And Kinsella has control of her breezy and at times humorous tone – you never sense that she’s trying to be Doris Lessing or Hilary Mantel. As unlikely as it all of this is, it holds your attention - if it holds your attention - in part because the story has so many plot twists and moves so fast that you have little time to think about the absurdities. She also thinks Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston are still together. The things she has forgotten include that a) she ditched her loser boyfriend and married a multimillionaire, and b) she evolved from a harried underling into the British carpet-industry’s equivalent of Faye Dunaway in Network. Lexi Smart wakes up soon after a thump on the head in 2007 and finds she has forgotten all that has happened to her since 2004. In Remember Me? she hangs her story on a creaky device – a young woman develops amnesia after a car accident – and her tale gets more improbable from there. Unlike many bestselling authors, Kinsella also knows how to plot. It is inconceivable that she would write, as Stephenie Meyer does in The Host, “It’s a voluntary choice.” If that seems slim basis for an endorsement, you probably walk right past all those books with embossed metallic covers each time you enter a bookstore. Educated at Oxford University, Kinsella respects the language of King James and Monty Python. Kinsella has two virtues that are as apparent here as in her first Madeleine Wickham novels. And so it is with Remember Me?: If you have a choice between this book and a Danielle Steel novel at the airport, it’s no contest. But fried Mars bars are more filling than the handful of Sour Gummi Bears you often get from romance-novels-gone-mainstream like this one. It doesn’t: Remember Me? is the literary equivalent of a fried Mars bar. I liked the Madeleine Wickham novels I read, including A Desirable Residence, and hoped her new book would mark a return to their form – that of the quiet English novel of manners updated for the age of house lust and two-career couples.

But Sophie Kinsella wrote under that name – her real one – before she adopted the pseudonym that appears on her bestselling “Shopaholic” series. Remember Madeleine Wickham? Unless you’re English, you probably don’t.

What if you woke up after an accident and couldn’t remember all the important things that had happened since 2004, such as that Brad and Jennifer broke up?

Sophie kinsella remember me summary