When septuagenarian Eleanor notices two struggling young mothers regularly passing each other in the street outside her Fulham home, like all good fictional old ladies she decides to interfere. She invites them both round, and so begins a tradition of Friday night get-togethers. Gradually, the little group expands to embrace single, thirtysome-thing Blaise, Karen, her friend and business partner, and Jude, an aspiring disc jockey. Together the six women drink wine, talk and laugh about the tough bits of their lives. Then one of them meets a man and the dynamic becomes rather wobbly.

Joanna Trollope generally likes to explore a clear “issue” in her novels. This time it is female friendship, the modern kind, vital, yet precarious. These characters make great case studies. They are, as one of them puts it, “impressively diverse”: well-off, poor, old, young (although only the flower-delivery boy is black). They have, it seems, a common female bond, or a simple need for companionship, that transcends any differences. In order to demonstrate this bond, we get to peer into each of their lives. There is the anxious single mother Lesley, whose husband died without knowing she was pregnant, Lesley’s wastrel sister Jude (the would-be DJ), and Eleanor herself, a retired professional who never married.

We see them come together in various kitchens, front rooms and offices, discuss things, then leave again. This is, of course, what many female friendships are like. However, in fictional form, it feels as if we are being told – via many explanatory conversations – that the women are great friends, rather than feeling it for real.

Trollope knows how to deliver the goods though. When Paula (whose young son was fathered by a married man) finally falls in love, the quietly charismatic object of her affections changes everything, irreversibly. To achieve this, he simply enters each of their lives in a low-key and brilliantly worrying way – showing up in their kitchens or workplaces, opening bottles of wine, discussing their business matters. He actually does very little (we never get to know him), but before long the women are busy feeling hurt, rejected, upset, anxious, protective or resentful. He is, as Eleanor puts it, a “catalyst”.

It is hard to get too whipped up about all this, since the characters and scenarios continue to feel emblematic. But Trollope fans probably won’t be disappointed. She weaves her secondary issues (single motherhood, marital stress, the struggle for a work-life balance) effortlessly throughout the book. This is still the cosy world of imperious cats, teapots shaped like cottages and people who pad about in socks. The diction is still reliably interrupted by poignant authorial pauses (“She isn’t,” Paula said, “the same with me any more”), and, while the women struggle and endure angst, they ultimately survive. It is, in other words, howlingly middle class, utterly conservative, and yet, of course, nicely tolerant of the vagaries of modern life.

There is something extremely reassuring here – and this, no doubt, is what shifts gazillions of Trollope’s novels. The final, neat message, that you have to engage with what is around you and go with the flow if you want to live life to the full, may not be earth-shattering, but it is somehow, deep down, what we all want to hear before we step into the messy, scary, real world.

Friday nights by Joanna Trollope
Bloomsbury £18.99 pp329

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