I’m certain there’s no shortage of books that examine the intricacies of a friendship over decades. Friendships can be tested at various junctures in a person’s life, particularly when people choose partners, become parents, experience successes or failures, or if there is significant financial inequity. The challenge in writing a novel about such events and the impact of these on the friendship, is that the compressed timeline can render events overly dramatic.

Another danger in the friendship story is that it becomes one-sided. Invariably, one friend has all the luck while the other has only misfortune.

Somehow Nina Stibbe sidesteps the pitfalls, and in One Day I Shall Astonish the World she has created an authentic story that captures the see-sawing of Susan and Norma’s friendship over many decades.

The women meet during a university break,. Both working in a haberdashery shop, they have big plans for what comes next, and it’s also the first hint that Norma is the pushier and brasher of the two. Thirty years on, their lives have taken quite different paths and Susan, with a husband who is seeking immortality (despite not eating vegetables aside from iceberg lettuce and baked beans) and a daughter who is ‘challenging’, begins to wonder whether she has made the right choices about life, love, and work. Meanwhile, Norma’s focus on her academic career has come with its own costs.

Initially you might think that Stibbe has set the reader up to feel sorry for Susan, who hasn’t fulfilled the academic pursuits she once craved. However, descriptions of Norma’s life reveal a different kind of thinness, and although Stibbe stretched this a little too much toward the end, there’s enough there to give the reader pause and to weigh up what’s at stake for each of the women.

There are some genuine laugh-out-loud moments in this book, and I enjoyed the very gentle demonstration of ‘you can’t have it all’. But the real joy comes from the careful and accurate depiction of friendship, with its love and laughs, and grievances and resentments. Does it stray into the territory of ‘frenemies’? Probably. Is the friendship unevenly balanced? Yes, at times. But it also highlights that we can be distracted by the idea of ‘the grass is greener’, without stopping to consider whether we like green grass in the first place.

3/5 Wait for summer and enjoy it as a beach read.

I received an audio copy of One Day I Shall Astonish the World from the publisher, Hachette Audio, via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.

Susan and Roy get married at the golf club where Roy works. The club management use the wedding as an opportunity to test out their event catering, and serve ‘golf-themed cocktails’, including one named after nineties golfing champion, Seve Ballesteros.