My most likely way to meet someone new is:

Beautiful drifters lost in London: doubt, deceit and a life half-lived. Janet Davey has established an enviable reputation on the strength of just two novels: her remarkable debut, English Correspondence, and First Aid. She excels in characters who need to lead ordinary lives of determined restraint, keeping their secrets intact. The realisation that they are approximations of the selves they might have been only occurs when events conspire to shatter the fragile veneer of that reserve.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in her new novel. It explores the overlapping of several London lives tipped into chaos by one random episode. On a snowbound January evening, Abe Rivers and Richard Epworth meet in a taxi queue outside Paddington Station. Abe, in his twenties, and his younger sister, Kirsty, lead a fractious life in a rundown house in Kensal Rise, left them by the mixed-race father they hardly knew. Richard is a City accountant and evangelical Christian, living in suburban comfort with his wife, Vivienne, and two daughters, who are all away skiing. Richard and Abe share a taxi and, at Richard's invitation, Abe spends the night with him.

Abe is a social and sexual drifter who enjoys chance encounters. For Richard, Abe is a painful reminder of a past he thought he'd left behind after the death of his first love, Jamie, a few months into their relationship. At Richard's request, Abe leaves a card, but with his sister's phone number, hoping Richard won't contact him. He doesn't, though he wants to, but Vivienne, knowing something is wrong and wondering if Richard is having an affair, finds the card in his wallet. Without his knowledge, she phones Kirsty, who angrily redirects her to Abe.

The most surreal scene is the stand-off between Abe and Vivienne, when she confronts him about Kirsty in the faux-zen loft of the Shoreditch healing centre where he works. Slippery Abe improvises a batty New Age explanation as to how his sister's card might have found its way into Richard's wallet. Vivienne accepts his story, but knows that something has changed. A seismic shift has taken place in all their lives.

Davey steers us through the ripple effect of Richard's crisis with skill and economy. Her mature insight, pitch-perfect prose and unerring sense of place releases her damaged characters into a wasteland of doubt. By the end of this wonderful book, we know almost every uncomfortable thing about them, except what the final consequences of that fateful night will be.

Source: http://www.independent.co.uk

By Christie Hickman