SOURCE: Potter, Jennifer. Review of The Best of Friends, by Joanna Trollope. Times Literary Supplement, no. 4800 (31 March 1995): 20.

In the following review, Potter criticizes The Best of Friends for its weak plot and unconvincing characterizations.

Newly deserted by her priggish, art-dealer husband, Gina Sitchell puts their meticulously restored country-town house on the market. Medieval with late-seventeenth-century additions, it has all the right 1990s accoutrements: elm shelves, waxed flagstones, recessed sockets. But no Aga, tut-tuts a prospective buyer dressed in faintly ridiculous metropolitan black. “We'd have to put one in … I have one in Camden Town. It's my dearest friend.”

This is Joanna Trollope's mild riposte (and one of only four small jokes) to critical opinion that dubs her novels “Aga sagas” and consigns them to the dump-bins of critical success for reasons more sociological than literary. Trollope writes about middle-class families and relationships—“intelligent, ordinary, recognisable families”, smirks the...