Sie kennen sich aus Schul- und Studienzeiten, haben gemeinsam eine alte Villa in London bewohnt und früher viele Träume und Hoffnungen geteilt. The novel focuses on the story of three women, their friendships and how their lives and relationships change over a decade. Wir sind umgeben von Erwartungshaltungen, manche erfüllen wir, anderen werden wir nicht gerecht und können das auch gar nicht. Cate has the most potential of the three, but gets the least screen-time, and the most intriguing aspects of her past are barely explored.

The story is told from the perspective of three friends - Lissa, Cate and Hannah - and switches back and forward in time from their shared past to their fractured present. The central question of the book, and actually the thing that most drew me in, was in the title Expectation, ‘what happens when we don’t fulfil our own expectations of ourselves? It doesn’t help that her mum Sarah, an aloof painter, makes her feel guilty for not living up to the feminist legacy that Sarah and her generation left through their activism at Greenham Common: “We fought for you to be extraordinary. I feel that these difficult to explain tensions and links between women are likely as alien to men as any of the nuances of male friendship are to me.Lissas Leben verläuft hingegen in ganz anderen Bahnen - sie ist Schauspielerin und steht endlich vor ihrem Durchbruch auf der Theaterbühne. A quick check of Hope’s acknowledgements touchingly reveals that her mother, like Sarah, was a Greenham Common veteran.

The prose is beautiful, the characters achingly real, their flawed decisions enraging and yet somehow still relatable. In London, Hannah and her academic husband Nathan have been trying to have a baby via IVF for years and are considering giving up, though Hannah is still desperate to become a mother. So it turns out that the line I quoted earlier, a line I read as sarcastic - nothing beats Hannah's pain - was in fact meant sincerely.According to this book, there really is nothing worse than being childless, and it's Lissa who deserves our pity in the end.