The Black Dress by Deborah Moggach left me laughing out loud and, at times, stunned into silence.

At a glance it comes across as a book about finding love and learning to thrive in your later years of life. But, as you read it and start to digest everything scrawled across the pages, it’s more about the fear of aging and being alone at the end.

Deborah wrote The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, later adapted into a film, but I never read or watched it. But with the way The Black Dress is written and the vivid clear imagery it brought to my mind I would love to see this, a book written during Covid lockdown, adapted into a mini TV series or a film.

The book follows Prudence (Pru) around after her husband Greg decides to go “find himself” by abandoning their marriage and fleeing to their Dorset cottage. She starts to spend a lot more time with her friend of many years, a ballsy woman, Azra and one day Azra mentions needing to leap for recent widows to find a new man.

After a string of shocking events Pru finds herself alone in her five bedroom house, where her two children have long since gone to different countries in Europe and made lives for themselves, in London and takes up going to funerals, in a tight fitting woollen black dress grabbed from a charity shop mannequin, where she meets some interesting characters, including one with an interesting choice of underwear, but that isn’t where she meets what seems to be a new lover. That happens in a completely unexpected and unplanned location.

They frolic to places in helicopters, go on a boat ride into international waters and talk of moving to a nice house somewhere out of London. Trouble is he has baggage. Everyone has baggage, especially at their age, he explains but oh boy the plot twist that hits in the following few pages. It felt like it stabbed me in the heart on behalf of Pru and especially as we then see Pru be shook into a whole state of fresh raw emotions.

And yet, it turns out he isn’t the only one with secrets, and as the end of the story approaches with Pru getting a peaceful but solitary existence it all unravels before our eyes. it changes how you feel about Pru slightly but not as much as, on reflection, you might expect it to. For a lady that says her most outrageous thing was shoplifting a bag of Maltesers it made my mouth drop in shock.

It was just so well written and whilst there were a number of twists and turns in the plot none of them felt too extreme or weirdly outrageously unbelieve. I could completely imagine it thanks to the smooth but hectic presentation of the story representing everything going through Pru’s head.