Middle age took Jane Shilling by surprise. She hadn''t seen it coming, and she certainly wasn''t ready for it. Living a flawed, bittersweet version of the idyll she dreamed of in her twenties, in a tumbledown urban cottage by the Thames, with a son, a cat and a horse in a livery fifty miles away, she wondered whether middle age was the beginning of the end. Or was there one last great adventure to be had?

The Stranger in the Mirror is one woman''s attempt to understand what middle age means for her and whether, as a new generation of women turns fifty, a revolution is under way. It definitely won''t reverse the signs of ageing - but it will make you laugh, it will make you think and it could just make you look in the mirror in a slightly different way...