The Bowl is Already Broken - Tapa blanda

'Riveting, witty and subtle' Margaret Forster 'Her frank emphatic intelligence brings Anne Tyler to mind, but her seductive wit and faintly unsettling vision are entirely her own' Julie Myerson 'Spiking her tale with humour, Zuravleff shows how neatly everything interconnects ... emotionally astute' Independent 'Light, crisp and engaging ... what the punter might imagine to be a world where decisions are made in an intelligent courteous manner turns out to be more like mud-wrestling' Daily Telegraph

Promise Whittaker is the diminutive, cartoon-voiced acting director of the National Museum of Asian Art. Her mentor, the previous director, is now lost in the Taklamakan desert. Her favourite curator has dropped their newest, most precious, treasure - at the ceremony to celebrate its acquisition. Another colleague is embezzling museum funds to pay for fertility treatments. And Promise, perspicacious about everything but what's going on under her nose, is the last to realise that the museum is in danger of being turned into a cafe and that she's pregnant - again. In "Promise", juggling crises at home and at work, Mary Kay Zuravleff has created one of the most loveable and offbeat heroines in recent fiction.