net, Finding Fatimah, Four Lions, Perfume, Allie Esiri Presents Women Poets Through the Ages and The Wasp and the Caterpillar. Sign up to unlock our digital magazines and also receive the latest news, events, offers and partner promotions. See our Remarkables Archive list for what is no longer in print, but which we are happy to track down.

It’s a twist of fate which presents her with an opening into the heart of the family of a famous novelist, and into the world on the other side of the window.

At the start of this story, protagonist Frances comes upon a car turned on its side with the injured driver, a woman, trapped within. Frances, seems as you first read her words to be perfectly normal and then you realise by the little things she lets slip, her skewed views on things, and particularly by the way in which she studies the behaviour of everyone around her, calculating how best to win them over, what a sociopath she is. What then follows is Frances Thorpe giving those reading her story a total masterclass in opportunism and social climbing as she inveigles her way in to the lives of the Kytes, through deceit, manipulation and flattery.

In fact, it’s centuries old, and needs a mixture of inner psychological tension, more memorable dialogue and a hint of something wider at stake – or anything at stake, really – to be worth a 21st-century audience’s time. a novel of skill, elegance and flair, one in which cool calculation and subtle manipulation move, as a cloud in front of the sun, to chill and unsettle, that suddenly cast shade revealing what in full light had been carefully concealed.

Joanne Froggatt of ‘Downton Abbey’ fame is good as Frances, a put-upon young woman, somewhat bereft of charisma or warmth who gradually reshapes herself to fill the void in the Kyte family’s lives. With shades of Hitchcock, The Talented Mr Ripley and Dear Evan Hansen, it was first staged at the Bridge Theatre in London in 2019 starring Joanne Froggatt and Robert Glenister. At the National Theatre: Saint George and The Dragon, A Small Family Business, Great Britain (also West End), Timon of Athens, One Man, Two Guvnors (also West End, Broadway and international tour; Tony Award nominee and winner of Drama Desk Award for Best Score), Travelling Light, England People Very Nice, The Man of Mode, The Alchemist and Southwark Fair.

Cue Frances’s increasing entanglement with the Kyte family, her seduction by the world of the wealthy, and a loss of innocence that sees her latent thirst for power aroused and then quenched. It’s only circumstance that’s made the Kytes the haves and Frances one of the have-nots, so the family aren’t exactly there for us to sympathise with as she takes advantage of them; but neither are they quite obnoxious enough for the play to really work as a satire of the undeserving rich. Yet Frances should always remain just out of reach, left forever spinning somewhere between our sympathy and fear, and Coxon does her no favours by narrowing her character down excessively in a too-long second half that tends towards over-explanation.Genre-wise, the book is classed as a psychological thriller - but the weighting is very much on the psychological side of that phrase. Film includes A Modern Tale, Peterloo, Chubby Funny, The Crucifixion, The Redistributors, Trimming Pablo, Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire, Blackball, Awayday, Laughterhouse, Rating Notman, A Hitch in Time, Correction Please, The Case of Marcel Duchamp, Crystal Gazing, The Doctor and the Devils, and The Life Story of Baal. Television includes playing Anna in Downton Abbey (nominated three times for Emmy awards), and Liar. This novel came with brilliant reviews but though I enjoyed it, I felt somewhat cheated because it could have been so much better.

One evening, driving back to London after visiting her infuriating parents, she comes across an overturned car crumpled on the side of the road. For Nicholas Hytner’s latest project at his own theatre he directs Alys, Always, Lucinda Coxon’s adaptation of Harriet Lane’s novel that plays out like a low-key ( very low-key) Talented Mr Ripley - a book that’s name-checked in the play itself. But the video screen that backgrounds the action, so we know when we’re outside or inside or in daytime or nighttime, is so often static and uninspired. When a unique opportunity presents itself, Frances hitches her wagon to a star and works it with zeal.But at the opening night of Alys, Always, I ran into a prominent younger British playwright who told me he was making his first visit to the venue - and I replied, "You've not missed much. Are the distortions of the truth she recounts merely trying to help their feelings or an attempt at ingratiation and will she get found out?