Taking the Devil's Advice

Spending the summer with his ex-wife, his children and his ex-wife's new husband was never going to be a good idea. Oliver should have expected the autobiography he's writing to be constantly sabotaged by derision. But he's a philosopher, always far happier with abstraction than with the realities that keep crashing around him. And when Constance starts to write her own version of their family's tempestuous shared past, she tells a very different story...

Praise for Taking the Devil's

'Anne Fine's black comedy bounces along its sprightly one-liners without flagging' - Observer

'Compact, well-wrought fiction which marries an easy, immediate, jaunty style to what is a deadly serious theme ... Ms Fine's achievement is in being able to illustrate with uncommon eloquence the attitudes of two people caught in an all too familiar form of conflict.' - The Scotsman

'Back to the crumbling home front and the crackle of domestic cross-fire in this clever and entertaining novel ... a direly witty achievement' - Guardian