I can't quite put my finger on this one! The Favourite is a fun look at sisterhood and family relationships.
I found it quite scatty and a bit all over the place and struggled to keep track of who was who to begin with. That said there was something endearing, honest and truthful about the relationships that unfolded.
3.5 stars.

I read Amazing Grace Adams and loved it, so was excited to see Fran Littlewood had a new book coming out. This is as equally brilliant. I loved this too, every page. It has the same humour, the same craziness, and amongst all the fun of the story, it has the same deep emotion at the very heart of it, just the same as the last book. In one part towards the end of the book, it even makes reference to Grace Adams, though a different name and was very subtle so could easily have been missed unless that last book has really stuck in your mind.

It’s the three sisters mum’s 70th birthday and Eva, the youngest of the three has hired a luxury house, a contemporary glass house, it even featured on Grand Designs. Eva is, lets say, comfortably well off after selling her business and can afford to treat her mum for her special birthday, it’s a chance too, for the whole family to celebrate together.

Alex, the eldest has a new baby as well as her other two young children and they decided to use the family get together as a chance to have a naming ceremony for the baby, out in the woods, like you do. It’s at this ceremony where disaster strikes and suspicion falls on Patrick as to whether he actually has a favourite daughter, which kicks off a re examination of the relationships between everyone in the whole family.

As the book moves on we hear the viewpoints of the three sisters, they look back over their childhood, to their recent pasts and to the present, questioning their own decisions, their relationships with each other and their parents and for Alex and Eva their relationships with their partners. Secrets are revealed, and emotions run high, as it approaches a fabulous, crazy, chaotic last few chapters. Above all it examines the bonds that hold siblings together, no matter what befalls them, they are ultimately there for each other.

Another observant, honest, funny, sensitively written book by this author, and I can’t wait to see what she writes next.

I raced through The Favourite—its relatable characters and heartfelt storytelling made it an absolute pleasure to read.

The novel revolves around Alex, Nancy, and Eva Fisher, three grown sisters whose bond is tested when their father, Patrick, inadvertently reveals he has a favourite daughter. Over the course of a single holiday week, the Fisher family is forced to confront decades of hidden truths, buried resentments, and the complexities of their relationships.

What makes The Favourite so compelling is how relatable the characters feel. The tension between sibling rivalries and deep-rooted love is explored with nuance, and the shifting perspectives allowed me to empathise with each member of the family.

I couldn’t put The Favourite down. It’s a rollercoaster of emotions, and I found myself rooting for them, even when they made decisions that were totally flawed. What really got me, though, was how deeply relatable this family felt. Their love is messy, imperfect, and as real as it gets. Littlewood’s writing is sharp, witty, and filled with so much heart, making every twist and turn feel all the more impactful. The characters are wonderfully nuanced, each one carrying their own burdens and complicated histories, but the way they come together (or sometimes fall apart) felt like a reflection of real life. It’s about love in all its rawness; sometimes messy, sometimes joyful, but always genuine.

a father admits who his favorite child is out of his 3 daughters.

the writing style could do with some editing as it often felt like one stream of consciousness, despite the story being multiple pov’s.

the characters never felt fully fleshed and struggled to feel emotionally connected to their stories.

however, the book does a great job of showcasing sibling rivalry, insecurities all women go through and family relationships.

id recommend this book for fans of coco mellor’s blue sisters.

Fran Littlewood delivers a sharp, witty, and touching family drama in The Favourite. Set during a week-long celebration of Vivienne Fisher’s 70th birthday, the book unravels the complex dynamics between three grown sisters—Alex, Nancy, and Eva—when their father Patrick inadvertently reveals he has a favourite daughter.

This revelation sends shockwaves through the seemingly close-knit family, unearthing decades of sibling rivalry, buried secrets, and old wounds. Told with tenderness and humour, the book masterfully examines memory, sisterhood, and the joys and strains of family life.

Layered and relatable, it’s a perfect choice for fans of family sagas and book club discussions.

Read more at The Secret Book Review.

