BEST BOOKS FOR... STARTING A NEW JOB

THE author and scriptwriter of TV hit Victoria suggests key novels to help you through the trickier times. NOW that any baby born today is almost certain to live into three figures, more of us are going to have to change careers at some point in our lives.

Perhaps the world of work will begin to divide into jobs for the young: firefighting; scaffolding; anything involving circuit boards; and jobs that require wisdom and don’t need perfect sight, such as writing.

Personally, I intend to go on writing until my fingers seize up from arthritis — and then I will download dictating software. I can’t think of anything worse than a life of leisure, however comfortable. But then, I am lucky enough to have found a job that is completely absorbing.

In one of my favourite comfort novels, the 1938 classic Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day, by Winifred Watson, the heroine, a spinster called Guinevere Pettigrew, who ekes an uncertain living as a nanny, is sent, by mistake, to work for a nightclub singer called Delysia LaFosse, who has class-A drugs in the bathroom and a complicated love life. Miss Pettigrew may have lived a sheltered life but, over the course of one hectic day, it becomes clear she is more than a match for anything Miss LaFosse can throw at her and she finds a new sense of self-respect, as well as a new career.

A friend recently gave up her job of 20 years that she knew was making her ill to start a garden design business.

From the day she resigned, she looked ten years younger.

V. I. Warshawski, the private investigator heroine of Sara Paretsky’s crime novels set in Chicago, started her working life as a lawyer, married to another lawyer, but she found she could not reconcile her principles to the compromises required by a legal career. She found fulfilment when she began working as a private investigator and ditched the husband.

Finally, there is Emma Harte, the heroine of Barbara Taylor Bradford’s Eighties blockbuster A Woman Of Substance. Emma’s love life could not be more rocky, but she holds herself and her family together with her incredible work ethic, transforming her modest talents as a seamstress into a global empire of department stores.

She likes the money, of course, but it’s the work that keeps her going. If we are all going to work until we drop, it might as well be at something we love.