The cover of Today will Be Different features a small image of the cover of Maria Semple's last novel, Where'd You Go, Bernadette – and with good reason. It's the US writer's calling card, a hilarious razor-sharp observational novel set in Seattle about a tech guru husband and his wife, the agoraphobic architect Bernadette, and their strange kid.
Nothing about their comfortable, over-examined life escapes Semple's flamboyant satire. Richard Linklater is directing the film version. Much is familiar in her new novel Today Will be Different – there's the same conflicted, moneyed, creative central character – this time called Eleanor (a Bernadette reboot), a cartoonist dealing with a long list of dysfunctional relationships in her life in California as she tries to fix herself.
Her husband is a mega bucks music producer and they have a strange kid, a boy called Timby. It’s fun, a high energy page turner, and Semple is an acute social commentator – though you don’t come away liking or laughing as much with Eleanor as you did with Bernadette.
