Time passes and things change - assumptions, ideas, reputations. Some things decay, while others mutate and evolve. Nothing is fixed. The characters in The Sea Lady think they have left the past behind, but it continues to work on them.

Margaret Drabble's 17th novel begins with a televised award ceremony for a book about science. The award is announced by Ailsa Kelman, famous for years as the nation's most outrageous [...]

Go into any bookshop and you will find shelves groaning with chick lit - or whatever romantic fiction is calling itself this year. Novels about passionate courtship, love and (usually) marriage make up an enormous proportion of all books sold. These stories are overwhelmingly written and read by women. They express a shimmering ideal of romantic fulfilment, the basic outlines of which have not changed since humankind crawled out of [...]

If modern novelists are to be believed, the average middle-aged woman exists in a state of permanent anguish. Various reasons are given for this. In Carol Shields's Unless, the anguish of the central character is focused on a daughter's apparent breakdown. In Joanna Trollope's Second Honeymoon, the heroine mourns the fact that her children no longer rely on her to wipe their noses or bottoms. Julie Myerson's The Story of [...]

Tolstoy said that all happy families are alike, and where a certain type of clever, untidy, upper-middle-class British family is concerned, he was right on the money. In this kind of family, which often considers itself startlingly unique, the inevitable carefree childhood has a sell-by date - if left to carry on too long, it curdles. Unless the adult siblings can move away from their spooky games and the rituals [...]

It has happened so often, that I now recognise each stage. I pick up the new instalment of Harry Potter with a mixture of intense curiosity and bitter professional envy. I tell myself that it's a ridiculous, overhyped fuss about nothing. And five minutes later, I am fathoms deep in a story that has me by the throat.

Essentially, that woman with far too much money has done it again. [...]

It is afternoon. The men have gone off to sleep. The parliament of women is in session. Once the meal is cleared away, they sit around the tea table, discussing the same things women have discussed since Eve left Eden - love, sex, and the intricate politics of love and sex. "To speak behind others' backs," declares Grandma, "is the ventilator of the heart." By the end of this elegant [...]

With a sassy cartoon sketch on the cover and a sparkly blurb about a woman who can't stop getting married, Reader, I Married Him is packaged as chick lit. Because it is by Michele Roberts, however, it amounts to more than a respected author's bid for a larger share of the popular pound - she couldn't write a bad sentence no matter how hard she tried. The title, that famous [...]

The eyes of the world are fixed on a small corner of the Cotswolds. At a stately mansion, crammed with ghosts and torture-chambers, the satanic conductor Rannaldini has teamed up with the impossibly sexy French director, Tristan de Montigny, to make an all-star film of Verdi's Don Carlos.

Beastly Rannaldini is obsessed with his step-daughter, Tabitha Campbell-Black. When not drooling over Tab's body, or gnashing over her indifference, he is [...]