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A gynaecological examination is a good analogy for the kind of painful self-inspection at which Queenie Jenkins excels. The heroine of Candice Carty-Williams’s 2019 debut Queenie memorably begins that novel with a medical appointment for a mystery ailment that turns out to be a miscarriage. The sequel, Queenie Is Working on It, picks up the story eight years on, with the now 33-year-old Queenie back on the gurney, this time for a fertility checkup. “I didn’t realise they did condoms for anything other than … penises,” Queenie observes lamely as the unsmiling doctor sheaths a probe. Life has changed, but in many ways, Queenie has not.

Carty-Williams’s first novel about a stumbling Jamaican-British woman living in London, navigating romantic disaster and a mental health crisis, was a breakout bestseller. Reassuringly, her keen ear for female friendships – the deep affection, the stubborn solidarity, the ribald humour – endures, as does her understanding of how the particular experience of race suffuses the ordinary lives of Black women. These are the qualities that made Queenie feel unique and interesting in 2019. She remains so in 2026, but your patience for the new novel rather depends on your tolerance for her continued misadventures.

She is, as the title suggests, a work in progress. The new Queenie has exchanged her demoralising magazine job for a role at a Black-owned social media platform. It’s this that takes her undercover to the fertility clinic, researching Black women’s experience of IVF treatment. When the tests come back indicating low chances of natural pregnancy, Queenie spirals and is forced to confront her chaotic love life.

Carty-Williams is smart and funny on Queenie’s delusions about her various paramours, especially the cheerily non-committal Vin, who works for Transport for London. Sex with him is like “some sort of erotic fairground ride where the end goal was both to have a stomach-dropping orgasm and also to finish breathless and thank God that everything is in one piece at the end”. If Queenie isn’t always in on the joke, desperately pinging sexy selfies to the indifferent Vin, her no-nonsense friends are there to set her right. Friends such as Kyazike – who calls Vin “TfL” because “they don’t deserve government names til they prove themselves worthy” – are delightfully realised, sage and sarcastic. That Queenie is so clueless can be grating, however. Fortunately, when she contemplates sex with a personal trainer called Pharoah, Kyazike is there to inform her that “fucking a PT is never smart. That’s community dick, sister.”

But Queenie’s sexual vulnerability is a serious theme that continues in this sequel, where erotic engagements with men are vain attempts to secure an emotional connection. Sex is, for Queenie, psychological, a way in which she is trying (and often failing) to set right the things that are going wrong in her life. It helps that Carty-Williams writes with clear-eyed candour, pragmatic and technical rather than titillating. When Queenie buys Vin a vibrating penis ring, he shakes his head. “Nah, babes … I’m not into all that AI shit.”

But, as the fertility doctor reminds Queenie, “the clock is ticking”. At a hen party, she finds herself discreetly taking notes on her phone during a discussion of anovulation and basal temperature testing. “Why didn’t we learn this stuff in school?” she thinks. “Why was I having to find out the basics of conception at a hen party when I was 33?” It’s a sharp question, and Queenie poses it on behalf of a generation of women for whom reproductive choices have been shaped by the pressures of financial insecurity and career planning. Queenie is not alone in finding herself underinformed and anxious about her reproductive future.

When Queenie lies to sexual partners about contraception in the hope that she might fall pregnant, Kyazike remonstrates that “bringing a Black baby into the world to be intentionally raised by a single parent feels wrong, sis. It don’t sit well with me at all.” It’s an example of the considered ways in which Carty-Williams channels the racial politics of ordinary life. It is not an overtly polemical statement, simply a reflection of Kyazike’s sense of the world. The experience of race is a condition of Queenie’s existence, but never the thing that defines her. It’s a point that Carty-Williams always makes with a skilfully light touch. “Please. Not the strong Black woman thing,” Queenie complains at one point, rolling her eyes. “We left it behind in 2020 when Black lives mattered. We’ve moved on to soft life now, or whatever the girls on TikTok are saying the latest personal political standpoint is.” Whatever it is, Queenie will probably still be working on it for the next novel.

• Queenie Is Working on It by Candice Carty-Williams is published by Trapeze (£20). To support the Guardian buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.