Staying Alive

Ten almost-strangers. The bravest experiment of all their lives. Wendy steps out of a taxi at the blue door of Number Eight — a rambling north London house she has agreed to share with nine other people she barely knows. Two years earlier, on a long cruise up the Amazon, the group had cobbled together a wild idea: why not pool their lives, part of their income and their many awkward personalities under one roof? Now the builders have gone, and the experiment begins. There is Amy, the sociologist whose theory this was, and her elderly academic husband Maurice, in whose family home they are all living. There is Dylan, the brilliant, charming and entirely untrustworthy architect; Felicity, his current partner and the household’s increasingly anxious treasurer; Heather, abandoned in Barbados and quietly rebuilding her life; sharp-tongued theatre critic Nat; meticulous, prickly Edward; Wendy the deep one, who makes jewellery for a living, Maria, the tempestuous, turned student in her thirties, and her husband, the quietly generous computer millionaire Aseem, who has funded the entire project. He and Maria have said they will just be occasional residents. Others have doubts of being able to stand communal life. Yet others feel they have no choice. The global pandemic forces at least a trial period of living together. Completely unforeseen changes to their numbers complicate the issue.

Funny, frank and deeply humane, Staying Alive is a novel about life as it is actually lived — with money worries, lingering desires, frayed nerves, hopeless crushes and unexpected acts of kindness. Drawing on a lifetime as one of Britain’s most respected group psychotherapists, Gaie Houston sits her characters down at a kitchen table and lets them speak, argue, hurt, forgive and grow. The result is a big-hearted, beautifully observed story for anyone who has ever wondered: who will I grow old with — and what will we make of each other when we get there?