Joanna Trollope crossed with Tom Sharpe

She's vain, self-obsessed and pregnant after shagging the office cad on her sitting room floor. Admittedly, Rachel Covington seems an unlikely heroine. Your first instinct is to roll your eyes in a silly-cow-should've-been-more-careful way. A few chapters in, though, and you're as interested in her and her unborn as you would be if she was your best friend. We're not quite sure how Debbie Carbin manages to hook us into caring about 'one of the best-looking people you'll meet' (Rachel's own estimation), but before you know it you'll be racing through the chapters so quickly you'll forget to eat or go to the loo. Of course, there's a romance too, with a man who she thinks is a stranger, but just happens to be her best friend's husband's brother. Yet it's Rachel's sweet, fresh and funny account of pregnancy that makes this such a good read.

Rachel's perfect yet somewhat selfish existence as a party-loving gal can't get any better. But then she meets Nick and suddenly her harmonious life is turned upside down when she discovers she's pregnant

Hilarious and honest

Carbin's brisk, funny first novel records the changes in a shallow, self-centered beauty brought on by a bun in the oven and an unlikely connection with a stranger. After being callous with many hearts, Brit Rachel Covington gets her comeuppance when her interoffice romance with superfoxy Nick Maxwell comes to an abrupt end. While pining for him and experiencing bouts of nausea, moodiness and ravenous hunger, she spies her friend Sarah McCarthy's husband, Glenn, passionately kissing another woman. Rachel also happens upon a lost cellphone and develops a friendship with its owner, charismatic Hector, soon revealed to be Glenn's successful older brother. When Rachel confirms her pregnancy, her decision to only let Hector know strengthens their bond and puts them on the fast track to potential romance, but circumstances prevent the would-be lovebirds from getting together. These are contrived in a necessary chick lit way, but Carbin fashions a convincing transformation for her protagonist. Other genre tropes abound (including the charged climax and Hector's wealth), but Carbin's engaging main character and swaggering sense of humor save the day

Debbie Carbin is a fresh and entertaining new voice in women's fiction. With an engaging style and an unrivaled sense of humor, she holds the reader willingly captive until the very last page. Do you see me sitting on my couch, reading this book until 3:00 in the morning? Notice how I just can't put it down. That's how much I loved it!

In this elegant and stunning novel, veteran heartstring-puller Hoffman (Here on Earth; Seventh Heaven) examines the lives of three women at different crossroads in their lives, tying their London-centered stories together in devastating retrospect.

I've never felt so attached to characters as I did in that book and have definitely never stayed awake all night sobbing after reading a book, but I did when I read that

The Sea, The Sea is both a novel entirely about the era in which it was written and one that reflects – at an angle – the place and time we are living in… it is a joy to read: a rollicking story that seems endlessly to be building towards some awful, hilarious, frightening conclusion

By the end I was impressed, moved and touched

A bittersweet love story

You'll soon be as captivated by Roza's colourful tale as Chris is

A bitter-sweet story of missed opportunities

Keen-eyed and funny

There is so much truth here, as Tyler strips away the issue of ethnic difference to reach the heart of her complex and compelling matter

Warm and optimistic, this story about adoption raises issues of belonging and identity

Tyler possesses a remarkable ability to render the ordinary extraordinary, which makes reading her work like tucking into tea and cake on a cosy Sunday afternoon

Full of excruciatingly comic set-pieces, this is an immensely satisfying, yet subtle, read

Tenderly observed and lifted by humour, Digging to America is a complex novel that asks if anyone can ever truly fit in. In answering that question Ms Tyler has woven her magic once again

As in her previous books, the writing here makes for wholesome, comforting fare, spiced as always with urbane wit and a knack for nailing the small truths behind fine details

In Digging to America, Tyler exhibits her knack for softening the sharp edges of human contact, showing people with smudges of vulnerability on their faces as they dig toward each other

Her prose is at once unpretentious and elegiac, like a photograph by Dorothea Lange, and her imagery has staying power

Deft and wise prose... [Tyler's] skill at turning everyday occurrences into amazing storytelling gets better and better

Redemptive