London theatre marked the 175th anniversary of the birth of Henrik Ibsen in 2003 with The Lady From the Sea, Brand and The Master Builder. This year (May 23, to be precise), is the centenary of his death, and Joanna Trollope's tribute is the beguilingly clever Second Honeymoon.

Central to the story is Ibsen's powerful 1881 drama Ghosts, like many of his plays a scathing critique of 19th-century morality.

More than a few critics have noted the relevance of Ghosts in these overly moralistic times, and Second Honeymoon is thinly veiled attack on the minority that would seek to dictate contemporary English middle-class 'family values'.

On the surface, there's nothing inherently amiss - Trollope peoples her story with Anglo-Saxon heterosexuals of sound English stock who went to good schools and live in relatively nice bits of London.

Ben, the youngest child at 23, has just moved out of the family home to live with his girlfriend, and Edie, his mother, is somewhat distraught at the departure - far more so than when her other children, Matthew and Rosa, flew the nest.

The three-storey house is now empty of all save Russell, her 56-year-old husband, and their cat, Arsie (named for football club Arsenal). Russell sees Ben's departure as a relief, a chance to get back his wife after 27 years of motherhood.

Edie sees things differently and, ignoring his increasingly romantic overtures, plans instead to revive her acting career. A half-hearted audition lands her the role of Helene Alving in a production of Ghosts by a small but well-regarded repertory company with West End aspirations.

Having set the stage, Trollope turns up the spotlights as each of the children makes a return to the familial home as their relationships fall apart.

Rosa ditches a boyfriend everyone warned her about and is left with maxed-out credit cards, no job and nowhere to live. Russell initially vetoes a return to the now empty nest.

Matthew, who finds the unpredictability of weather 'vaguely threatening', feels he can no longer keep up with Ruth, a 32-year-old junior headhunter, who's driven by the belief that, 'You couldn't, as a woman, make yourself into someone lesser in order to accommodate a man's weaknesses.'

Ben, trying to wean his girlfriend away from her mother, with whom they've both been living at the end of the line in Walthamstow, finds himself back home sleeping on the couch, his only recently vacated room now occupied by Rosa, whose own room has been taken by half-starved actor Lazlo, Edie's doomed stage- son Osvald, whom she rescued from Kilburn.

Into the mix Trollope adds Edie's sister, Vivienne (who's at first separated from, then reunited with her philandering husband, Max) and their son Eliot (who communicates by phone from his increasingly Australian life in Cairns with his girlfriend, Ro).

Various confidants act as muses to the main characters, or provide impetus to the storyline, which the dust-jacket fairly describes as 'the domestic nuances and dilemmas of life in present-day England'.

Trollope has built a considerable following through the realism of her stories, which in Second Honeymoon will ring true for Britons, Australians, New Zealanders and Canadians. Americans unfamiliar with the English may not experience quite the same frisson, but the subtext is fairly clear.

At the heart of Second Honeymoon lies the debate about what constitutes a family. Only about one-third of couples in Britain now get married, part of a general rejection of the institution itself and its religious overtones. However, only marriage is recognised as the legitimate union. Indeed, the provision in England and Wales last December of civil partnerships for same-sex couples in lieu of marriage was crafted in such a way as to withhold recognition of de facto heterosexual couples, who are still deemed to be 'living in sin' and their children 'bastards'.

Hong Kong similarly rejects de facto relationships, although Australia, New Zealand, Canada and many other countries have no issue with recognising two people of whatever gender living together in a mutually dependent relationship.

For the Norwegian playwright Ibsen, who earned in his lifetime international recognition for the social commentary of his dramas, hypocrisy was his nemesis, particularly when reality and purported morality radically diverged.

Ibsen is all about moral dilemmas, which is Trollope's territory, too.

In 2003, Ibsen became the most performed playwright in Britain, after Shakespeare, which goes to something George Bernard Shaw wrote of the father of modern drama: that he gives us 'not only ourselves, but ourselves in our own situation'. The same can be said of Trollope today, although her touch is lighter.

Just as Ghosts is considered a play about rediscovering 'the joy of life', so too is Second Honeymoon. And as Ghosts is about what critics call the need to shed dead ideas and moral conventions, so is this book.

Second Honeymoon is a sensitive, subtle and beautifully written tale about letting go of the past, because, as Edie says, 'there is no time like the present ... if you wanted a future'.