All the Other Mothers Hate Me

by Sarah Harman

Overview

A mom will do anything to save her kid. Anything.

"The missing boy is 10-year-old Alfie Risby, and to be perfectly honest with you, he's a little shit."

Florence Grimes is a thirty-one-year-old party girl who always takes the easy way out. Single, broke and unfulfilled after the humiliating end to her girl band career, she has only one reason to get out of bed each day: her ten-year-old son Dylan. But then Alfie Risby, her son’s bully and the heir to a vast frozen food empire, mysteriously vanishes during a class trip, and Dylan becomes the prime suspect. Florence, for once, is faced with a task she can’t quit: She’s got to find Alfie and clear her son’s name, or risk losing Dylan forever.

The only problem? Florence has no useful skills, let alone investigative ones, and all the other school moms hate her. Oh, and Florence has a reason to suspect Dylan might not be as innocent as she’d like to believe...

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593851463
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/11/2025
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Sarah Harman is an American living in London. She worked most recently as a foreign correspondent for NBC News, reporting on-air for Today, Nightly News, and MSNBC. She’s a graduate of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Her debut novel All the Other Mothers Hate Me won the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize in 2023.

Read an Excerpt

Prologue

The missing boy is 10-year-old Alfie Risby, and to be perfectly honest with you, he’s a little shit.
I realize that’s a horrible thing to say about a child, particularly one who is missing. But - and I’m not proud of this - if I had to choose a boy in Dylan’s class to vanish in broad daylight, Alfie would’ve been top of my list.

There are some kids you just kind of want to punch, and Alfie was one of them. Perhaps it was his hair - that pale red shade we used to call strawberry blonde. Or his dull, raisin-coloured eyes. Or the way his sharp little teeth gave him a distinctly ferret-like appearance.

Their sharpness is a point of fact: Last year he bit his nanny, Cecilia, so hard she needed stitches. For weeks, she appeared at afternoon pick-up like a sad ghost, clutching her bandaged forearm.

The one time I volunteered to chaperone a school trip, a class picnic to Hampstead Heath, Alfie leaned over a plate of sausage rolls and told me, very casually, as if we were two adults at a bar, that he ‘quite liked my slag fingernails.’

And then there was his family. They weren’t just run-of-the-mill, St. Angeles rich. They were in a whole other league.

‘Like richer than God,’ one of the other mothers had whispered to me during last year’s spring fundraiser, as we arranged sugar cookies on tiny plastic trays.

But if I’m being honest, my feelings about Alfie had nothing to do with his hair or his wealth or his ferret teeth. No. My dislike of Alfie stemmed entirely from the way he treated Dylan, my precocious, sensitive only son, like he was a bug to be crushed.

And nobody crushes my kid.

Editorial Reviews

Everyone’s talking about Florence!

As seen in
Real Simple • NPR • Marie Claire • Glamour • New York Post • TIME Magazine • Reader's Digest • BookPage • Jordy's Book Club

"A biting, twisty, utter delight." —Jessica Knoll, New York Times bestselling author of Luckiest Girl Alive and Bright Young Women

"A smirking thriller that never threatens to take itself too seriously." —NPR

"Put this at the top of your To-Be-Read list!" —Liv Constantine, New York Times bestselling author of The Next Mrs. Parrish

"Part social comedy, part thriller. . . . Harman pulls it off." —Wall Street Journal

"Ruefully funny and mildly disturbing." —Oprah Daily

"Plenty of dark humor, and more than a little biting social commentary. . . . If twisty, voice-driven novels like First Lie Wins and Listen for the Lie are your jam, then make room on the shelf for this cracking debut." —Amazon Book Review

"Hilarious and poignant and absolutely unique. It's Bridget Jones meets Daisy Jones.​" —Hank Phillippi Ryan, USA Today bestselling author of The Other Woman

"Nonstop entertainment, a hilarious and biting story of redemption." —Real Simple

