Sex. There's a lot of it about. And Stella is definitely not getting her fair share.

She's got a few handicaps: she's the wrong side of thirty, she's a single mum (to the adorable Honey), and her French hot-bloodedness is liable to turn grown men pale. Mind you, the men she meets are either perma-tanned, tight-trousered smoothies with strangely white teeth or - easy, tiger - balding, poorly socialized podgers. One lot have black satin sheets; the other lot have, well, wives. What's a girl to do?

Dividing her time between London's most PC playgroup (most popular children's names: Ichabod and Perdita) and lessons on the art of pulling from housemate Frank, Stella is seriously starting to wonder if she'll ever have sex again.

'Brilliantly funny and knowing ... Clara Hutt could eat Bridget Jones for breakfast'
Evening Standard

'A sharp, witty novel ... groundbreaking in current women's fiction'
Marie Claire

I am lying in my bed listening to Frank having sex again. 'Gur-runt, gur-runt, gur-runt, gur-runt, gu-runt,' is what it sounds like: coitus as iambic pentameter, which you must admit is unusual. His is the only voice I can hear: is he having the sex with himself, I wonder? Because he's being unnecessarily vocal for a solo performance: if you have a quick Barclays, you hardly need to provide your own running commentary. What can he possibly be saying to himself? 'You're hot, Frank, mate. You make me hard, know what I mean? Does this feel good, Frankie, baby'? God, how creepy. How deeply, deeply creepy. The freak!

I do not deserve my life, I really don't. I've never deliberately hurt anybody, I pay my taxes, I love my child, and what do I get? An absolute pervo smut-freak of a housemate: a man that lies there dirty-talking himself. Oh, yuck. Oh, blee. I might have to switch the light on and pace up and down for a bit.
Still, makes a change, the solo business. It's usually a duet.
But I spoke too soon, for lo: here's tonight's ladyfriend, who's been silent as the tomb until now: 'Eee,' she's saying - perhaps she's from Yorkshire. Very high-pitched, at any rate. 'Eee.' Oh, I see: Frank-eeee.'

I suppose that makes it marginally better. But still... I am really, really happy for Frank that he's having so much sex -someone in this house has to, and it sure as pants isn't me. But I'd rather not be listening. Not that that's what I'm doing - listening. I am overhearing by accident. You couldn't not. Oh, I wish I was earless and had lots of elegant turbans, like my great-aunt, who of course had ears, but you get the gist.

On, and inexorably on it goes: 'Grunty grunty grunt...'. (Frankie's sexual technique is quite impressive: it's been at least 25 minutes. Dominic took about half this time, including foreplay. Still, he was English, so what can you expect? I'm lucky I got away with my bottom intact).

I know what you're thinking: that it's all very well for me to sit, or rather lie, here complaining, and that if I don't like it then I should stop listening like some depraved voyeur, or rather ecouteur, and maybe put some music on, or get into the shower, or just go somewhere else. But I can't. It's 2 am: the creak of floorboards, let alone a sudden blast of either water or Puccini, would simply make it perfectly clear to Romeo and Juliet that I can hear everything. Besides, I'm cosy in my bed: I don't want to go out anywhere. And it's raining. It always rains here.

Christ, I wish he'd hurry up. Why are the walls so bloody thin, anyway? There's a whole bathroom between us: I really shouldn't be able to hear a thing. This is a big fat square Victorian house: you'd think the walls were as thick as tree trunks. They probably made them thin on purpose, so that Mr Unwholesome Victorian could hear the maids being shagged. Bloody pervy, weird English (I must stop saying that, actually, or even thinking it: I'm half English myself).
Thank God Honey is tucked up two floors away. Brahms' Lullaby this ain't, comme on dit a New York.

'Woah God,' Frank suddenly shouts, sounding agonised. WoahGod.'
'Eee,' she says. 'Aaaa. Aaaa.' And then, sounding oddly tribal: 'Oa. Oa. Oa. Oa.' Exactly like that: four times. She likes the simple vowel sounds, clearly.
And then she screams.
Clear as a bell, she screams 'In my face. Yurgh. Yurgh. Hoooooooo yes. Hoooooo yes. RAAAAH.'
And then, finally, there is quiet.

