It is the morning after a husband's affair has been discovered, and the house is in chaos: the opening to Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1877) is deliberately evoked in Toni Jordan's novel Our Tiny, Useless Hearts. Now, three couples – Caroline and Henry, Lesley and Craig, and Janice and Alec – and the marital interloper, Martha, must redefine love under new circumstances. As marriages break up and re-form, the narrator, Janice, attempts to protect her nieces, Mercedes and Paris, from a reproduction of her own largely fatherless childhood.