A smart, laugh-out-loud debut novel about a deeply flawed but endearing stay-at-home mom, a book for anyone who took Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones to heart a decade ago-and now has kids. Lucy Sweeney has three sons, a husband on a short fuse, and a tendency toward domestic disaster. It has been years since the dirty laundry pile was less than three feet high, months since she remembered to have sex, and weeks since her toddler started using the trash can as a toilet. Lucy is living in a constant state of emergency, caught between perfectionist Yummy Mummy No. 1 and competitive Alpha Mum, making it hard for her to remember exactly why she exchanged her career and sanity for less than blissful domesticity. When she begins a flirtation with Sexy Domesticated Dad, a father from the school car-pool lane, the string of white lies to cover up the trail of chaos and illicit desire starts to unravel and disaster looms. Slummy Mummy is a hilarious novel about the dilemmas of modern marriage and motherhood for those who never discovered their inner domestic goddess. Pitch-perfect and satisfyingly smart, it does for the stay-at-home mother what Allison Pearson's blockbuster bestseller I Don't Know How She Does It did for the working mom: It offers a lovable, flawed character who resonates, entertains, and undoubtedly has it worse than you do.

For Lucy Sweeney, motherhood isn't all astanga yoga and Cath Kidston prints. Lucy is living in a state of permanent emergency and the white lies to cover up the trail of chaos and illicit desire are about to be exposed. This novel is about the dilemmas of motherhood and modern marriage for those who never discovered their domestic goddess within.

Nanny required to take care of needs of busy professional London family When penniless student Ali Sparrow answers Bryony and Nick Skinner's advertisement her life changes overnight. She is catapulted into the privileged and excessive world of London's financial elite. At first everything is overwhelming - from twins who speak their own language to a teenage girl with weight issues and a son almost her own age. Then there is Bryony, who has one eye on her dazzling career and the other on Ali's failings. When boom turns to bust and a scandal erupts that suggests something corrupt has been hatched behind the Skinners' front door, their private life is suddenly public news. And as Ali becomes indispensible, she realizes she's witness to things she probably shouldn't see. But is she principled enough to keep the family's secrets when the press come prowling for the inside scoop? Or will she dish the dirt on the family who never saw her as anything other than part of the scenery?

This collection of essays focuses on the representations of a variety of “bad girls”—women who challenge, refuse, or transgress the patriarchal limits intended to circumscribe them—in television, popular fiction, and mainstream film from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Perhaps not surprisingly, the initial introduction of women into Western cultural narrative coincides with the introduction of transgressive women. From the beginning, for good or ill, women have been depicted as insubordinate. Today’s popular manifestations include such widely known figures as Lisbeth Salander (the “girl with the dragon tattoo”), The Walking Dead’s Michonne, and the queen bees of teen television series. While the existence and prominence of transgressive women has continued uninterrupted, however, attitudes towards them have varied considerably. It is those attitudes that are explored in this collection. At the same time, these essays place feminist/postfeminist analysis in a larger context, entering into ongoing debates about power, equality, sexuality, and gender.

Interdisciplinary and intersectional in emphasis, the Routledge Companion to Motherhood brings together essays on current intellectual themes, issues, and debates, while also creating a foundation for future scholarship and study as the field of Motherhood Studies continues to develop globally. This Routledge Companion is the first extensive collection on the wide-ranging topics, themes, issues, and debates that ground the intellectual work being done on motherhood. Global in scope and including a range of disciplinary perspectives, including anthropology, literature, communication studies, sociology, women’s and gender studies, history, and economics, this volume introduces the foundational topics and ideas in motherhood, delineates the diversity and complexity of mothering, and also stimulates dialogue among scholars and students approaching from divergent backgrounds and intellectual perspectives. This will become a foundational text for academics in Women's and Gender Studies and interdisciplinary researchers interested in this important, complex and rapidly growing topic. Scholars of psychology, sociology or public policy, and activists in both university and workplace settings interested in motherhood and mothering will find it an invaluable guide.

