Missing You Already by Pauline McLynn

Headline Review €14.99
GRITTY isn’t what you expect of Pauline McLynn - Mrs Doyle in Father Ted, and now starring in October by Fiona Looney in the Olympia.
But in Missing You Already she’s taken on the icy subject of Alzheimer’s.
Probably not a good idea in these testing times - look back to the 1930s, when all anyone wanted to see on the screen was the rich having a great time.
Still, she wasn’t to know that someone would pull a loose thread in the economy and the whole thing would unravel.
The story: Kitty Fulton’s job is minding the lost. She runs the ticket office in a train station in rural England, and loves to reunite the absent-minded with their absent possessions.
But at home, her mother May is going absent in another way. She’s hiding the fact that she can’t read the clock, can’t remember if she’s eaten, can’t control her body - or her mind.
And when she finally admits it, she tells Kitty: when I swim out in the Red Sea, don’t try to bring me back.
The new town librarian, Simon Hill, is drifting into Kitty’s life - as she loses one love, she finds another.
Not a comforting read, but a sadly realistic story.
Author's site

Going it Alone by Clare Dowling

Headline Review €9.44
THE HORRIBLE truth is that Millie is 39. She’s had a great time as Andrew’s wife after the last 15 years of flitting and good-timing.
But now she’s married, and her biological clock isn’t just ticking, she’s being deafened by the alarm.
It’s time for serious action on the baby front. But Millie’s husband really isn’t co-operating as he should.
Fair City writer Clare Dowling is the mistress of feelgood stories, but here she’s dicing with danger. But she’s still funny even writing about a fraught subject.
What her heroine Millie hasn’t realised is the unfair rule that at 18 you only have to glance at the postman to be pregnant. But at 39 - when you can actually support the kid - your body’s snarling at you: “You had your chance, babe; forget it”.
And few things put a worse strain on a marriage than the infertility of either one of the partners.
Millie is getting familiar with terms such as ‘ovarian reserve’. She isn’t noticing how much more reserved her husband is.
As Andrew digs in his heels and Millie goes right ahead baby-hunting anyway, their marriage seems to be falling to pieces.
Dowling’s done it again with this entertaining story. Her fans will love it.
Author's site

Anything for Love by Sarah Webb

Macmillan €12.99
DIVINE Alice Devine is in the pits. No man, no real home, her adorable baby Adam to support.
And a sister who keeps helpfully getting her jobs.
So naturally she moves in with her sister, Grace, and takes the next job offered.
Working as an assistant fundraiser for a maternity hospital lands her into the world of the rich. Older men with younger wives, women built like busty stick insects - but all the same problems as the women whose husbands have less money and more hair.
Her boss is Maud Hamilton-O’Connor, wife of the famous Boothy, and the most famous of Ireland’s charity ladies who lunch. But a bit scatty: don’t let her near the slug pellets when she’s cooking.
Here’s where 93% of readers start guessing who’s who. The other 7% already know, I’d guess.
“Even I knew Boothy,” writes Sarah Webb in this latest hilarious novel. “He was one of Ireland’s richest men… He also had a larger than life personality with fantastic, controversial expressions for everything from SUVs (‘Dublin Dumptrucks’) to the bin charges (‘Sin Bins’), and he was always giving ‘state of the economy’ soundbites on the telly.”
Anything for Love is full of twists and tears and laughs, another solid bestseller-to-be for the Dun Laoghaire writer.
Author's site

Between the Sheets by Colette Caddle

Simon & Schuster €8.99 (Easons price)

IRISH chicklit used to be great - witty, tightly plotted, with vivid characters. You never knew what was going to happen, and whatever happened you burst out laughing.
But in the last couple of years it's gone all fluffy. The plots are flabby, there isn't a joke in the place, and it's as dull as a daylight nightclub.
Colette Caddle just may be showing a light at the end of this tunnel with her latest book, though it's the dark light of misery lit.
It's an undemanding book, with more nourishment than flavour.
In Between the Sheets, Caddle's heroine, Dana De Lacy, is the type you read about in the Herald diary - a best-selling romance writer, well married, with publicists making sure her picture is in every paper as she haunts the glamorous night spots.
It all falls to pieces when Dana's sexy architect husband Gus walks out, saying their marriage was a sham. Both of them immediately get off with new squeezes.
Dana takes to the drink and starts writing about her dank Wexford childhood, when her father, a famous poet, was horrid to her brother and her mother, and idolised her.
The story goes back and forth between Dana's modern high life and early misery - but of course it all ends happily.
Publisher's site

A Dance in Time by Orna Ross

Penguin Ireland €17.54

ISEULT Gonne's was an unfortunate second-hand life - half-acknowledged child of WB Yeats's muse; half-French, half-Irish; mistily involved with the married Ezra Pound; abandoned by Francis Stuart when he chose Germany and other lovers.
My mother once told me that Iseult was stunningly beautiful. When she walked into a room, every man went unconsciously to straighten his tie.
But as soon as her aged mother entered, it was as if Iseult had become invisible: Maud Gonne's blazing beauty obliterated her.
Orna Ross - teacher, journalist, literary agent, counsellor, writer - has wrapped Iseult's story within another.
The gigantic book is full of antique scandal: the sensational divorce of Maud Gonne and Major John MacBride is rehearsed here. MacBride, a hard-drinking soldier, denied the whispered charge of sexually abusing Iseult.
Ross, who is sick with cancer at the moment, used the relationship between Maud and Iseult Gonne and a fictional writer and her daughter, as a template for a meditation on the nature of daughterhood.
The book could have done with cutting by a third to sharpen the stories that really matter - but her style is so wonderful that even the dull in-between bits are almost a pleasure to read.
For anyone intrigued by the matching of art and idealism that gave birth to our state, this provide a fascinating insight.
Publisher's site

