[.ca] Just Between Us (ISBN 0007268645)

From Amazon.co.uk:
On the surface, Rose Miller, the heroine of Cathy Kelly's Just Between Us, has a golden life: she's just about to celebrate her 40th wedding anniversary with her lovely husband Hugh, her three daughters are all wonderful and her home in the small Irish town of Kinvara is gorgeous. So far it sounds like a feature in a glossy magazine, where everyone is happy and smiling and the only foreseeable problems ahead involve estimating the exact quantity of canapés for the party guests at Rose's ruby wedding bash. But Cathy Kelly doesn't deal in slick clichés. Her characters, despite their glamorous exteriors, face real emotional dilemmas and heartaches. As Rose says: "It was one thing to look as if your life was perfect, it was another thing for it to be so. Looks could be deceptive." Cathy Kelly, with great warmth and compassion, begins to reveal the not-so-gilded truth about the four Miller women. Rose is questioning her marriage; her youngest daughter Holly is lacking in self-confidence and stuck in a boring job that stifles her creativity; single parent Stella is a brilliant lawyer and mum, but romance seems to be by-passing her; and Tara has a glowing television career, but her home life is turning out to be far from rosy--her husband seems to be drinking to excess. Over the course of some 500 hundred chatty pages Cathy Kelly reveals the women's secret doubts. Their problems are distressing, but the novel still has that feel-good factor; the author mixes humour with realism and the result is this compelling sixth novel from the bestselling Irish author. --Eithne Farry