No Rehearsal
Publisher: Minerva Press
Published: March 1999
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 348
ISBN-13: 9780754103981
Subjects: Modern fiction
First sentence: It wasn't the fact that she didn't like his taste in music that much.  Some of it was all right; the older stuff was a bit off the wall for her though.  She wasn't into jazz or the blues.  Come to think of it, she'd never heard him listen to it either.  It must have been a phase he'd gone through once, perhaps when she'd popped out to swap homework notes with a friend.
Description: It could happen to you...

No Rehearsal is a warm tribute to the extraordinary lives of ordinary men and women. Laugh, cry and travel the world with Edward, Olivia and Bump.
As Edward Mallory so rightly pointed out, 'Life's no rehearsal,' which is just as well, really. Because after that, let's just call it eventful, cruise, Daniel Beech's liver certainly couldn't stand another opening night. And if it were a rehearsal, would Dan's wife, Emma, try to electrocute him with the kettle again? No, once round is enough for him. Enough for his daughter, Olivia, too, whose unborn baby is attempting to be the first child to kick its way out of the womb.

The Mallorys have had a rough ride, recently, too. First there was... well, you'll have to find that one out. Then Val's cleaner inconveniently expires in the lounge - without cleaning the fireplace, either. And Liz is having the hardest time getting her nerdy teenage boyfriend Don out of his jumpers and into her knickers.

The troubled, uproarious and crisis-punctuated lives of both the Beech and Mallory families are irrevocably intertwined through the figure of Olivia's acrobatic unborn child, in this candid, moving, poignant and relentlessly funny novel.