Such sombre material lends itself to realist fiction, but Jordan delivers a classic bedroom farce with snappy dialogue and egocentric yet endearing characters that career from one complication to another. The novel is also a satire of the outer suburbs – '[a] nudist, adulterous spa retreat populated by guerrilla amateur psychoanalysts' – and pokes fun at contemporary fads and mores, including attitudes towards infidelity and divorce: 'It's super-common to start over these days,' says Martha (who is also seven-year-old Mercedes's teacher); 'It's a trope, practically.'

In serious interludes, Janice, a microbiologist from the city, reflects on why her marriage to Alec foundered – reasons not unconnected with her concern for Mercedes and Paris. Occasionally, the shifts between humour and pathos are jolting, but these poignant intervals provide welcome breathing space, as well as incrementally supplying the back-story. They also create empathy: the narrator reflects on cycles of familial damage when she imagines her nieces 'splitting themselves in two'. A repeated refrain concerns the difficulty of being a grown-up: the impossibility of understanding how the world works; the negotiation of love's absence.

To describe Our Tiny, Useless Hearts as eminently readable is no aspersion; this comedy is perfectly calibrated to encourage glimpses of our own foibles in characters writ suburban-large – behaving badly, seeking forgiveness, and, sometimes, making amends.