It's early 2008 and the credit crunch is starting to bite. Sam and Laura Diamond - and their friends - are circling forty and all feeling a lot less certain about life than when they first met in their twenties. Laura wants to work part-time and have a third child - an appalling prospect for her husband Sam, whose secret ambition is to give up his job as a struggling scriptwriter and have a vasectomy.Life's no more straightforward for wild child turned corporate lawyer Janey Dart. Having finally given up on Patrick, the love of her life, she finds herself unexpectedly pregnant and hastily married to a wealthy hedge fund manager who loathes her friends.And Sam's oldest friend, trendy restaurant owner Jonathan Sleet, is about to hit the big time with a TV series and cookbook, but can't control his roving eye. So it's no surprise that back on their organic farm in Suffolk, his once glamorous wife Hannah is finding distractions of her own.Determined to reunite the group, Jonathan brings everyone together for a holiday to celebrate his fortieth birthday. But six friends, two decades of tangled fortunes and an explosive secret from the past make for an unforgettable week.

This book maps the most active and vibrant period in the history of British women's writing. Examining changes and continuities in fiction, poetry, drama, and journalism, as well as women's engagement with a range of literary and popular genres, the essays in this volume highlight the range and diversity of women's writing since 1970.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the author of the New York Times bestseller Choke and the cult classic Fight Club, a cunningly plotted novel about the ultimate verbal weapon, one that reinvents the apocalyptic thriller for our times. "A harrowing and hilarious glimpse into the future of civilization.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune Ever heard of a culling song? It’s a lullaby sung in Africa to give a painless death to the old or infirm. The lyrics of a culling song kill, whether spoken or even just thought. You can find one on page 27 of Poems and Rhymes from Around the World, an anthology that is sitting on the shelves of libraries across the country, waiting to be picked up by unsuspecting readers. Reporter Carl Streator discovers the song’s lethal nature while researching Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, and before he knows it, he’s reciting the poem to anyone who bothers him. As the body count rises, Streator glimpses the potential catastrophe if someone truly malicious finds out about the song. The only answer is to find and destroy every copy of the book in the country. Accompanied by a shady real-estate agent, her Wiccan assistant, and the assistant’s truly annoying ecoterrorist boyfriend, Streator begins a desperate cross-country quest to put the culling song to rest.

‘Honest, gutsy and laugh out loud... Do your pelvic floor exercises before reading as you may pee your pants’ – Kathy Lette A celebration of parenting failures, hilarious confessions, fish fingers and wine! This is a book for anyone who’s ever dealt with a poo in the pool, cleaned up a sick in the supermarket, or gone to an important meeting without realising there’s weetabix stuck to their bum. Because let’s be honest – no matter how much we love our kids, or how good we are at parenting, everyone’s a Scummy Mummy sometimes.

"Susan Wyler's contemporary take on a classic love story is utterly beguiling. Solsbury Hill is a gorgeously well-written tale of a fraught love affair that takes you from New York to the wild gothic setting of the Yorkshire moors."—Fiona Neill, author of Slummy Mummy and What the Nanny Saw The windswept moors of England, a grand rustic estate, and a love story of one woman caught between two men who love her powerfully—all inspired by Emily Bronte’s beloved classic, Wuthering Heights. Solsbury Hill brings the legend of Catherine and Heathcliff, and that of their mysterious creator herself, into a contemporary love story that unlocks the past. When a surprise call from a dying aunt brings twenty-something New Yorker Eleanor Abbott to the Yorkshire moors, and the family estate she is about to inherit, she finds a world beyond anything she might have expected. Having left behind an American fiance, here Eleanor meets Meadowscarp MacLeod—a young man who challenges and changes her. Here too she encounters the presence of Bronte herself and discovers a family legacy they may share. With winds powerful enough to carve stone and bend trees, the moors are another world where time and space work differently. Remanants of the past are just around a craggy, windswept corner. For Eleanor, this means ancestors and a devastating romantic history that bears on her own life, on the history of the novel Wuthering Heights, and on the destinies of all who live in its shadow.