Family dynamics form the central narrative of this cleverly constructed novel. A family comes together for a celebratory week away - and everything falls apart. Three sisters, one discovered to be the favourite, their parents marriage - not as perfect as assumed - is all explained through flashbacks and different points of view. I loved the authors first book Amazing Grace Adams and this has the same tense claustrophobic feel - everything taking place within a week's timeline. The sibling relationships and the different recollections of childhood events are nuanced and easy to relate to.
My only issue was not being clear on which child belonged to which sister and whose partner was whose for a while at the start - kept having to go back and remind myself! Thats the only reason i give it a 4.5 rather than 5.

I absolutely loved this, Fran Littlewood has nailed the intricacies and animosities between siblings and how one mis-judged comment from a parent or adult can have long-lasting impacts and ripples well into adulthood. As soon as I finished, I started again to spot the connections and clues that I'd missed the first time round.

Three sisters, Alex, Nancy and Eve have come away with their own families and their parents. They are gathering to celebrate Alex's new baby and to toast their mother's 70th birthday. The sisters are close to one another but still snipe behind each others' backs from time to time. Alex is feeling exhausted with her third child in her 40s, Nancy has always felt like the left-out middle child, and Eve is hiding a big secret about her personal life that is over-shadowing everything.

There's an incident early on in the book where all three sisters expect to be treated equally but when it is clear that their father has picked one daughter over the other two, it sends shockwaves through the whole family.

The story is told from multiple perspectives and timelines, with chapters from the girls' childhoods interspersed with the present day, and chapters from each sister as well as their mother. There are long buried grievances and upsets that have never been spoken about, misunderstandings and hurt, where each sister thinks the others are more loved or better treated. This then plays out in how they treat each other and their extended families. I enjoyed seeing how my loyalties to each character changed as the book progressed; at the outset I had strong feelings about the family members that changed and evolved as I read more.

I loved Fran's first book and this is just as wonderful and insightful, highly recommended.

I struggled to get into this sadly.
There were a lot of characters to keep track of with lots of flashbacks that didn't really help.

The conflict and siblings' rivalry was interesting as I'm sure many can relate, but again, there was just a little too much going on for me to really gel with anyone.

Thank you netgalley for sending me an advanced copy of The Favourite. I'm sad that I didn't enjoy it as much as I hoped I would.

I really enjoyed the author's first novel, Amazing Grace Adams, and could not put it down. I didn't feel quite so strongly about this one, but it did keep me reading, and that was quite an impressive achievement given that the subject matter was both more diffuse (large, middle-class family, lots of characters) and more ordinary (large, middle-class family, etc). I sometimes feel disappointed when an author who writes a singular debut goes into this territory and couldn't finish the second novel of the author who first wrote 'The Stranding,' for this reason. However, in this case the characters were sympathetic enough to make a difference.

Patrick and Vivienne seem to be the 'perfect parents,' but in their seventies, they are worried about certain memories coming to light, and while they love bringing up slightly naughty memories from their girls' childhoods, there are some things they don't talk about - like the burns their oldest daughter received in the first moments of a camping holiday, or that they separated for a few months due to the guilt and only got back together after a drunken roll on the 1970s yellow carpet led to youngest daughter Eva.

Eva, the 'band-aid baby,' becomes the unwilling focus of her sisters' resentment when her father jumps to save her from an accident they all thankfully escape in the present day., but doesn't help older sisters Alex and Nancy, who are both struggling in their own ways and find this apparent betrayal from their Dad to be too much to add to their middle-aged cognitive loads. Alex is struggling with a new baby at forty-five and Nancy has an envelope from the hospital she can't bring herself to open. Eva, the success story despite being the 'baby who had a baby,' in her twenties, is concerned that she may have married the wrong guy, particularly when his creepy son shows up on this doomed family 'holiday'.

I still feel as though this book could have benefited from a tighter focus, particularly on the sisters, and I struggled to tell them apart at first despite the author's best efforts. However, this deserves to do well despite a couple of the emotional payoffs being unearned (there actually IS a tragedy in the Grace Adams novel, and two of them are averted here - a falling tree and the mother getting lost in a storm - and I'm not completely sure how I feel about having my emotions manipulated for something that doesn't go ahead, but that could be over-pickiness).

