Forty. And Nobody Warned You

Forty, for a woman who has been told it is a beginning by people selling her something. The prices are still too recent to be absurd, so this edition spends its length on the decade nobody warns you about: the one where the people either side of you both need something.

What is in it

• The years you could have been born, and what a house, a week of work and a pound actually cost in each of them.
• What has changed since, with the figures rather than the sighing.
• The honest bits about the age, written by somebody not pretending it is fine.
• Quizzes and things to argue about.
• Things you can now say and get away with.
• Around forty pages to fill in, which is the part that survives.

Formats and price

Part of Milestone Birthdays, an Home Truths series.

Frequently asked

Is this a fabulous-at-forty sort of book?

No. That is the register this part of the shop defaults to and it is why so many of these get given once and never opened. The tone here is observational, the tables are real, and roughly a third of it is blank because it is meant to be written in.

How is it different from the men's fortieth?

Same forty years, different position. The pay pages carry the gap of the period rather than one average, and the honest chapter deals with the decade where the generation above and the generation below can both need something at once.

Is every fact in it sourced?

Yes, to the Nationwide house price index, the Bank of England historical dataset, the Office for National Statistics and the Official Charts Company.