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Love Rat returns

Love Rat returns

Mount! by Jilly Cooper (Transworld, £20) It can't have escaped the notice of Jilly Cooper fans that Rupert Campbell-Black is back! And they won't be disappointed. How could anyone not love a book where the animal characters get equal billing alongside the humans? The cast list at the front of Mount! runs to seventeen pages half of which are devoted to quadrupeds. The personalities of horses such as Peppy Koala, Safety Car, Master Swiftly, dog Forester and cat Purrpuss play as

The Naked Muse

The Naked Muse

The Naked Muse by Kelley Swain (Valley Press, £8.99) In all the years, I've been life drawing, I'm ashamed to say I have never made friends with the model. We've chatted of course, when they've come round in the breaks to see what I've done, but I've never stopped to consider what they think about when they are sitting on a piece of old curtain staring out at a room full of artists staring back at them to seek out every line, every perfection or imperfection and turn it into

A Country Road, A Tree

A Country Road, A Tree

A Country Road, A Tree by Jo Baker (Doubleday, £11.99) Perhaps the strangest thing about this whole mesmerising story is that it's true. If you thought literary writers spent their lives propelled as if on casters from bed to desk to library and back again, never risking more than a trip to the bar, here's something to make you think again. Samuel Beckett's whole being was about writing, when the book opens he's in pre-war Paris hanging out with friends including James Joyce

Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award

Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award

Photograph © Francesco Guidicini Kindness is dead. She was knifed, no axed, no shot by her boyfriend, a lover, a man in a red car that was not a silver Pajero and the five ladies who were her colleagues in the hair saloon (sic) where she was the best (and cheapest) braid plaiter in Harare can’t get enough of her death. They weave it in and out of their day, around their customers, a blind beggar and his seeing-eye boy – both barefoot, the tennis-playing lady they reckon is no

One with You

One with You

One With You by Sylvia Day (Penguin, £7.99) Hankies, check. Glass of wine, check. Comfy sofa, check. Copy of One With You? Sorted. I’m settling down for the blockbuster finale of Sylvia Day’s Crossfire series, a bit late to the party I admit, this is my first Crossfire novel, but here I go. Suffice to say that in the beginning was Sylvia Day, the author of a chart-topping series of novels teeming with all the breathless romance and eroticism you’d need to set Mr Mills’ and Mr

L'amour fou

L'amour fou

We'll Always Have Paris by Emma Beddington, (Pan Macmillan, £12.99) Never trust a book by its cover. After reading the line on the front of Emma Beddington's memoir, I thought it was about trying and failing to become French - frothy, witty, insightful, I thought, just what I need as a break from my day job writing about a 700-year-old prison. And it is all those things - the sections where teenage Emma is kicking against her childhood in nice middle-class Yorkshire rang very

For The Most Beautiful

For The Most Beautiful

For The Most Beautiful by Emily Hauser (Doubleday, £12.99) The only prize I ever won in school was for speaking Greek verse. We, half a dozen state school girls from Hertfordshire, took on the might of the top (male) public schools and won. It was girl power at its finest. So armed with that victory and the subsequent O-level, here is my review of this lovely book by proper classicist Emily Hauser, a retelling of the Trojan Wars where the women also come out on top. The story

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Prawn vol-au-vent, anyone?

Prawn vol-au-vent, anyone?

The Naked Muse

The Naked Muse

Pedro Paricio - Dreams

Pedro Paricio - Dreams

Present perfect

Present perfect

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