The One Plus One

Jess is a single mother who cleans holiday homes to keep her family afloat. Her husband has disappeared, her teenage stepson is being bullied, and her daughter, a gifted maths student, has been offered a place she cannot pay for.

Help arrives from an unlikely direction. Ed is a wealthy tech entrepreneur whose vacation home Jess happens to clean, and he is awkward, abrasive and carrying troubles of his own. When he offers to drive the whole household to the Math Olympiad, it may be the first unselfish thing he has done in a long time.

This is a contemporary romance built on opposites: a cash-strapped cleaner and a rich, socially clumsy man thrown together by circumstance. The family around Jess is untidy and noisy, and the road trip puts them in close quarters with a stranger who does not fit in.

The tone is warm and comic, with real money worries and family strain underneath the humour. It reads as light and quick, a love story that grows out of practical need rather than grand gestures.