If you're new here, why not subscribe to our email updates or follow us on Facebook? You can also add us to your Google Reader. Thanks for visiting! Elin Hilderbrand’s Barefoot opens with a scene akin to a drawn-out framing shot in a Steven Spielberg movie: through airport attendant Josh Flynn’s eyes we see three woman disembarking from a plane,...

  Earlier this year I read Margaret Drabble’s excellent The Millstone, a novel about a young, unmarried Englishwoman who falls pregnant and who, after an unsuccessful attempt to abort the pregnancy, opts to keep the child. It’s a fascinating novel that looks at the highly curtailed rights of women in the 1960s, and also at the many...

In my perusals of Buenos Aires bookshops for English-language material I unearthed, along with all manner of questionable bodice rippers and deliciously un-PC adventure stories, a couple of gems that I suspect will stay with me for some time: Shirley Hazzard’s languidly striking The Bay of Noon (see my review), and Margaret Drabble’s The...

Ellie Avery isn’t barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, but she is pregnant, and stands little hope of putting up her feet any time soon. Despite being an organisational guru–Ellie runs a tidying business called Everything in its Place–Ellie finds herself dealing with the unanticipated more often than not. And unfortunately the unanticipated...

Twenty-nine year old Alice Love’s surname suits her perfectly: she has a heart so large it could feature in an Edgar Allen Poe short story (in a good way, of course), feels nothing but glorious, unabashed adoration for her new husband Nick, sees potential lurking in every corner of the once-gorgeous home they bought for a song but for which others might...