Jen Beagin’s new funny novel is set in Hudson, the small town in upstate New York where she lives, known as Brooklyn of the Hudson Valley, its inhabitants are “better-looking than average” and dress “like boutique farmers”, like Brentwood in Essex, East of England, surrounded by open countryside and woodland.

Big Swiss is Greta’s nickname, who is tall, and is from Switzerland. Great dressed top to toe in white, that adorable gap between her two front teeth, her penetrating blue eyes. She;s head-turnger, including the heads of infants and dogs.

Greta (45), is working in a pharmacy in Los Angeles when an OxyContin addict pulls a gun to demand pills, leading to the suicide of her colleague. Greta’s therapist recommends she take up “ hot yoga, hypnosis, primal screaming, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), acupuncture, and swing-dancing lessons” as well as quite caffeine and nicotine.

Ignoring therapist’s advice, Greta leaves her job and a 10-year engagement to a man to move cross-country to join her friend Sabine, a empty nester dealing weed, in a dilapidated Dutch farmhouse in Hudson. A “one cigarette drive from town”, the house also hosts 60, 000 honey bees, half a million hibernating stink bugs and two mini-donkeys.

Greta who likes knowing people’s secrets, takes a job transcribing the sessions of a local sex and relationship coach. With the transcripts printed verbatim, the premise allows Beagin to flex her talent for dialogue.

The sex therapist is named Bruce but goes by Om, “without a hint of irony”.  He does a brisk business, nearly everyone in Hudson had spilled guts on this man’s couch”.

Greta becomes infatuated with the voice of one of the clients, Flavia, whom she nicknames “Big Swiss” because she’s tall and come from Switzerland.

A 28-yer-old gynecologist, Flavia is  in therapy because she’s never had an orgasm. She finds sex with her husband a chore, “like walking the dog and drinking wheatgrass at the same time”.

This book is currently being developed into an HBO series starring Jodie Comer.

In such a tiny community you can’t enter a room without having weird, sometimes horrifying history with at least four different people”. When their paths cross at the dog park, Greta gives a fake name, introducing herself as Rebekah, and the two embark on a torrid affair, Beagin’s sex scenes are exuberant in bed with Big Swiss, “anything and everything seemed possible. No wonder lesbians seemed so smug” Greta observed.

The suspense complete with a deliciously awkward dinner party with the husband  lies primarily in whether Flavia will learn the truth of “Rebekah’s identity”

Both women are scarred by real traumas. Flavia was brutally assaulted by a man who has just been released from prison and may be stalking her; Greta blames herself for her mother’s suicide  when she was 13.

Beagin skillfully skewers the language of healing.  “Can you not use the word “journey” ever again? Flavia asks Om while still allowing her protagonists to begin to heal and ends up with Greta  on Om’s couch on Ketamine to address her suicidal ideation. “Do you give all your clients Ketamine?” She asks him. “ Is that why they’re often sobbing uncontrollably and calling you Dad?”.

Big Swiss will make you laugh out loud.

Hudson hipsters one of Om’s client is a baker who calls himself a “grain scholar”, Beagin challenges the narrative of victimization the critic Parul Sehgal has dubbed “the truma plot”.

Big Swiss by Jen Beagin, Faber £16:00/ Scribner $27, 336 pages