Meet Kate Reddy, fund manager & mother of two. She can juggle nine different currencies in five different time zones & get herself & two children washed & dressed & out of the house in half an hour. A victim of time famine, Kate counts seconds like other women count calories. As she hurtles between appointments, through her head spools the crazy tape-loop of the working mother's life: must remember client reports, bouncy castles, transatlantic phone call, nativity play, check Dow Jones, cancel hygienist, squeeze sagging pelvic floor, make time for sex. Factor in a manipulative nanny, an Australian boss who looks at Kate's breasts as if they're on special offer, a long suffering husb&, her quietly aghast in-laws, two needy children & an e-mail lover, & you have a woman juggling so many balls that some day soon something's going to hit the ground. In an uproariously funny & achingly sad novel, Allison Pearson captures the guilty secret lives of working mothers, the self-recriminations, comic deceptions, forgeries, giddy exhaustion & despair as no other writer has ever done. With fierce irony & a sparkling style, she brilliantly dramatises the dilemma of working motherhood at the start of the 21st century.