For her fourth book, Candace Bushnell tries to recreate a world as compelling and fascinating as Sex and The City. Unfortunately she has not succeeded.
In Lipstick Jungle, high fashion meets the powerful women who actually wear it. Single, beautiful, creative and unconventional, Victory Ford has worked for years to create her own independent fashion
Title:
Messiah
Author:
Boris Starling
Genre:
Thriller
Publisher:
HarperCollins UK
Release Date:
1999
Pages:
483
A stunning, shocking, wonderfully well written debut reminiscent of James Patterson and one that will catapault Boris Starling to the front rank of thriller writers.
The summer of 1998 sees London in the middle of a heat wave with a killer on the loose. Men are being murdered in their homes in the middle of the night, the only clue – a silver
Title:
The Lives of the Muses, Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired
Author:
Francine Prose
Genre:
Biography
Publisher:
Harper Collins
Pages:
432
Starting with writer Samuel Johnson’s muse Hester Thrale and moving on to Alice Liddell (Lewis Carroll’s inspiration for Alice in Wonderland), Pre-Raphaelite beauty Elizabeth Siddal and Salvador Dali’s wife Gala, this is a multi-biography with an art slant and a theme as fascinating as the lives of the women who inspired it.
Title:
A Million Little Pieces
Author:
James Frey
Genre:
Biography & Autobiography
Publisher:
John Murray Pubs Limited
Release Date:
2004
Pages:
513
A Million Little Pieces is set in the roller coaster timeframe of James Frey’s torturous ride through rehabilitation. While struggling to find a new life, Frey shares his past life of debauchery and addiction with astonishing honesty and clarity, giving the usual self-pity a gracious miss.
Frey started drinking regularly at the early age of
Title:
Living the Dream
Author:
Kate Thompson
Genre:
Chick-Lit, Irish
Release Date:
Jun 1 2005
Pages:
619
Living the Dream is Kate Thompson’s seventh novel and sees the return of some of her favourite characters.
Cleo Dowling’s dream has just come true, she’s won the lotto. Even though she is determined not to change, everyone’s attitude towards her does change, so Cleo takes off to a small village in the west of Ireland
Title:
How to Lose Friends and Alienate People
Author:
Toby Young
Genre:
Biography
Publisher:
Little, Brown Young Readers
Release Date:
2008
Pages:
349
At some point in their career, most journalists dream of conquering the land of Manhattan’s glossy mags. Undeterred by a world where infamous ball-breaker Tina Brown is Queen, Toby Young went Stateside for five years in search of success, supermodels and better cocaine. Thus begins a voyage of self-discovery bristling with a naivety that rarely
Title:
The Lovely Bones
Author:
Alice Sebold
Genre:
Thriller
Publisher:
Macmillan
Release Date:
2003
Pages:
328
In addition to having all the trappings of a page-turner, Alice Sebold’s morbid Lovely Bones explores two levels of death – both those that are left behind and the departed. The narrator is a young girl who is brutally murdered at the age of fourteen. The reader is taken through her struggles and attachments to the life she was tragically
“Farewell, but you will be with me, you will go within a drop of blood circulating in my veins”
These lines from a Pablo Neruda poem are the only link to the past that a young Cuban woman has to her mother. The words, scrawled on a piece of paper, are pinned to her clothes as she is abandoned to the care of her grandfather. The time is Cuba, at the height of the revolution, when the city’s inhabitants are fleeing the terror of Batista
Title:
After Many a Summer
Author:
Aldous Huxley
Genre:
Fiction
Publisher:
Ivan R Dee
Release Date:
1976
Pages:
355
The bones of this story concern an English academic’s trip to America to stay with a rich tycoon.
Jeremy Pordage has been employed by Mr Stoyte to go through a wealth of historical documents he has purchased from two down-on-their-luck spinsters of the English aristocracy. Such is Stoyte’s style of personal aggrandisement, he has built
Title:
My Week with Marilyn
Author:
Colin Clark
Genre:
Biography & Autobiography
Publisher:
Weinstein Books
Release Date:
2011
Pages:
320
Back in the summer of 1956, Colin Clark’s first job was as third assistant director (as he puts it, “the lowest of the low”) on a film called ‘The Prince and the Showgirl’. Starring Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe, the film was one of Monroe’s attempts to escape being typecast as a dumb blond, but her acting
Bibliofemme, a project that started out as a non-funded labour of love, has fostered an online community of readers who share their thoughts and ideas on all things literary. This website encourages a sense of community among women in particular and has prompted numerous reading groups to get started.
