’t apologise for it, and is funny and astute in her observations. If the Radletts of the 21st century are perhaps a little less extraordinary than the Radletts of the 20th, they still leap off the page with warmth and chaos.

Between Aunt Sadie’s hippy leanings and Uncle Matthew’s desire to shield his family from fame, the Radlett children are insulated from much of the modern world, home-schooled and banned from electronic devices. Laika, the youngest, retreats into a contactless digital life, designing the trading algorithms that will ultimately prove his downfall in a condo near Wall Street.Brilliantly done, faithful but imaginative, tremendously romantic and very funny' Nina Stibbe, author of Reasons to be Cheerful*****************Marooned in a sprawling farmhouse in Norfolk, teenage Linda Radlett feels herself destined for greater things. His violently arbitrary, Nicky Haslam-style hatreds pepper the pages: enoki mushrooms, thin socks or open-mouthed Instagrammers. Linda Radlett lives with her siblings, Louisa, Jassy and Robin, and their parents, Matthew and Sadie, on a vast Norfolk estate.