The novelist and screenwriter introduces his witty and acute social comedy set in a Sussex village.

'No one is perfectly happy. But when are we happy enough?' William Nicholson's new novel, The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life, enters the minds and hearts of a group of 'new villagers', the people who live in the country and work in the city. It's about marriage and sex, work and money, being a parent and being a child; about life not turning out the way you hoped, and about life being richer than you dreamed. The main plot – a wife whose long-ago lover returns, to remind her how intense her feelings once were – is borrowed from past experiences of the author's wife, Virginia Nicholson, herself a writer (Singled Out). She will be on the platform with him to discuss turning real life into fiction, whether her husband understands women, and the married life of two writers.