So obviously it's a teeny bit awkward at breakfast the next morning. I wasn't going to say anything - I tend not to -but I wake up both knackered and in a furious bad mood. I didn't get to sleep until after three, and Honey woke up at six, as toddlers will. Mary, her babysitter-cum-occasional-childminder, has finally arrived to look after her for a few hours, and the two of them have gone off into the living room armed with puzzles, board books and a vast collection of dollies.

Honey looks as fresh as a daisy. I look like a gnarled old oak, especially under the eyes. It's just before nine, and here we are in the kitchen. Frank's wearing his favourite battered tartan dressing gown and squeezing oranges. The oranges match his hair (body, head and, presumably, pubis). So if you think this is one of those 'And there the love of my life was all along, right under my nose' stories, you are very much mistaken.

Frank has a lot going for him: he's charming, he's clever, he's funny, he's kind, and he is extraordinarily professionally successful: my ex-husband Dominic now sells his paintings for tens of thousands of dollars. His face is nice too: stem jaw, flinty grey eyes and a mouth that looks potentially cruel (very sexy, I always think) until he smiles his lovely, faintly goofy disarming smile. Great body, too: lanky yet broad, but not overdeveloped, and marvellous sinewy arms from all that painting.

So on paper, yes, foxy in the extreme. On paper, I'd read about him and shout 'Go on my son' to myself. On paper, I'd be the one having sex with him, and teaching him the beauty of consonants. But this isn't paper, and while all of the above are true, there is one insurmountable problem.

If I got desperate enough, I could just about go with light strawberry blond. Or pale Titian, maybe, or whatever lying excuses for 'ginger' people come up with. But Frank isn't merely ginger: he is, as I said, as orange as the fruits he is squeezing: not merely ginger, but practically fluorescent. He makes the average carrot look pretty peaky.

The problem isn't just his head-hair: the problem, for me, with gingers - and yes, I happily admit I have a problem, so you don't need to bore me with 'what would it sound like if you substituted 'black people' for 'gingers?', because I know, I know how bad it sounds - lies in the secondary hair. (Black people, cleverly, never have ginger hair.)

If it was just the head, I could make my ginger lover wear a hat at all times, or I could just shave it off. There would still be a faint marmalade shadow, but if I kept my contact lenses out, I probably would barely notice. No, it's the other hairs. It's the ginger chest hair, and the ginger arm and leg hair and - here's the crux of it - the ginger armpit hair, all damp and curlicued after lovemaking... and the pubic hair. The chimpanzee-orange pubic hair of someone like Frank. I simply can't countenance it: for some people it's hairy backs that make them dry-heave, or men with pronounced female buttocks (never, I'll grant you, a good look); or the old weeny peeny problem. Or - God - man-boobs. For me, it's orange pubes: no pasaran.

That's not all, unfortunately. And I can't dismiss the other stuff as easily - as facetiously - as the orange body-wool, either. The fact is that Frank is casually promiscuous in a way that stuns and fascinates me in equal measure: joyfully, guiltlessly permanently-up-for it. Which is fine, of course, but one wouldn't necessarily want to go there: every woman Frank sleeps with becomes a notch - an instantly forgettable, inconsequential little notch - on his bedpost.

He's forgetful in other respects too. I happen to know that Frank has a child up in Newcastle, where he comes from (Frank never wears coats). A child - a daughter - whom he never sees and never mentions. And the child presumably has a mother, of whom Frank has never spoken. And I have a problem with that, I really do: such a problem, in fact, that I can't even bring the subject up with him. I am silenced by my own disgust. So let's just say Frank is not my dream date, and leave it at that.