This was wonderful. Asides the instigating plot point - a falling tree is about to crush all three sisters and the father chooses to save only <I>one</I> of them - the plot was completely character driven. I <I>loved</> that - give me all the introspective, deepest darkest thoughts! The chapters always jumped perspective and character POV right at the peak of the latest drama so that you were thrust into the aftermath varying amounts of time later. It kept me intrigued as it would take a little while to reduce exactly what had happened, but you'd always get an inkling from the way the other characters were behaving. The constant drama kept escalating and I couldn't put the book down for a solid evening until i had finished it.

I'm the oldest of three sisters so this was always going to be relatable. Luckily, Alex, Nancy and Eva have completely different personalities from my sister's and I, so it didn't hit <I>too</> close to home. What did resonante was the amazing relationship between the three of them - the closeness that has you ready to tear out your sisters hair one minute then die fighting to protect them the next. Fran Littlewood must be one of three - the references to the oldest sibling tendency to play adult, specific "big sister" and "little sister" looks that mean different things, the way they would pester their older teenage sister until she exploded in rage, the physical fighting even though they are adults, regressing to kids when their own kids aren't there, the little jealousies, THE CLOTHES STEALING!

I also found it really clever that they all remembered key life events completely differently - the outlandishness often corresponding to how young they were.

This was my first Fran Littlewood but I'm off to check out her debut novel now.

Thansk to Netgalley and Michael Joseph, Penguin Random House for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

An interesting plot but a somewhat confused execution with different voices and timelines. Parts I did enjoy and could relate to, to a certain extent, who hasn't come across favouritism within a family. The book is essentially about the rivalry between three sisters but with lots of other relationships thrown in the mix - parents, partners, children, colleagues many of them quite firey, do adult siblings really bite like three year olds. I didn't really engage with any of characters overall and found the book quite slow but with too many things happening.which made it quite bizarre and almost comic at times. The book near the end was slightly strange with quite a few unresolved storylines.

Thank you to NetGalley and Michael Joseph, Penguin Random House for this ARC.

The three Fisher sisters Alex, Nancy and Eva usually get on ok, but when the entire family including parents, partners and children meets for a week's holiday in a glass house in the forest (the metaphor is not subtle at all) to celebrate a naming ceremony and matriarch Vivienne's 70th birthday, something disconcerting happens - their father involuntarily picks a favourite amongst his daughters which causes all kinds of conflict and sibling rivalry.

I could not get into this. There were too many people, too many flashbacks and yet too little of note happened. I didn't really like any of the characters sufficiently - their relationships were all over the place, animosities were aired, secrets and lies exposed and it felt like one big dysfunctional family. And I couldn't engage with it. For example, who doesn't tell their family they got married? The fragmented writing style is infuriating. The jumpy timeline is incredibly confusing. Where is the structure? Just when we're about to get to an interesting revelation, the scene breaks off and we're in another flashback or back to the present. I really liked Amazing Grace Adams but this wasn't for me.

Vivienne and Patrick Fisher have raised their three girls, Alex, Nancy and Eva who now have families of their own. It’s Vivienne’s 70th birthday and all are gathered to celebrate this milestone in the countryside in the most incredible glass fronted property, a la Grand Designs. On the first day in the woods, the siblings have a lucky escape from potential disaster but what it achieves is to reveal which of the sisters is Patrick’s favourite. Shockwaves reverberate, old wounds are reopened, tensions rise as the past is examined in this latest novel from Fran Littlewood. Each sister and Vivienne give their memories and perspectives of various incidents over the years in this intense domestic drama. Are their recollections accurate or flawed by time? Are all of them wearing masks with fixed grins as they stare into a potential abyss?

