Liv Kellerman is 26, newly divorced, and has just lost the love of her life. Her husband? You've got to be kidding. It's her apartment she's in mourning for - her lovely penthouse apartment with its Empire State Building view. On her own for the first time in her life, Liv is forced to relocate to a crumbling Greenwich Village hovel, but things are about to get a lot worse. She's about to become an estate agent. Belle's gift for creating eccentric and winning characters, and her acute observations of both the absurd and the poignant in everyday life, are the hallmarks of her fiction. HIGH MAINTENANCE is generous and unsparing, tough and exciting and terrifically smart - a hot new property on the market.

I missed Belle's first novel Going Down, but this one is certainly a humdinger. The narrator is Liv Kellerman, 26 and newly divorced from her husband, but she is much more concerned about losing the penthouse apartment they had with a view of the Empire State Building. With a rich father but no money of her own, she has yet to get any alimony and so moves to a crumbling Greenwich Village apartment and takes a badly paid job as a reader to a blind Judge. Becoming bored with that, she decides to become a real estate agent and meets a fellow agent called Dalt, who offers her a job in her firm (commission only, no salary) - an offer she soon regrets accepting. It is all very wacky but enormous fun; Jennifer Belle has a wicked eye for the unusual.

Jennifer Belle lives in New York City. GOING DOWN, her first novel, has been translated into eleven languages.