There’s a tremendous intimacy in Julie Mars’ writing. It’s as if she were an old friend, confiding secrets. That isn’t to say that her latest book Anybody Any Minute doesn’t create a fictive dream. The protagonist Ellen Kenny comes across as real, and the story, despite its quirky turns, is also believable.

As the novel opens, 45-year-old Ellen is in trouble. Despite having just lost her job, she purchases a run down house in the country on her credit card for reasons she can’t fathom, and her husband Tommy is furious. After 17 years of marriage, she suddenly realises that she can’t connect with her husband (who is contemplating an affair), her new house is full of problems, her neighbours are bizarre, and her sister experiences a tragedy that leaves Ellen taking care of a 2-year-old who doesn’t speak English. Add in the unexpected custody of a depressed dog, and Ellen finds herself way over her head. It’s a situation that only the finest “open-your-heart” herbal tea, acupuncture treatments, extensive research, an artistic chainsaw, and lots of spontaneous love can sort out.

To call this book charming would be an understatement. As a character, Ellen might be irritating and self-centred in a lesser author’s hands, but instead, Julie Mars creates a woman whose mid-life soul searching comes across as believable and important. Ellen’s excessive interest in the lives of the strangers she meets has a bit of naivety to it. It’s the antithesis of the way people in her native New York City approach one another, but her behaviour is also moving. Ellen lets people in and then gives back without reservation, a quality which she notes, is generally lacking in our modern world.

Ellen’s search drives the narrative on, and her philosophical musings and refusal to take things at face value turn what looks like a no-win situation with no-hope characters into something entirely different. There are moments when Ellen’s musings go quite deep, enriching the novel beyond its light-hearted fast moving plot: