Tom Campbell’s third novel deploys his formidable comic gifts in the service of something surprisingly moving: a story about learning to want the right things
There is a moment early in Helen Hoskins Begins Again when its protagonist, 47-year-old recently divorced secondary school English teacher Helen, surveys the three piles of clothing spread across her bed — the ones that must go, the ones that probably must go, and the ones she loves — and realises that the third pile is empty. It is a small, precise, devastating observation, and it tells you almost everything you need to know about Tom Campbell’s gifts as a novelist. The comedy is exact. The sadness arrives uninvited. And you suspect, even here on page three, that you are in very capable hands.
This is Campbell’s third novel, following Fold, which earned a Book of the Week from The Guardian‘s Nicholas Lezard, and The Planner, praised by Mark Watson as “genuinely funny, scathing, intelligent.” With Helen Hoskins Begins Again, Campbell turns his attention from the world of men behaving badly in offices and card games to something altogether more open-hearted: a post-divorce romantic comedy of the most un-sentimental kind.
Helen is newly separated from Justin, a man whose talents for guitar-playing and social charm, once irresistible, have curdled in her memory into their opposite. Her Brighton home is full of the debris of a marriage: unworn clothes, an overwhelming contact list, three competing psychotherapists whose advice has cancelled one another out. Campbell renders her inner life with a comedian’s timing and a novelist’s empathy. She is not pathetic, not bitter, not a cautionary tale; she is, rather, extremely alive to the absurdity of her situation, and determined, if not always successfully, to be honest about it.
Into this carefully ordered life stumbles Leo Teasdale, listed in her phone simply by his surname, as one might file a solicitor or a plumber, a statistician specialising in welfare policy, recently displaced from his Brighton life and now adrift in a rented flat in Shoreham-by-Sea, two miles along the coast. Campbell is superb on Shoreham: Leo’s wry, conflicted observations of the town, its emptied streets at dusk, its seagulls, its Union Jack flags and competitive darts matches, carry the kind of detailed sociological attention you might expect from a writer who has spent his career thinking seriously about economic decline and cultural regeneration. But it never feels like a lecture. It feels like Leo: melancholy, self-aware, a little lost.
Brighton and its neighbour give the novel much of its texture and atmosphere. Helen navigates the city’s blond-wood wine bars with the cautiousness of someone who has been hurt and knows it; Leo wanders the Shoreham seafront with a carton of chips and a bench to himself, wondering what England has become. That these two characters, both highly intelligent and essentially decent, have somehow ended up here, unmoored, middle-aged, examining their contact lists for people worth keeping, is both comic and quietly aching.
Their courtship, if that is what it is, unfolds through a series of wonderfully observed encounters: a first meeting in which Helen arrives with an escape plan already in place; a countryside walk involving red kites, a folk-horror pub, and a conversation about the promiscuity of songbirds; the gradual, reluctant, entirely convincing discovery that they might actually like each other. Campbell is masterful at dialogue that does several things at once: establishes character, generates comic friction, and advances an emotional argument the characters themselves are refusing to make.
The supporting cast is equally well-drawn. Bea, Helen’s “most trusted jungle guide,” is a tour de force of affectionate comedy: three children, three fathers, the unnerving accuracy of someone who has survived everything. Helen’s two teenage sons exist largely as a domestic weather system, threatening and unpredictable. And the novel’s central conceit, a joint divorce party, thrown by Helen and Leo to toast their failed marriages and mix their mismatched social worlds, is executed with gleeful precision.
What Campbell understands, and what makes this more than a charming comic novel, is that second chances are not really about finding someone new. They are about finally being willing to want something for yourself. Helen begins the book performing the actions of personal transformation — clearing the wardrobe, pruning the contacts list, attending the therapy — without quite believing in any of it. By the end, something has shifted. The novel earns its warmth without once being sentimental about it.
Comparisons to David Nicholls and Helen Fielding are not unfair. Philip Jones, Editor of The Bookseller, has already noted the kinship, but Campbell’s voice is distinctly his own: drier, more satirical, less inclined to let anyone off the hook, including his heroine. He writes about the failure of institutions (marriage, therapy, the professional middle classes) with the cheerful savagery of someone who has thought hard about what they are actually for. That he does all of this while also being, as Lottie Moggach has put it, “hilarious, perspicacious and moving,” is no small achievement.
Helen Hoskins Begins Again is a pleasure from start to finish: a novel that is cleverer than it lets on, which is, it turns out, very much on brand.
Helen Hoskins Begins Again by Tom Campbell is published by Mensch Publishing on 15th May 2026 (£17 paperback).
Find out more about the book: https://menschpublishing.com/books/helen-hoskins-begins-again/
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