But I digress.
'Morning, Stella,' Frank beams, handing me a glass of orange - natch - juice. 'Sleep well?'
I raise one eyebrow and give him a slow, deliberate look. He understands it, and a hot blush starts creeping up his Celtically pale face.
'Maybe you could very sweetly buy me a present,' I tell him, sternly.
'What, like a bunch of flowers? It'd feel a bit like apologising to the landlady,' he smiles.
'I was thinking more ear plugs.'
'Oh God,' says Frank, covering his face with his hands in the usual way. 'Oh God. I'm really, really sorry.'
'It's okay,' I tell him. 'But honestly, Frank, you do this all the time, and if you're going to be quite so, um, vocal, then ear plugs really might be an idea.'
'Yeah,' says Frank, staring at his bare toes, which are scrunched with horror. 'Honestly, Stella - I didn't even know it was going to happen, otherwise, you know...'
'What? Otherwise what?'
'Well, we could have gone to hers, or whatever.'
'You never do, though, do you? Are they all homeless? Anyway, I hope it was worth it. Was it good?' I've gulped down my juice and am standing by the coffee machine. 'Coffee?'
'Yes, please. Was what good?'
'The sex, Frank.' Frank, I am pleased to notice, has gone scarlet. What with the tangerine above the red face, he looks like the kind of cardigan women wore in the late Nineties.

We stand in uneasy silence, glaring at each other. I might have gone too far, I think to myself. On the other hand, it gets really on my nerves when people - English men - get all uptight about something you've actually heard them do. I'll just go a little further: test his mettle.
'Oa. Oa. Oa,' I shout, right into his face. 'Oa, Frankie, baby.'
Frank looks truly appalled. He runs his hand through his hair, which is standing up in soft peaks, like egg whites would if egg whites were orange. And then he smiles, and I smile, and then we giggle.
'You're an appalling human being,' he says. 'You do terrible things.'
'Pot,' I reply. 'I don't believe you've ever met kettle.'
He rolls his eyes.
'Really, Frankie. I know it's none of my business, but 'oa, oa'?'
Frank is trying to look severe, and failing. He laughs through his nose, and then properly, out loud. When he laughs, his eyes start watering, which always sets me off. He does it now. We laugh, and then he snorts, and then we're friends again.

I expect you're wondering how I come to be sharing a house with a sex-obsessed ginger man. It's a bit of a long story, but I'd better tell it, and that way we'll have got the boring explanatory bit out of the way and get on with the rest.

My name, as you will have noticed, is Stella. It's really Estelle, but I got so fed up of the mispronunciation I had to put up with daily - 'Ee-stell', 'Eh-stelley', 'Es-tewell', even 'Esther' - and with people asking me to spell it for them, that I anglicised it some years ago. I am, as I mentioned, partly English, on my mother's side. My father is French (and, I think, possibly gay, though I can't be quite sure; certainly, he's the campest man on earth, as you will see). I was brought up in Paris, speaking French, although Mummy, being one of those tenaciously snobbish Englishwomen who spend twenty years abroad and deliberately don't quite master the basic gist of the language, always spoke English to me at home.

So I was brought up bilingual, although obviously living in Paris meant that all my day-to-day business - school, friends, shops, restaurants - was conducted in French. We spent summer holidays in England every year, staying with my maternal grandparents at their house in East Sussex, and this, combined with my mother's descending like a ton of bricks the second her immaculate ear discerned anything approaching a French accent in me - 'Darling, don't be froggy' - means that I speak English like, well, a native.

(Odd of my mother to marry a Frenchman and then be embarrassed by Frenchness, isn't it? If she imitates someone French, she literally says 'Nee nor nee nor'. But it often happens when English people marry 'foreigners', I notice: blissfully exotic for thirty seconds, and then an albatross of shame for the next twenty years).

I spent a couple of years at a boarding school in the shires when Mummy and Papa separated, when I was 14. That was when I realised, on a daily basis, that I could sound as English as Judi Dench, but that, like it or not, in the middle class world which I inhabited, I was hopelessly, helplessly foreign: I liked my family better than I liked horses, I couldn't eat grey mince, I'd done snogging, I liked cigarettes and was allowed to smoke one a day at home, I refused to play lacrosse on the grounds that it would ruin my calves (I know: terrible of me - true, though), and so on and so inexcusably foreignly forth. Still, I made some nice horse-faced friends and became good at tennis, so it wasn't entirely wasted.

