OK then how about this for a selection:
The first two are free with current magazine issues. The second two have slightly darker themes but all are excellent good reads.
Decide over the weekend then we'll have all of next week to get hold of the books (I think all are widely available)
“The Devil Wears Prada” – Lauren Weisberger
(free with this month’s Eve)
When Andrea first sets foot in the plush Manhattan offices of Runway she knows nothing. She’s never heard of the world’s most fashionable magazine, or its feared and fawned-over editor, Miranda Priestly.
Soon she knows way too much.
She knows it’s a sacking offence to wear less than a three-inch heel to work – but there’s always a fresh pair of Manolos in the accessories cupboard.
She knows that eight stone is fat. That you can charge anything – cars, manicures, clothes – to the Runway account, but you must never leave your desk, or let Miranda’s coffee get cold. That at 3am, when your boyfriend’s dumping you because you’re always working and your best friend’s just been arrested, if Miranda phones with her latest unreasonable demand, you jump.
Most of all Andrea knows that Miranda is a monster boss who makes Cruella de Vil look like a fluffy bunny. But this is her big break, and it’s all going to be worth it in the end.
Isn’t it?
“Green Grass” – Raffaella Barker
(free with this month’s Family Circle)
When teenage Laura Sale turned down Guy Mildmay's marriage proposal, she had no inkling that their paths would cross again. She'd wanted to spread her wings, Guy to remain a Norfolk farmer. But when, years later, they meet in a chic London organic restaurant, Laura is at a turning-point. Disillusioned with life as partner to an installation artist (speciality: the Mobius strip) she finds herself drawn back to the countryside of her childhood holidays. Guy revives powerful memories - and could Laura ever work things out with the often-infuriating, supremely urban Inigo? Raffaella Barker has written a hilarious tale of bad-tempered goats, art-world excess and frantic text messages - and of a woman's yearning for the vivid expression of life that only the countryside makes possible.
“The Lovely Bones” – Alice Seabold
On her way home from school on a snowy December day, 14-year-old Susie Salmon is lured into a cornfield and brutally raped and murdered, the latest victim of a serial killer. The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold's haunting and heartbreaking debut novel, unfolds from heaven, where "life is a perpetual yesterday" and where Susie narrates and keeps watch over her grieving family and friends, as well as her brazen killer and the sad detective working on her case.
As Sebold fashions it, everyone has his or her own version of heaven. Susie's resembles the athletic fields and landscape of a suburban high school: a heaven of her "simplest dreams", where "there were no teachers... We never had to go inside except for art class... The boys did not pinch our backsides or tell us we smelled; our textbooks were Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue".
“After You’d Gone” – Maggie O’Farrell
A distraught young woman boards a train at King's Cross to return to her family in Scotland. Six hours later, she catches sight of something so terrible in a mirror at Waverley Station that she gets on the next train back to London. After You'd Gone follows Alice's mental journey through her own past, after a traffic accident has left her in a coma. A love story which is also a story of absence, and of how our choices can reverberate through the generations, it slowly draws us closer to a dark secret at the family's heart.