With her two previous novels Wolitzer established herself as the doyenne of feminist social politics. In The Wife she told the story of a secret literary collaboration between a successful but philandering writer and his brilliant wife, while The Position revealed the lasting impact of the sexual revolution on the children of progressive parents. In The Ten-Year Nap, Wolitzer completes the trilogy by examining modern women’s lives through a vibrant prismatic lens and asks: so what is it that we really want?

At a Seventies consciousness-raising event a group of housewives glimpse a gleaming future in which “everyone would work, everyone would have power, everyone would help out at home”. Thirty years later their daughters — educated, self-aware women who ditched their careers to stay at home with the kids — are waking up to a grisly, yawning future.

Amy Lamb, a former lawyer, is a devoted mother and wife who knows that to stay in their fashionable Manhattan apartment she needs to find the impetus to go back to work. Amy’s friend Jill, a former academic prizewinner who has left the city for the suburbs, is finding it hard to adapt to her new surroundings.

Roberta, an artist, stopped painting when her children were born. In an attempt to do something, she becomes involved in abortion rights and volunteers to drive a girl from South Dakota to the state’s sole abortion clinic, briefly bonding with the girl, whose artistic aspirations move Roberta to make a promise that she will fail to keep. For Karen, a statistical analyst, life is arguably easier. Her banker husband makes enough money to keep her and the kids in a huge split-level flat.

When Amy befriends a working mother of three who appears to have it all — work, love, family — a whole host of practical and existential concerns are released into the yoga classes and coffee houses of New York and one, two, three generations of anxious, overwrought, pioneering females bustle and creep into the novel to add to the clamour and enrich the cultural landscape.

Wolitzer is wickedly, terrifically funny. Her novels are smart, provocative and entertaining and The Ten-Year Nap is a true delight.

The Ten-Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer (Vintage, £7.99; Buy this book; 352pp)

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