I shan't bore you with my days at university - two years at the Sorbonne, one at Cambridge, reading Romance Languages. All you need to know is that I didn't work particularly hard, went to a lot of parties and generally had a lovely time. After Cambridge, I got married to the boy I'd been going out with in the summer term: we were only 22 and, really, it was doomed to failure. In the event, it lasted two silly, giggly years and the split was entirely friendly: Rupert is even Honey's godfather.

Unfortunately for lonely old me - I could do with an extra friend right now - Rupert, having lived the post-marital life of an eligible West Londoner to the full - shag-pad in Ladbroke Grove and so on - decided six months ago to grow a beard, up sticks and move to the Hebrides, where he studies birds, eats crabs, wears itchy sweaters and is, by his own account, blissfully happy. Funny how people always revert back to type: I remember his mother telling me that he spent his entire childhood collecting feathers and climbing up trees to find nests.

I moved around Europe for a while and then, aged 27, I went home to Paris and started working as a translator. I had a wonderful life: a flat in the Marais, good friends, a fantastic bistro right underneath my apartment: they'd send up old-fashioned soupe a I'oignon when I had a cold or a hangover. The only fly in the ointment was work: there's a limit to how excited you can get translating endless documents about petrochemical companies' plans for expansion. Still, it seemed that the more boring and technical the job, the better you got paid, so I pottered along happily. The odd love affair along the way kept things zinging along nicely; I was, with the luxury of retrospect, perfectly content.

We talked to India about sex, marriage, and being 'grown up'. Here's what she had to say ...

Your first novel, My Life on a Plate, was a huge success. Can you tell us what Don’t You Want Me? is about?

It’s about sex really, and particularly sex after marriage, whether it’s possible to ever have a sexual relationship again when you’re the wrong side of thirty-five, quite fussy and have a child. The answer being probably not unless you’re willing to make enormous compromises.

Was it difficult to move on to writing your second novel?

No, it was very easy because I, like the majority of women, think about sex, shoes and babies quite a lot of the time and that’s what certainly a big part of the novel is about, so no not really, it’s just all running round in my head.

In a way, this novel is about growing up. At what point do you think we become ‘grown-ups’, if ever?

I don’t think we ever do really become grown-ups. There’s been a lot in the press recently about ‘kidults’; adults who are sort of muddling through but are never properly grown up in the way that one conceives of our parents as being grown up. I remember my mother seeming grown up to me when she was about thirty, and I don’t feel grown up, I don’t think any of my friends are grown up. It’s as if we’re on stilts wearing borrowed adult clothing going through the motions, but really we just want to go and hang upside down on a bar and show our knickers.

Why is being single an 'unnatural state'? Both of your novels focus on this ...

I don’t think being single is an unnatural state, that’s the thing. I think everybody’s obsessed with the unnaturalness of the single state and actually, I think being single is completely reasonable. There is so much pressure now on women from the age of about twelve onwards, via media in general, and particularly magazines, to conform and enter a nuclear relationship and raise children and have a boyfriend, a husband, a partner. Actually I think that’s quite a crock. I think if you have maternal feelings and want to have children fine, if you fancy having a big wedding dress fine, but I don’t think it is an unnatural state. I think what both the books do in their different ways is try and show that being neatly married and living in your little suburban house is not necessarily a valid solution.

Sex and the (newly) single thirtysomething. Tell us more ...

Well, I think people should be less fussy about sex. The thing about sex is that as long as you don’t have particularly high standards, it’s not really very difficult to find. I wrote an article once for Nova magazine about how it was really easy to get a boyfriend; you just have to go and stand in the street and one would come along. He might be a rubbish boyfriend, he might be really ugly, he might be thick, he might be bad in bed or he might be none of the above. The thing is, we expect so much that we’re not prepared to sort of experiment and poke around, as it were, and have a look and see what’s available. We want everybody to be six foot two, earning a fortune, extraordinarily handsome, and fabulously intelligent, and then we moan because the streets of London aren’t littered with such men. I think we just need to really reconsider and perhaps be able to disassociate sex from a marriage that’s going to last thirty years.