Byline: VICTORIA MOORE
The Charming Man by Marian Keyes (Penguin [pounds sterling]7.99)
MARIAN Keyes fans will be kept occupied for a week with this 900-page, door-stopper set in Ireland and written in her usual chatty, girlygossipy way.
At its centre is the lustrous-haired, silver-tongued and too-good-lookingto-be-nice politician Paddy de Courcy.
But the saga unfolds through the voices of four women whose lives he has affected.
There's Lola, a stylist and, she thinks, Paddy's girlfriend until, while bidding for an owl handbag on an internet auction site, she notices a news headline that says Paddy has just got engaged - and not to her.
There's hard-nosed journalist Grace Gildee and her lovely, but troubled sister, Marnie.
And there's Paddy's foxy new fiancee, Alicia. Throw in a couple of dirty political tricks campaigns and you have a tangle of broken hearts and intrigues to be unravelled by heroines who seem to eat a lot of chocolate.
This book's the literary equivalent of a family-sized tin of biscuits stuffed with pink wafers and jammy dodgers: not sharp, but oddly compelling.
Epi leather BagsPriceless by Olivia Darling (Hodder [pounds sterling]6.99)
'GET rich, get lucky, get even,' screams this book's (gold-embossed) cover-line.
In other words, if you ever watched Dynasty and fantasised about striding around in swishy designer clothes, flicking your blow-dry and telling people 'I've bought your company, get out,' then you might enjoy this.
Set in the world of fine art and auction houses, the plot revolves around a fake art scam, a smoothie auctioneer called Nat Wilde who loves nothing more than the girls in his office competing for his attention with shorter skirts and higher heels, and an American career hottie who has crossed the Atlantic intent on getting one-up on Nat, the man who once humiliated her.
The raunch factor is daringly high: in true Eighties bonkbuster tradition, there are a lot of rather steamy scenes.
Darling devotees will recognise a cast that overlaps with her earlier glamourthon, Vintage, as well as her Silver Set biting wit.
Jinxed by Sara Lawrence (Faber [pounds sterling]6.99)
STAGMOUNT is no Mallory Towers. Come to that, it makes St Trinian's look like a convent for model nuns.
It is a riot of beautiful, spoilt teenagers in designer jeans, whose holiday parties leave a different class of drunken debris - part-smoked bongs, girls entangled in the suits of armour that scatter their friends' ancestral homes, borrowed purple suede Biba shoes perched on fountains - and whose term-time activities are equally saucy. Naughty and giggly, this is actually teen fiction, but it will be enjoyed by others who wish they hadn't grown out of schoolgirl japes.
Twenties Girl by Sophie Kinsella (Bantam [pounds sterling]18.99)
LARA isn't over her break-up with Josh. She gets teary just thinking about it and even her parents daren't mention him by name any more, instead essaying a tentative: 'How are things?'
She's also having problems with her new headhunting company, so things are looking rocky financially, too. What she really needs is a ghost - yes, you did read that correctly
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