Guest:Tania Glyde, author of 'Cleaning Up- How I Gave Up Drinking and Lived'. For more info about Tania, you can visit taniaglyde.wordpress.com/

Books

Cleaning Up- How I Gave Up Drinking and Lived by Tania Glyde

Imagine not drinking a bottle of wine before making a pass; not moving in like a starving cat when someone is at the bar; not apologising for something you don't remember doing. Once upon a time, Tania Glyde couldn't imagine living any other way. She wondered whether she had a problem, but so many people drank more and as a clock-watching 6pm-er who hardly ever threw up in public, by general standards she was fine-despite the constant hangover and the bottle of vodka stashed in her handbag. At the end of a 23-year love affair with alcohol, Tania Glyde remembers her inner white wine witch. Exposing the culpability of the drinks industry,the enabling qualities of Class A's and our powerful sense of entitlement to drink until we fall over, "Cleaning Up" examines a moral panic of our time, exploring why women drink, how to stop and what life after alcohol is really like.

Cement Garden by Ian Mcewan
In the relentless summer heat,four abruptly orphaned children retreat into a shadowy,isolated world,and find their own strange and unsettling ways of fending for themselves...

Glamorama by Brett Easton Ellis
The author of American Psycho and Less Than Zero continues to shock and haunt us with his incisive and brilliant dissection of the modern world. In his most ambitious and gripping book yet, Bret Easton Ellis takes our celebrity obsessed culture and increases the volume exponentially.

Victor Ward, a model with perfect abs who exists in magazines and gossip columns and whose life resembles an ultra-hip movie, is living with one beautiful model and having an affair with another. And then it's time to move on to the next stage. But the future he gets is not the one he had in mind.

City of Boys by Beth Nugent
Set in New York City, middle America, the beaches of Florida and rural highways, suburban kitchens, and cross-country trains,the ten stories of City of Boys evoke a haunting landscape at once familiar and strange. A small-town girl flees her domineering mother and falls into an obsessive love affair with an older woman in New York City.A sixteen-year-old envies her cousin's sex appeal while avoiding the attentions of her middle-aged uncle. A brother tries to protect his sister by convincing her never to leave their apartment, but his control is threatened when he takes a new job. And there is more, in this stunning debut by a masterful new voice in American literature.

Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian
Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin tales are widely acknowledged to be the greatest series of historical novels ever written. All eighteen books are being re-issued in hardback by HarperCollins with stunning new jackets to coincide with a new film based on the adventures and to introduce these  modern classics to a new generation. Master and Commander is the first of Patrick O'Brian's now famous Aubrey/Maturin novels, regarded by many as the greatest series of historical novels ever written. It establishes the friendship between Captain Jack Aubrey RN and Stephen Maturin, who becomes his secretive ship's surgeon and an intelligence agent. It contains all the action and excitement which could possibly be hoped for in a historical novel,but it also displays the qualities  which have put O'Brian far ahead of any of his competitors: his depiction of the detail of life aboard a Nelsonic man-of-war, of weapons, food, conversation and ambience, of the landscape and of the sea. O'Brian's portrayal of each of these is faultless and the sense of period throughout is acute. His power of characterisation is above all masterly. This brilliant historical novel marked the debut of a writer who grew into one of our greatest novelists ever, the author of what Alan Judd,writing in the Sunday Times, has described as 'the most significant extended story since Anthony
Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time'.

Other Books by Tania include 'Clever Girl' and 'Junk DNA'.