Book 59: "The Starter Marriage" by Kate Harrison

She moves towards me as if she's going to kiss me, but then thinks better of it. I wonder if that's why Barney left me. I am the most self-contained person I know, someone whose personal space might as well be staked out with barbed wire.

I read this author's first book "Old School Ties" before she did an author talk at the BCUK Unconvention a couple of year's ago, and her second novel is equally enjoyable. Set in Birmingham, it is the story of Tess, a primary school teacher whose best friend persuades her to join a course on surviving divorce, since she is not coping at all well with her husband's desertion.

Book 60: "The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction" ed. George Mann

Hopes were pinned on Windbag for two reasons. First, its symptoms were less startlingly dramatic than Bowdler's, and nowhere near as unsettling. Second, by its very nature, Windbag instilled the avoidance of vulgarity. No-one who caught Windbag would resort to four-letter words, not while they were so enthusiastically utilizing fourteen-letter words. The full range of the English language was theirs to command, so what need was there to wallow amid the baser idioms when altogether more refined and elegant modes of expression were available? from "The Bowdler Strain".

My favourite stories were "Personal Jesus", the amusing tale of "The Bowdler Strain" and the poignant "Last Contact", but overall this was a very good selection of stories.