A young wife unpacks in a Swiss hotel suite and finds a jar of poison sitting on the cocktail tray with an ornate silver spoon standing in it, as though somebody expected her husband to help himself. He laughs and calls it a practical joke. Somebody in this building has read his medical notes and his war record, and only one of those documents is true.

A dark kitchen, one cup of coffee, and the only quiet hour a single father will get all day. By seven the dog has a dead snake, the school folder has vanished and the six-year-old has had an accident. The romance has not started yet, and the book has already told you everything about its hero.

Dozens of viewers turn up. Almost all of them are men on their own, driving cars with out-of-state plates and no child seats. One woman kneels at the oven, slides her arm in to the shoulder and closes her eyes. The property is not being sold. It is choosing.

At the back of a Tuscan property, a stand of mismatched trees. Cypress, pine, two lemons, one oak. Every trunk carries a set of initials cut into the bark by hand, and the swing hangs from the one planted for a husband. The heroine has been sitting on it since childhood without knowing what it meant.

A river guide tells a campfire story about a white desert bloom that steals a person's will and leaves them awake for it. Nine chapters later, a luxury skincare brand is selling that flower as self-care. Nina Simon's second novel is a comedy about sisters wrapped around a very cold idea.