Family Friends: A Novel

A "sultry and evocative" novel about the secrets and entanglements between a group of friends holidaying in the south of France. 

Since they first met at university twenty years ago, Maggie and Will have spent the last two weeks of every summer in France with their close friends, Lydia and Roland. Both families always look forward to this annual ritual—but this summer things are different.

Will has been hiding something from his wife, and is struggling to keep his deceit from seeping into the cracks in their marriage. Maggie is worried about their withdrawn teenage son. Roland is grappling with how to grieve the death of his first wife. Lydia is trying to ignore past chemistry with an old friend while learning to play second fiddle to a ghost.

Into this already conflicted fray steps Issy, Roland’s beguiling, irrepressible daughter from his first marriage. And as the August heat beats down, and the children behave in unexpected ways, the two couples find that tensions they have been trying their best to temper have begun to bubble over …

Family Friends is a deeply atmospheric, sophisticated and compelling novel about what happens when the ties of love and loyalty are stretched to the breaking point, how relationships change (and don’t change) over time, and how we navigate the challenges thrown at us in every season of life.

"Do you wish you were spending the summer in a villa in the south of France? Let's be honest: so do I. But the next best thing is joining the characters in Chloë Ashby's Family Friends … a sexy, simmering exploration of youthful and middle-aged desire. I could feel summer heat on my skin and the delicious pleasure of a cool dip in the villa's swimming pool. A luminous summer novel."—Amanda Eyre Ward, New York Times bestselling author of Arrivals and Departures & The Jetsetters