Now 36 and married with a two-year-old daughter, Amelie, Lisa Jewell was experiencing a familiar twentysomething career crisis in 1998 when the thought of writing first occurred to her.

She had been made redundant from her job as a director’s PA at the shirt company Thomas Pink and was desolate: “It was the best job I ever had. It broke my heart when I lost it. It was physical pain.”

Temping beckoned, but first she went on holiday to Malta with friends. One of them had taken Nick Hornby’s newly released novel, High Fidelity, which ended up being passed round the group.

Jewell now credits that book with setting her on the path to authorhood. “I thought, I’d love to write a book like that, a girl version.” When she got back to England, a journalist friend advised her to write three chapters and send them off to a selection of agents.

Jewell followed the advice but, in time-honoured tradition, had a bumpy start. One agent, Judith Murdoch, was interested but gave her to understand that she had no place for time-wasters.

“She sent me a really snitty letter back saying, ‘I can’t possibly take an interest in a work in progress. I’m far too busy, and I don’t like your font’.”

A year passed before Jewell had the courage to re-submit her manuscript and, when she did, she didn’t have enough money to cover the postage. She ended up hand-delivering her package to Murdoch’s house, where she met the woman in her dressing-gown (she’d just come out of hospital).

Murdoch rapped out a demand that Jewell at least cover the return postage, and sent her home with her tail between her legs. That, she suspected, was that.

From those inauspicious beginnings, things could only get better, but even Jewell – reading with amazement newspaper reports either trumpeting or deriding the latest of the series of outlandish book deals offered to debut novelists that were a feature of the late-1990s publishing landscape – didn’t imagine how much better.

Two days later, Murdoch rang to say, “Well, I’ve finished it, and it’s really rather good.”

Penguin offered her £60,000 for Ralph’s Party; later that day, they upped it to £120,000 for two books.

Jewell’s response was characteristically self-deprecating: “But it’s really not that good.” Murdoch had talked of bidding wars and film rights and Jewell had wondered whether to ring up other firms to check whether her new agent was right in the head.

But perhaps the most unexpectedly fairytale development in the book’s publication came when it was selected to appear on BBC2’s Late Review.

Lined up to give their judgment were Tony Parsons, Bonnie Greer and, perhaps most worryingly, the notoriously stern critic Tom Paulin. Jewell feared the worst, imagining that they had picked it out largely because “they wanted to slag off the overpaid-first-novelist syndrome”.

But they liked it, and nobody more than Paulin, who called it “a breath of fresh air”, describing how he had sat on a train with a hangover and been utterly transported. “It was magic,” says Jewell, who had sneaked out of her publication dinner to watch the programme on the restaurant’s television. “And it really set the ball rolling.”

That ball has continued to roll, but it would be unfair to ascribe Jewell’s success either to the lucky dip of publishing or to critical caprice. Her novels are indeed a cut above most other run-of-the-mill light comic romances: cogently written, character-driven and each with a carefully engineered twist that keeps the reader suitably unsure as to whether the expected happy-ever-after ending will materialise.

Vince and Joy, for example, begins with its eponymous heroes falling in love in the unlikely setting of a caravan park. The complication is that they are teenagers

destined to be sundered by

circumstance (and Joy’s deliciously repugnant father) and to fall haplessly into other, far less satisfying relationships for many years.

One of the novel’s satisfyingly dark plotlines lies in Joy’s disastrous marriage to a snobbish control-freak, and has its origins in Jewell’s own first marriage.

One thing she does credit her bookish ex-husband with, however, is introducing her to a wide range of literature. But when she was reading the latest Julian Barnes or Martin Amis, she was always asking herself, “Where is the young woman’s voice in this?”

Despite her commercial success, Jewell is free from the airs and graces that can affect novelists who know exactly how much pulling power they have.

She describes book number six – half completed and set in a commune – as “Ralph’s Party with weirdos”.

She makes light of the fact that her editor at Penguin, the formidable, highly respected Louise Moore, lends her the family nanny every morning so that she can write, which, by any standards, is pretty magnificent author-care.

Instead, Jewell is more preoccupied by the fact that, what with a small child and a husband working from home, domestic space is at a premium, and she is still working on a rickety table in the corner of her bedroom. “It does feel a bit tragic,” she says wistfully. “I’ve had five books published, after all.”

Vince and Joy is published by Penguin.