What’s it like to leave your husband aged 28? What would you do if your boyfriend mined your private life for his TV drama? And what can a woman’s gym bag reveal about her heart? This year’s popular fiction didn’t shy away from life’s bigger questions. Pour yourself a large Baileys and tuck in.

Monica Heisey’s debut novel takes the “hot mess” template of a young woman going off the rails, adds lashings of sardonic humour and swipes at our online obsessions to create a heartbreaker of a book. Maggie reels through her first year as a 29-year-old divorcee, behaving increasingly monstrously and desperately papering the cracks with wickedly funny punchlines — until she can’t any more. Heisey, a Schitt’s Creek screenwriter, captures the shock