As one of three close siblings, I’m all too aware of family dynamics and over the years we’ve often discussed who my parent’s favourite offspring might be!! This is a reflective, revealing novel and it does make me pause and think about our own dynamics, thankfully ours don’t go pear shaped like this one does. The shifting dynamics between the sisters, between Vivian and Patrick and between the parents and their children are all fascinating. The memories do take a bit of a wandering, meandering path but that’s what memories do, so it feels authentic. As the holiday progresses there are some nuggets that come to the surface and it becomes emotional, painful and raw although on occasions it can be witty and very funny. It does get a bit slow in the middle when they recollections are not especially exciting more of the normal cut and thrust of everyday life but then the anxiety and stress levels rise and how. Despite their best efforts at fakery on several levels, the holiday becomes a doo-doo show for multiple reasons. There’s a lot of unravelling as the many papered over cracks fracture and split. It becomes quite dramatic, potentially disastrous and I’m not sure how it’s all going to work out but I love the ending. Yes, after all the drama that’s what it means to be a sister. It’s priceless.

The characterisation is excellent even the ones on the periphery are deftly portrayed. I become very attached to Nancy, I love how she often tells it how it is. Even Alex begins to grow on me!

Finally, as for the superb setting at the glass house, it becomes a terrific metaphor for the ensuing dramas as people in glasshouses definitely shouldn’t throw stones. I love how the house reflects back what is going on, a clever touch if a bit unpleasant!.

With thanks to NetGalley and especially to Michael Joseph at Penguin Random House for the much appreciated arc in return for an honest review.

The Favourite follows the Fisher family as they gather to celebrate their mother Vivienne’s 70th birthday. Things take a bit of a turn however, when their father accidentally reveals his “favourite” daughter, stirring up old tensions amongst the sisters Alex, Nancy, and Eva.

The book moves between past and present, showing how the sisters’ childhood shaped their relationships. It captures the mixture of love, jealousy, and humour that comes with family life.

This is a great read for anyone who loves a family drama! An entertaining 5-star read!

Loved this family drama, it was a deliciously fun read. The story kicks off when during a family getaway the family patriarch accidentally makes it known in subtle - but certain - terms who his favourite daughter is, then jumps perspective as the members of the family grapple with the truth of this reality and what it means for them. Weaving together past and present, I loved the dynamics of the sisters and the roles they each play in the family. It was great fun to peel back the layers of the family dynamic and refreshing to read a novel about sisters with such a witty bent.

I really loved Fran Littlewoods debut novel “Amazing Grace Adams” and was eagerly anticipating reading this , her second novel.

While it didn’t hit the same highs of her debut, I did very much enjoy this family drama. Alex, Nancy , Eva are three sisters in their 40s/ late 30s navigating their own family lives and their relationship with each other and their parents. The entire family including spouses and children are away in a luxury isolated house for a week to celebrate their mother’s 70th birthday. In a moment of tension and chaos, their father accidentally reveals he has a favourite daughter and the fall out is the basis of this book.

I did enjoy this book, it captures the messiness of family dynamics well and the characters were well drawn allowing the reader to easily know who was who amid a fairly large cast of characters. The book goes back and forth in time and is told from multiple perspectives , this also works well.

I did find the pacing a little uneven in the middle section of the book and my mind was prone to wandering a bit when reading but the final quarter brought me back fully on board and fully invested in this family.

Great writing and an enjoyable read.

3.5-4 star

This is an engaging novel about sisterly relationships among adults and how familial rifts are carefully negotiated every day. The sisters in question are Alex, Nancy and Eva who gather at a luxurious holiday let to celebrate their mother Vivienne’s seventieth birthday. Each sister has done well for herself and is blessed with a good job, loyal partner and delightful children, so why is there still so much petty animosity between the three? An unfortunate incident on the day of arrival brings old rivalries and loyalties to the fore in ways that nobody could have imagined.
Well-written, my only criticism of this novel is that many of the multiple points of view are delivered by third-person narrators, when first-person narrators may have been more honest and unfiltered. Nevertheless, this is an insightful novel about family dynamics where nothing much happens on the surface but plenty below it! Thank you to the publishers and to NetGalley for the free ARC that allowed me to read this novel and familiarise myself with the author’s work.

I was expecting a little more from this. It took me halfway through the book to distinguish between the sisters so that doesn’t say much for the characterization. However, there was something beguiling about the writing and how the author handled the topic, so it’s a solid three stars from me.

A good story with lots of threads going on relating to how messed up families can be. You did have to be on it, paying attention to who is talking and when from but overall enjoyable.