Senta Rich

Noelle is an efficient and friendly hotel cleaner, a model employee. Or so she'd have you think. The trouble is that she can't help taking little 'souvenirs' as she cleans. Nothing of value, just tokens of happy, normal lives: a lipstick, a hair clip, some tweezers.

As she starts at her 21st hotel, she's determined to beat her record of one month in a five star hotel before suspicion falls on her. But when she meets her new colleagues, her plans are complicated. These women aren't just hands pushing carts down lonely hotel corridors: they are women with lives full of happiness and worry, pain and joy. The kind of lives Noelle has never known how to live. They make her wonder what it might be like to have real friends, people to stick around for…

Tristan and Izzy are on the brink of marital breakdown. Sex has become less than perfunctory and distance shadows their interactions. The arrival of their new neighbour may just be their salvation: or, will she be their undoing?

Vivacious, enigmatic and enticing, Viv piques both Tristan and Izzy's interest, her appearance in their lives offering them diversion from their faltering marriage and a window into the people they might be were it not for each other.

But as Viv becomes an ever-increasing presence in their lives, the couple are forced to confront the long-ignored truths about themselves, each other and their pasts that have been a silent, spectral presence between them for years. At this fork in their marriage, they will face the most difficult decision: to cleave together for the sake of their union, or to walk away.