Darling: A razor-sharp, gloriously funny retelling of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love

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India Knight does a fantastic job of capturing the essence of Mitford's original story but brings overlays modernity that makes it more relatable for today. Knight's effervescence of language magnifies the eccentricities of the families to satirical levels. As crazy as things get, there are poignant moments scattered throughout which remind us that love is sometimes not what we imagined, but it can also come when we least expect it. After writing an article in The Sunday Times about her daughter's special needs - her youngest child has DiGeorge syndrome. Okay readers, don’t judge me, we’ve all done it, but I requested this book solely on the basis of loving that simply gorgeous front cover. Eventually Linda does find her way out from the bosom of her deeply eccentric extended family, and moves to London to become a model. She knows she doesn't want to marry 'a man who looks like a pudding', as her good and dull sister Louisa has done, and marries the flashy, handsome son of a UKIP peer instead. But her new life is unromantic: darker, wilder and more complicated than she expected. Mess with Nancy Mitford at your peril. Last year, purists recoiled from Emily Mortimer’s (in my mind terrific) BBC adaptation of the author’s 1945 novel The Pursuit of Love. No one likes people fiddling with their favourites, especially a classic as beloved as Mitford’s tale of interwar aristos the Radletts. So India Knight is a brave woman for retelling it for the 21st century .

Husband number one, Tony Kroesig, has been perfectly refashioned as the son of a prominent right-winger. He calls his banking colleagues “proper lads” and has a sister called Blanche (“I thought it a sinister name for the offspring of a Ukip supporter,” thinks Fran). This book is gorgeous. Full of charm and whimsy, I want so badly to live at Alconleigh. Uncle Matthew is ridiculous and my favourite character with Davey as a close second.

This is a Mitford retelling, so the British class obsession features prominently, mainly in the form of working-class Uncle Matthew’s complicated loathing of “poshos”. Knight also takes a gleeful magnifying glass to the hypocrisies of modern life, from rigorous dieter Blanche going to restaurants solely for social media content, to Christian making Linda do all the housework, because paying a cleaner is “immoral”. We might call this, as a genre, novels of the interior: interiors of places, and interiors of people. It’s easy to dismiss the domestic, but if home is where the heart is, the heart is where all humanity happens. And Darling is a very human book, full of feelings and heartbreak and humour and joy.

The big question is WHY OH WHY? i.e. why bother retelling such a perfect book? What can be gained from doing this? Granted, it’s hard to compete with the high stakes of Mitford’s pre Second World War setting. Knight makes Linda’s third love affair, with French hotel tycoon Fabrice El Hassane, dizzyingly romantic. But there’s no getting round it: being separated from your lover because they must open a new hotel in New Zealand is fundamentally less sexy than them leaving to fight the Nazis as a French resistance hero. Darling' is a modernised, re-imagined version of Nancy Mitford's classic, 'The Pursuit of Love'. Linda Radlett's quest for love is narrated by her best friend, and cousin, Fran. Their unique, somewhat cloistered, childhood let their imaginations run rife; growing up is an adventure. Although Linda believes she wants to be free from the family confines, really she only dreams of romance and marriage.

Inevitably, Linda eventually rebels against her sheltered childhood, running away to London to be a model and then jumping into a duo of ill-fated marriages, which is Knight’s cue to skewer certain quarters of the British ruling class. Knight, a native French speaker, lived in Brussels until about the time she turned nine. After migrating to the United Kingdom, she was educated in London. She was awarded an exhibition to Trinity College, Cambridge, where she read Modern Languages from 1984-1987, before starting her career in journalism. I was good at becoming whatever was required: you could pour me into any vessel and I'd take on its shape" He was obsessed with money and status, perhaps because, as Aunt Sadie pointed out, he was one of those people who are clever enough to work out that they aren't a sufficient draw on their own" Fans of Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit Of Love will adore this brilliant contemporary take ... The writing is as sharp, the details as perfect, the jokes as funny as [the] original' Daily Mail