"Imagine Big Little Lies after one too many glasses of wine, stumbling into a whodunit. . . . Harman’s writing is razor-sharp, blending biting, dark humor with genuine tension." —Seattle Times

"A sharply insightful page-turner." —Kimberly McCreight, New York Times bestselling author of Like Mother, Like Daughter

"Comedy and crime don’t always mix, but they do perfectly here." —Marie Claire

"Darkly funny, irresistibly suspenseful. And this novel has voice for days." —Clémence Michallon, internationally bestselling author of The Quiet Tenant

"Florence is my new favorite agent of chaos—I loved her snarky-but-true observations, hilarious misadventures, and fierce love for her son. Impossible to put down." —Kristen Perrin, nationally bestselling author of How to Solve Your Own Murder

"Must-read. . . . a frothy, fun read that goes down easy while getting at some hard truths." —The Cut/Book Gossip newsletter

"A funny whodunit with incisive commentary. . . . Ripe for a debate on what makes a 'good' or 'bad' mom, and entertaining to boot." —Glamour

"It’s no easy feat to write an equally comical and compelling novel about a missing child, but Sarah Harman accomplishes just that " —BookPage (starred review)

"A mix of Catastrophe and Fleabag with a dash of Nancy Drew." —The Nerd Daily

"A dramatic, fast-paced read." —Reader's Digest

"If you like quirky characters, scrappy fighters, and a high dose of hijinks, this is your cup of tea! Who am I kidding? This book is everyone’s cup of tea." —CrimeReads

"A hilarious, well-plotted thriller that goes racing through the streets of London, powered by frantic maternal desperation." —Shelf Awareness

"Snarky, wildly entertaining." —Fresh Fiction

"Funny, heartwarming and readable." —Daily Mail

"A zany romp featuring a less-than-perfect character readers will root for." —Booklist

"An absolute riot with a razor sharp sense of humor and unyielding suspense.” —Rachel Koller Croft, author of We Love the Nightlife and Stone Cold Fox

"Delicious, wicked, and darkly funny, a wild ride you wish would never end." —Sash Bischoff, author of Sweet Fury

"Truly one of a kind." —Caitlin Mullen, author of Please See Us

"An absolute gem." —Katy Hays, author of The Cloisters

"Pure delight in book form. Readers everywhere will be rooting for Florence from start to finish." —Saumya Dave, author of The Guilt Pill

"Everything about this book is unique and exciting, most especially the outrageous narrator. . . . Pure comedic gold." —firstClue newsletter

From the Publisher

2025-01-18
A former girl-band singer adrift in her life and career gets drawn into a missing persons case involving the “little shit” who’s been bullying her 10-year-old son in this debut novel.

Florence Grimes isn’t like the other mothers at St. Angeles, the posh London school her son, Dylan, attends. A divorcée and almost–pop star from Florida, she runs an online balloon delivery service and dreams of making a Mariah Carey–style comeback. Her going-nowhere-fast life suddenly gets turned upside down when Alfie Risby, heir to a frozen food fortune and her son’s tormentor, goes missing during a school field trip. Dylan becomes a major person of interest in the investigation that follows; then Florence discovers Alfie’s backpack in Dylan’s room. Horror mounting, she reads one of Alfie’s notebooks and learns that her son has made threats to kill his classmate. Readers are quickly pulled into the escalating drama by the sharp-tongued Florence, whose observations about the glossy St. Angeles “school mums” and their “anorexic whippet dog[s],” cheating husbands, and endless games of social one-upmanship are as unsparing as they are hilarious. Her commitment to protecting Dylan becomes the catalyst for her evolution into an amateur sleuth who stumbles across secrets so explosive they transform her and her son’s lives forever. Sly red herrings and surprise reveals are par for the course in this tightly plotted story that, while it satirizes the British obsessions with appearance and class, also celebrates the power of personal redemption through love.

A smart, page-turning suspense novel debut.

Kirkus Reviews