'I then came up with all the reasons why I couldn't possibly do it,' says Jewell. A little embarrassed, she admitted that she would like to write a book. 'What would you really, really like to do, if you could do anything?' said her friend Yasmin. She had just been made redundant from a job that she loved, as PA to the director of a shirt-making company. Two years ago, the former marketing manager was lying drunk by a swimming pool, contemplating a bleak future. Falling on the night of the launch party, it was a surreal end to what has been, for Jewell, a surreal year.
Even the terminally unimpressed poet Tom Paulin called it a 'breath of fresh air'.
The unanimous verdict on Ralph's Party was that it was a joy to read, a modern, unpretentious breeze of a novel. 'I thought they'd trash me as a symbol of the "overpaid first novelist". 'I thought the panel was going to tear me apart,' says Lisa Jewell, whose book, Ralph's Party, is published this month having netted over £150,000 in advance fees. The television arts show's panel of reviewers, known for savaging everything in their path, raved so unconditionally about a debut novel by a 30-year-old woman from north London that several of her friends who were watching burst into tears. A strange thing happened on the Late Review last Thursday.
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