Enchanting Alice by Anne Dunlop

Poolbeg €17.99
ANNE Dunlop is back with a blast in this gently funny story of love and marriage in the 1970s.
Beauty queen contestants Jane and Kathleen couldn't be more different. Jane's a svelte, dark Derry beauty, Kathleen a fine sonsy hunk of a farm girl.
Jane confides that her ambition in life is to marry for love, and to live happily ever after.
Be careful what you wish for. Months later she's a 17-year-old bride, married to Kathleen's brother Michael and living on a farm on the top left-hand corner of Lough Neagh, with his Bible-bashing father and spiteful mother, and raging Kathleen.
Each heart knows its own bitterness, and no one else can share its joy, as the Bible has it.
Jane soon chickens out and makes a run for it, moving into a house in a nearby council estate.
And we're off - into a cosy world where Jane's new neighbours teach her how to live, and turn her into a hothousing mother who force-feeds her children Mozart and mackerel, while flirting with sexy Oliver, father of 10, from down the road.
Poor Michael, meanwhile, is a slave on his father's farm.
This is pure fantasy. It's set in Northern Ireland from around 1971 to 1988, but there isn't a whiff of the Troubles - just adorable mountainous farmers beating the Lambeg drum at the Glorious Twelfth marches.
It's cuddly, undemanding and fun, with a sweet humour that is very appealing.
And don't worry - Jane gets the second half of her wish too.

The Matchmaker by Marita Conlon-McKenna

Bantam
AS HE made them, He matched them, Dublin mothers are apt to mutter darkly as they look at their daughters and the fellows they marry.
But Maggie Ryan, in The Matchmaker, is determined that there's someone for everyone - especially for her three single daughters, Anna, Grace and Sarah.
Her teeth are whetted when a rich bachelor moves into her Pleasant Square homeland.
But Anna wants a poet, who'll love her with the burning passion Yeats had for Maud Gonne.
She meets a disturbingly ambitious playwright with a symbolic take on life, the doyen of the café scene.
Happiness looms - or does it?
Not to mention Grace, who's happy and confident in her relationship with a man her colleagues call Mr Smooth - until he has that "We've had fun, I'm sorry it had to end this way" talk with her.
The old girlfriend he'd finished with has turned up, and it's not finished after all.
Sarah isn't looking for a man. She's happy enough to have a good male babysitter for her kid, and to draw and write the adventures of Mitten the Kitten to entertain the little one.
And Maggie herself? Not a chance. Until the girls send her off on a spa break and she meets her match.
As gorgeous and snuggly a book at you'll read in a long day's cuddle-up in bed, The Matchmaker is a winner.

Hard to Choos by Pixie Pirelli

Hard to Choos
Pixie Pirelli
(New Island €??)

Synopsis: Charlotte hates Paris, so when she wins a trip for two to the fabled capital of romance, she hands it off to her two best girl pals, and goes instead with her two best boy pals to a classy country house hotel. Cue confusion, madness – and lurve.

FLIRTY, funny and sexy, Hard to Choos is the perfect book to pack in your beach bag this summer.

Pixie Pirelli – new author, hmm? Well, Kate Thompson fans may remember that her last book, Sex, Lies and Fairytales, included a character by that name, author of a bestseller called – yes – Hard to Choos.

Thompson is having some fun here, writing in the persona of English Pixie (real name, confusingly, Jane Gray).

But enough about the author – what about her protagonist?

Charlotte Cholewcyk (pronounced Ho-lev-chick) is a disaster on teetering heels. Sweet and funny, she’s a magnet for all life’s straying pratfalls.

It’s not helped by her habit of talking too fast when she needs to explain her way out of trouble.

Imagine Charlotte, dressed all in the sultry Coco de Mer underwear she’s helped friend Alex buy for his actress girlfriend – now his ex-girlfriend, thanks to one of Charlotte’s misunderstandings. And now the ex is demanding her birthday Coco-threads back.

Imagine Charlotte swimming in bra and pants across the country home hotel’s lake – only to be confronted by the sight of the aristocratic goats munching her floaty white dress and flowery hat back on shore.

Imagine her trying to reclaim her threads from the same goats, then leaping into the lake when she proves strangely attractive to the devil-eyed caprines.

Imagine her, too tender-hearted to eat a turbot when its dead, flat eye is staring her in the face, trying to convince her hostess that she has a terrible allergy to the cat that’s purring its way into the handbag where she’s concealed her fish dinner.

Imagine her in borrowed bling light-up shoes, flash-flashing her way across the drawing room of the hotel where all the guests are dressed in the best of all possible taste.

And amid the chaos, imagine dishy Alex – closer than a brother, Charlotte’s buddy since childhood and the kid who accompanied her through every scraped knee – suddenly transmuting into Mr Right.

Even Paris changes its tune, until by the end, tootsies tucked into the perfect Choos, hand-in-hand with the man of her dreams, Charlotte finds true happiness in the city of love. Very satisfying.