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

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Laika, the youngest, retreats into a contactless digital life, designing the trading algorithms that will ultimately prove his downfall in a condo near Wall Street. Linda remains “soft-shelled as well as soft-hearted, with an overabundance of trusting optimism and friendliness”.

The fact that it is a modern adaptation has been done so well, it has avoided being a superficial reading of The Pursuit of Love so well.

Eventually Linda does find her way out from the bosom of her deeply eccentric extended family, and she escapes to London. Husband number one, Tony Kroesig, has been perfectly refashioned as the son of a prominent right-winger. The last few years have seen the 2021 BBC adaptation of Mitford’s 1945 novel The Pursuit of Love, starring Lily James, and the “Mitford Murders” series by Jessica Fellowes. Linda’s dud husbands are the fleshily handsome son of a Ukip peer (looking ‘like he lives off parma ham and cream, like an old woman’s bloody cat’, Uncle Matthew fulminates) and an Etonian anti-capitalist.

You can almost feel Knight giggling as she invents a new lexicon for the Radletts: “If people were short – all the Radletts were long-limbed and rangy and viewed short people with fascination and envy (‘It must be so cosy to be short,’ Linda said) – we’d say they were ‘still growing’, even if they were adults: ‘What’s she like? Here are all the old favourites – gorgeous Linda, irascible Uncle Matthew, husky-voiced Bolter – brought up-to-date and reimagined by Knight. Also, any book that manages to make me laugh out loud (or snort) multiple times, has a special place in my heart.Such a fun and witty read about the Radletts, mainly Linda Radlett, who feels herself destined for greater things in life. I actually snorted with laughter in several bits of it - particularly when Uncle Matthew and Davey get obsessed with Instagram. A razor-sharp, laugh-out-loud novel that re-imagines the cast of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love. I think we can all relate to the struggles that Linda faces, as well as a loathe for the Christians and Tonys of the world.

but I never actually believed it; the smug privilege and pointlessness of just about everyone in the book left me struggling to understand why I was supposed to care for or about any of them - it's all very well to employ character stereotypes for a fun shorthand so the audience knows what to expect, but to never step beyond the stereotypes is the mark of a lazy author.Like most clever people, I’m not over-fussed about clothing; there have been numerous studies showing that successful types – unless they’re in entertainment, showbiz or fashion itself, obvs – tend to wear the same thing every day.

By making Mr Radlett a working-class rock star rather than moneyed aristocrat, Knight gives herself the opportunity to rib the upper classes through his frequently irate, defiantly egotistical lens.Hers is a higgledy-piggledy life that is always buoyed by good cheer, and everyone swept up in her wake is left changed by the encounter, no matter how small or big it is.