Cirrus@Austlit

'This novel is about a woman called Martha. She knows there is something wrong with her but she doesn't know what it is. Her husband Patrick thinks she is fine. He says everyone has something, the thing is just to keep going.

'Martha told Patrick before they got married that she didn't want to have children. He said he didn't mind either way because he has loved her since he was fourteen and making her happy is all that matters, although he does not seem able to do it.

'By the time Martha finds out what is wrong, it doesn't really matter anymore. It is too late to get the only thing she has ever wanted. Or maybe it will turn out that you can stop loving someone and start again from nothing - if you can find something else to want.' (Publication summary)

'What do you do, when you find the perfect family, and it's not yours?

'A charming, funny and irresistible novel about families, friendship and tiny little white lies. The only thing Abi ever wanted was a proper family. So when she falls pregnant by an Australian exchange student in London, she cannot pack up her old life in Croydon fast enough, to start all over in Sydney and make her own family. It is not until she arrives, with three-week-old Jude in tow, that Abi realises Stu is not quite ready to be a father after all. And he is the only person she knows in this hot, dazzling, confusing city, where the job of making friends is turning out to be harder than she thought.

'That is, until she meets Phyllida, her wealthy, charming, imperious older neighbour, and they become almost like mother and daughter. If only Abi had not told Phil that teeny tiny small lie, the very first day they met ... ' (Publication summary)

'''Mothers. Those women with purses the size of meat trays that hold an entire deck of school portrait photos and a chequebook, make a casserole without a recipe, make the tightest bed you′ll ever sleep in and only swear under extreme duress. How, how, would I go from me to that?"

At 24, Meg Mason was newly married to a man ′essentially indistinguishable from a young Matt Damon" after landing her dream job, writing for The Times in London. What could possibly go wrong? A holiday in Greece, an accidental shortage of birth control, and eight months later she was sobbing on the side of a road over trading her career for something she knew zip about. On October 8, 2003, she invented motherhood by Having A Baby. On October 9, she discovered a bunch of women had done that already. But still they couldn′t tell her how to do it. Thanks to a helpful neighbour she knew that convincing a newborn to take a bottle by letting it lick a Dorito first to ′get more thirsty′ didn′t always work, but not what to do when your child won′t sleep for roughly two years in London or in Sydney, or how to remove your hand from a stroller - after you′ve superglued it to the handle.

Hair-raising, terrifying and hilariously funny, along the way she discovers that being a mother, however disaster-prone, just might be the only thing that she is truly irreplaceable at.' Source: www.harpercollins.com.au/ (Sighted 26/06/2012).