Rosalind Ayers was a general-practice manager for twenty-six years – the person who ran the building, the rota, the budget and the crises, and whom nobody could name if you asked them who worked there. At fifty-one she took redundancy, sold a house she had lived in for two decades, moved to a coastal town where she knew precisely one person, and spent an instructive year discovering how little of her professional competence survived contact with a commercial oven.

Raised in Whitstable, Kent, the daughter of a woman who did the same thing at fifty-five and never once explained why, Rosalind writes from the conviction that the culture has almost no useful language for what happens to a capable woman when the people who needed her stop needing her. Her novels are the language she went looking for: practical about money, honest about how physically hard beginning again is at that age, and completely uninterested in treating a woman’s fifties as an epilogue.

Her Second Acts novels each follow one woman through the year after the thing that ended, into the same small harbour town, where a four-generation network of women who arrived at the worst moment of their lives quietly absorbs her. Readers can expect heroines whose competence is real, adult children who are right about something, towns that must be earned rather than gifted, late-blooming romance that is optional and frequently declined, and an ending in which she keeps the life she built rather than being handed the old one back.

Rosalind lives on the Kent coast with a lurcher named Bramble who is afraid of the sea, a bread oven she is still not entirely in control of, and a standing Sunday arrangement with four women who all arrived here from somewhere worse. She has never once regretted selling the house.