Hello from the Gillespies: Get ready for Christmas with this feel-good festive read

From an ARC kindly provided by TheReadingRoom and Penguin.

Hello From The Gillespies is the 10th full-length novel by Australian author, Monica McInerney. The annual Christmas Letter: who hasn’t ever received one (or perhaps sent one themselves)? Angela Gillespie has been religiously sending one out every December 1st for 33 years. She regards her Christmas Letters as Historical Documents, a concept that is bears some merit. But for the Gillespies, this year has been (to borrow a famously royal term) an “annus horribilis”. A combination of factors (a five-month long headache, the impending return home of her twin daughters, the threatened stay of interfering Aunt Celia, the imminent hosting of two hundred neighbours for the district annual Woolshed party, the preamble to Christmas) coupled with an emergency trip to hospital to reunite her young son with his finger, mean that the version of Angela’s letter that is accidentally sent to one hundred email recipients is not her usual upbeat missive, but a searingly honest account of her family’s year. It is a letter that details the state of disarray of the lives of her four children, her worries about her husband and her doubts about her marriage, her opinion of her husband’s aunt, her frustrated pottery ambitions, her thoughts on the life she might have led.

McInerney gives the reader an original plot with a few twists, some of which are predictable, but this does not detract from the reading pleasure. Her characters are familiar and easily recognisable.

Readers will find themselves constantly chuckling, often laughing out loud but occasionally also moved to tears or with a large lump in the throat. Reading this book in a public place may garner some funny looks. Fans of McInerney’s work know that stories about families are her strength; they will once again be delighted with this entertaining and heart-warming tale.