I couldn’t work out whether Caitlin Moran’s How to Build a Girl (Ebury, £14.99) was aimed at mature adolescents or immature adults, but I loved it anyway — even before I came across the very pleasing mention of myself in Chapter 20, and the even better one in Chapter 24. Tamar Cohen’s The Broken (Doubleday, £6.99) was that miracle — a novel about the disintegration of a middle-class marriage which didn’t make me sneer once, thanks to the cliché-free freshness of the writing. But my favourite book of the year has to be Unchosen: Memoirs of a Philo-Semite (Unbound, £14.99) by Julie Burchill: a wonderfully cool-headed and unbiased writer I’m sure we’ll be hearing a lot more from.
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