My House Is Falling Down

By: Mary Loudon

Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson

‘A truthful, exciting, agonising adult love triangle. An emotional labyrinth, with monsters, great risks – and survival.’ Laline Paull, author of The Bees

For Lucy, marriage to Mark provided an anchor after several years of drifting casually across countries, into jobs and out of relationships.

Now forty-two, her anchor is working loose. Bewildered by the demands of motherhood and dissatisfied by her work, she has also grown understandably resentful of her husband: Mark has serious difficulties of his own and whilst harsh self-reliance has kept him sane, it has alienated his wife.

When Lucy falls in love with Angus, a pianist in his sixties, her shock is extreme. Adamant that she will not deceive her husband, she instead asks his advice. Mark’s reaction, however, is startlingly unorthodox, leaving Lucy to steer an impossible course between duty and desire, adventure and security. As her marriage falters and Angus presses for commitment, she is forced to choose between family and self, with lifelong consequences for everyone.

Infused with her trademark precision, clarity and dark humour, Mary Loudon’s searing, highly-charged novel My House is Falling Down is a fearless exploration of what infidelity means when no one is lying, and how brutal honesty may yet prove the biggest taboo in our relationships.

Critic reviews

The steamy must-read of the summer

A sophisticated novel that forensically examines how love and infidelity can coexist in a long term relationship – I devoured it! (Penny Hancock, author of Tideline)

Will keep book clubs up and down the UK enthralled all year . . . Mary Loudon’s forte is exploring complex emotional and ethical issues with great delicacy and insight . . . I raced through it in one sitting (Daily Telegraph)

Loudon is a writer of elegance and high intelligence

Taking the scalpel to her subject of a woman’s infidelity and her attempts to compromise, Loudon is both candid and surprising

A truthful, tender exploration of long-term love and the fragility of marriage

My House is Falling Down shows sharp insight and elegance of phrase . . . honesty characterises this totally absorbing book. A difficult theme is handled with great realism and without a trace of sentimentality or mawkishness (Richard Harries)

An intricate, sophisticated portrait of infidelity and trust in a long term relationship. This novel features a fresh perspective on a modern love triangle that is at once provocative and tender

A novel of great tenderness and intelligence . . . A grown up love tangle with interesting, grown up men and women (Andrew Miller, Costa Prize-winning author of Pure)

A truthful, exciting, agonising adult love triangle. An emotional labyrinth, with monsters, great risks – and survival

(Laline Paull, author of Baileys Prize-shortlisted The Bees)

What a lucid, subtle and beautiful writer she is, with a gift for slicing through to the complexities of a relationship or a situation. Reading anything by Mary Loudon is to peer through the bell jar to the truths captured inside it (Elizabeth Buchan, author of The Good Wife and The New Mrs Clifton)

Nothing I say could match the emotional lure and its sustaining that is here. First person love – real, lived – a tense, irresistible read (Jon Snow, Channel 4 News broadcaster)

What a superb piece of writing. Mary Loudon’s great skill is to make you care about people you don’t necessarily like, and to leave you worrying about them long after you’ve finished the book (Eleanor Updale, author of the Montmorency series)

I found it intense and haunting and the writing is exquisite. It’s not easy to get a fresh angle on infidelity but Mary Loudon did (Stephanie Calman, author of Confessions of a Bad Mother)

This is so well-written! I was enthralled by this novel, a truly modern morality tale with so many apposite and pertinent observations (Valerie Grove, journalist, author and biographer)