The latest addition to my website is A L Kennedy‘s Serious Sweet. This is another first-class novel from Kennedy, telling the story over the course of one day of two people who are having serious difficulties coping with life. The first, Jon Sigurdsson, is a fairly senior civil servant. He is divorced, does not get on with his daughter as well as he would like, does not like his colleagues or his boss and has taken up as a hobby a handwritten letter-writing service to lonely women, whom he has no intention of meeting. Meg Willams is a lonely former alcoholic, a bankrupt accountant and recovering from cervical cancer. She now works in admin for an animal shelter. She subscribes to Jon’s letter-writing service and inevitably tracks him down. Apart from the letter-writing service, what makes this novel interesting is that we follow the thoughts of the two as they go about their daily business and these thoughts reveal two people who seem to be very unhappy with their lives and, on a couple of occasions, close to breakdown. Kennedy tells the story very well, really giving us an insight in Jon and Meg and their struggles with life.