Before his brain began to shrink, Barney Panofsky clung to two cher-ished beliefs. Life was absurd, and nobody ever truly understood any-body else. Even his friends tend to agree that Barney is 'a wife-abuser, an intellectual fraud, a purveyor of pap, a drunk with a pen-chant for violence and probably a murderer'.

Deals with the Rabbitte family from Barrytown, Dublin. In this title, we follow the rapid rise of Jimmy Rabbitte's soul band, the Commitments, and their equally rapid fall; and Sharon Rabbitte's attempts to keep the identity of her unborn child's father a secret, amid intense speculation from her family and friends.

Brother and sister, Constance and Kenneth Fielding live in calm respectability, just out of reach of London and the Blitz. But when a series of uninvited guests converge upon them - from a Balkan exile to Ken's old flame and the siblings' own raffish father - the household struggles to preserve its precious peace.

Penny Harrigan is a low level associate in a big Manhattan law firm with an apartment in Queens and no love life at all. So it comes as a great shock when she finds herself invited to dinner by one C Linus Maxwell, aka 'Climax-Well', a software mega-billionaire and lover of the most gorgeous and accomplished women on earth.

In the struggle for women's equality, there is one subject still shrouded in silence - women's compulsive pursuit of beauty. This title exposes the tyranny of the beauty myth through the ages and its oppressive function today, in the home and at work, in literature and the media, in relationships between men and women, between women and women.

Every day, women around the world are confronted with a dilemma - how to look. In a society embroiled in a cult of female beauty and youthfulness, pressure on women to conform physically is constant and all-pervading.

A collection of writings about prejudice, abuse, and neglect, but also about courage, resilience and changing attitudes towards girls.