Changes

|title=Man at the Helm

|author=Nina Stibbe

|publisher=Viking

|date=August 2014

|summary=A very enjoyable domestic tale, with children in the early 1970s considering any and all potential suitors for their newly-divorced mother.

}}

What's that about treating an ending purely as another beginning? When the marriage of Elizabeth's parents ends, the foursome of Lizzie, her older (and wiser beyond her years) sister and kid brother and the mum move to a Leicestershire village to begin again. But things don't start swimmingly – the entire village seems to turn against them and maintain their outsider status. Thinking this down to the D-notice put on their parents (for divorce means a woman being unacceptably short of trustworthiness in the early 1970s) the girls put their efforts into match-making. Little do they realise the lack of options they face – and the life-changing events that arise when they witness a glimmer of success…