Madeleine Wickham Books in Order

Under her own name, Madeleine Wickham wrote a string of contemporary novels that look at money, marriage and social climbing in modern Britain. Instead of one central heroine, these stories tend to follow several characters whose lives collide over one charged weekend, a shared house or an unexpected crisis.

In 40 Love everything revolves around a supposedly friendly tennis party at a country estate. As four couples play sets, watch their children rehearse a play and compare careers, old rivalries and hidden financial pressures come to the surface, showing how easily envy can creep into long‑standing friendships.

• A Desirable Residence* and Swimming Pool Sunday use houses as fault lines. In the first, Liz and Jonathan are saddled with two mortgages and are drawn into the schemes of a charming but ruthless estate agent and the glamorous tenants he finds for their unsold home. In the second, an accident at a village pool day sends a child to hospital and pits neighbours against one another as lawyers and blame enter the picture.

The Gatecrasher follows Fleur Daxeny, who crashes funerals to charm wealthy widowers and leave with their money, only to find herself unexpectedly attached to one man’s family and haunted by her own past choices. The Wedding Girl turns on a hasty student marriage of convenience that comes back to threaten a lavish society wedding years later.

Other novels, such as Cocktails for Three and Sleeping Arrangements, centre on tight circles of friends thrown off balance. Three magazine colleagues who meet monthly for gossip must finally confront their secrets, while two families double‑booked into a Spanish villa find that unresolved history matters more than sunshine or sangria.

Across these books you can expect sharp, readable scenes of dinner parties, offices and weekends away in which people quietly test one another’s limits. Wickham is interested in how money, property and ambition shape relationships, but she lets humour, awkward conversations and small acts of kindness carry the story. The tone is a little steelier than the later Sophie Kinsella romcoms, yet the same eye for tangled loyalties and hopeful endings runs through the whole set.