Alice never imagined that she would end up like this. Is she the only mother who feels so permanently panic-stricken at the terrors of the modern world - or is it normal to sit up in bed all night popping bubble wrap? She worries that too much gluten and dairy may be hindering her children's mental arithmetic. She frets that there are too many cars on the road to let them out of the 4x4. Finally she resolves to take control and tackle her biggest worry of all: her daughter is definitely not going to fail that crucial secondary school entrance exam. Because Alice has decided to take the test in her place... With his trademark comic eye for detail, John O'Farrell has produced a funny and provocative book that will make you laugh, cry and vow never to become that sort of parent. And then you can pass it on to your seven-year-old, because she really ought to be reading grown-up novels by now...

Stories depict the hardships, physical dangers, and emotional trials of World War II fighter pilots

Vincent De Wimper voelt zich bedrogen: door zijn ex-vriendin, door de maatschappij, door het leven zelf. Sinds zijn relatie met Patty tien maanden geleden op de klippen liep, brengt hij zijn dagen in ledigheid door. Afleiding zoekt hij onder meer in fantasieën over de zangeres Duffy, het schrijven van brieven aan wijlen zijn onzichtbare hondje Maxi, denkbeeldige reizen naar El Paso, Texas, en bespiegelingen over het meest onderschatte lichaamsdeel ter wereld, namelijk de vrouwelijke kuit. Op een dag echter neemt hij een belangrijke taak op zich: het redden van zijn kettingrokende, zwijgzame onderbuurman Johannes... Een hachelijk, ja waarlijk verontrustend voornemen. "49 manieren om de dag door te komen" is een adembenemende roman over een man die tracht te vluchten in de waanzin, en daar wonderwel in lijkt te slagen.

Two years after Julie goes to live with her Aunt Jean after her mother's murder, she finally finds solace in surfing, but when her brother moves away and her aunt becomes ill, Julie is afraid she'll never get her life back together.

Een vrouw vertelt hoe ze in een depressie raakt als haar vriendin haar verlaat voor een andere vrouw.

This study proposes interpretive strategies for nineteenth-century American women's novels. Harris contends that women in the nineteenth century read subversively, 'processing texts according to gender based imperatives'. Beginning with Susannah Rowson's best-selling seduction novel Charlotte Temple (1791), and ending with Willa Cather's O Pioneers! (1913), Harris scans white, middle-class women's writing throughout the nineteenth century. In the process she both explores reading behaviour and formulates a literary history for mainstream nineteenth-century American women's fiction. Through most of the twentieth century, women's novels of the earlier period have been denigrated as conventional, sentimental, and overwritten. Harris shows that these conditions are actually narrative strategies, rooted in cultural imperatives and, paradoxically, integral to the later development of women's texts that call for women's independence. Working with actual women's diaries and letters, Harris first shows what contemporary women sought from the books they read. She then applies these reading strategies to the most popular novels of the period, proving that even the most apparently retrograde demonstrate their heroines' abilities to create and control areas culturally defined as male.