"Just like you" by Nick Hornby

An audio book.

It's 2016, London. The Brexit vote is coming up. Emma Bacon likes talking about sex. Her kids go to public school. She flirts with Joe, (22, black) who works on Saturday in a butchers. He sometimes coaches a football team.

Lucy, Emma’s prettier friend and neighbour (42, a teacher, with boys 8 and 10), has separated from Paul because of his drinking, and doesn’t want him back though he's been through rehab. She’s trying blind dates but hasn't had sex for years. On the first night that she uses Joe as a babysitter, Paul turns up at the house very drunk and Joe has to use force to restrain him. Lucy has to return early to get rid of Paul. Joe wouldn't mind staying the night. But he's not asked.

The blind-date she had to abandon is Michael, in his 50s, an author. He asks her out. Joe is asked out by Jazz at the sports centre. Lucy and Joe discuss each other's date online. Lucy invites Michael back after their date. Michael and Joe meet and Joe goes home. Lucy thinks her silly interest in Joe is because she's lacking sex, and she intends sleeping with Michael. But he warns her that he has erectile issues and she ends the evening. Jazz offers to sleep with Joe on their first date but he says it's too soon.

After an awkward piece of conversation Lucy asks him to sleep with her. The sex isn't good for her the first few nights. It improves. His mother deduces that he's sleeping with someone her age. His ambition is to be a DJ.

There's a gentle break-up. Lucy becomes friends with Michael. Joe goes out with Hanna (a UCL literature student). When Lucy and the boys stay at Michael's 2nd home in the country, she invites Joe and Hanna. Hanna and Lucy have a chat. Hanna says she's had a nice summer with Joe but it won't last - she wants to do a Ph.D. Joe and Lucy get together again. He moves in.

They begin to be seen out together. They assess how each other gets on in the other's social context. They both do well. She has trouble at school when rumours start spreading. She notices that the people she used to think were like her (Shakespeare audiences) weren't like her after all. He has a one-nighter with Jazz (who's doing vocals for a track of his). He admits it to Lucy and they break up.

When he apologises, she wonders whether she should forgive him, but she does. 2 years later, at his sister's wedding, she's accepted as family.

Externals (politics - Trump and Brexit; society - their families and friends) put pressure on their relationship. They and their family/friends want to know where it (the relationship) is going. After the referendum there are reconciliations, apologies for lying, etc. "Brexit seemed to have floated clear of its details, was now like a religion"

The kids get some of the best lines.

Other reviews

• Sam Leith (Both are intensely sensitive to any sign that the other is conscious of what divides them)
• Joanna Briscoe (his attempt to inhabit the point of view of a black man in his 20s sits uneasily. Amid all the unwinnable arguments about who is allowed to write about whom, or from whose viewpoint, this is a brave, well meant if sometimes jarring attempt.)
• Sara Collins (there is an inauthenticity at the novel’s heart which seeps through even in the opening pages. At times, Just Like You is trying so hard to be a "woke", "political" novel that it ends up being one-dimensional and tone-deaf. ... Hornby’s inimitable style is not enough to save this novel, which flounders under the weight of the political topics it exerts itself so obviously to tackle.“)