She Grabs the Wrong Gym Bag, and Carries It Into a New Life

SOMEONE ELSE’S SHOES, by Jojo Moyes

The British novelist Jojo Moyes is understood for her terrifically humorous tear-jerkers, usually about ladies trapped in sticky conditions. Only a few authors have the ability to make you chortle on one web page and cry on the subsequent. Moyes is one among them.

For a lot of the final decade, Moyes has chronicled the adventures of Louisa Clark, a misplaced soul who tends to search out herself — and generally even place herself — in untenable conditions. In “Me Earlier than You,” Clark takes a job as an at-home nurse for a dashing and rich quadriplegic. This romantic, unhappy and galvanizing story grew to become a monster greatest vendor and spawned two equally pleasurable follow-ups, “After You” and “Nonetheless Me,” and a film starring Emilia Clarke.

Often Moyes dips into the historic realm, as she did in her final novel, “The Giver of Stars,” which follows 5 ladies in Melancholy-era Kentucky. In her 14th novel, “Somebody Else’s Sneakers,” she whisks her followers again to present-day London.

The premise, a unfastened spin on “Buying and selling Locations,” could come off as twee. Whereas utilizing an about-to-expire day cross at a elaborate health club, Sam Kemp by accident takes the improper black health club bag from the locker room and “stomps off to the automobile park.” She has a gathering in 23 minutes! No time to linger like the opposite ladies who “have husbands known as Rupe or Tris” and “double-park their manner by their day.” Sam’s bag is a Marc Jacobs knockoff; the one she picks up is the true deal, and incorporates a Chanel jacket and a pair of “vertiginous crimson crocodile-skin Christian Louboutin slingbacks.” Evidently, Sam — a printing govt in a dead-end job who has a depressed husband and hasn’t loved a pedicure since 2009 — shortly masters the artwork of strolling in heels. Not lengthy after that, she makes a number of slam-dunks at work and enters into an emotional affair with a colleague.

The rightful proprietor of the bag is Nisha Cantor, a rich, pampered second spouse who’s now saddled with a pair of “very drained, ugly, block-heeled” pumps. (“It takes her a second to understand what she is taking a look at,” Moyes tells us.) However issues are about to get a lot worse for Nisha. When she returns to her resort, she finds that her horrible husband, Carl, has iced her out and brought up together with his assistant. Carl, his bodyguard and the resort employees refuse to permit Nisha entry to her room.

Unable to gather her finery or her passport, Nisha now wants money, pronto, so Moyes units her up with a job as resort maid. Cleansing bogs is not any enjoyable, however not less than Nisha meets Jasmine, a salt-of-the-earth fellow housekeeper who has her again when she wants it most.

Moyes’s intentions are clear: It is a novel about ladies of a sure age who immediately discover themselves invisible — to their spouses, to their colleagues, to the world — and discover pleasure in being “seen” by one another.

Even when among the remaining caper sequences have a Scooby Doo–like absurdity, Moyes has an unbelievable knack for minor plot twists, and there are loads of them. She strikes shortly from one character’s all-time low to the subsequent, nimbly zagging the place a lesser storyteller would possibly zig. Her minor characters — a drained, menopausal site visitors cop; Nisha’s fashion-obsessed son, who by no means favored that Marc Jacobs bag anyway — are cleverly drawn, and in some way all of the ridiculousness pays off. Would I learn a trilogy about Sam, Nisha and Jasmine? Sure. They might be barefoot for all I care.

Marshall Heyman is a journalist and tv author whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Vogue and City & Nation.

SOMEONE ELSE’S SHOES | By Jojo Moyes | 448 pp. | Pamela Dorman Books | $29