INTERESTING SELECTIONS FROM THE WEEKEND GUARDIAN:

Top five classic airport novels

The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy (1984)
Cold War thriller much loved by Ronald Reagan, this was the first novel to be published by the US Naval Institute.

Hollywood Wives by Jackie Collins (1983)
Sex, scandal and lashings of Hollywood gossip, interspersed with envy-inducing shopping sprees on Rodeo Drive.

Lace by Shirley Conran (1982)
One of the pearls of this gloriously tacky tale of a movie star's search for her roots is the infamous line: 'Which one of you bitches is my mother?'

Riders by Jilly Cooper (1985)
Show-jumping hero Rupert Campbell-Black set a generation of schoolgirl hearts aflame in vintage Cooper romp.

The Firm by John Grisham (1991) Rattling account of the shady goings-on at a Memphis law firm that sealed Grisham's reputation. Might well put you off scuba-diving.

Top five summer reads of 2008

The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer (Faber)
The appearance of a stranger on her doorstep throws a dutiful wife's world off-balance.
Sashenka by Simon Montefiore (Bantam)
Sweeping historical epic about a daring young woman forced to make a hard choice in Stalinist Russia.

The Good Plain Cook by Bethan Roberts (Serpent's Tail)
In the summer of 1936 a girl in rural Sussex answers an advert that leads her to an extraordinary household.

The Standing Pool by Adam Thorpe (Cape)
An idyllic French holiday turns into anything but for an English family.

Crime by Irvine Welsh (Cape)
An Edinburgh detective on holiday in Florida stumbles into a sinister world of professional paedophiles.

FOOTNOTE;

The Bookman recalls very well Shirley Conran's Lace as it was during my days at Penguin Books in NZ and it was a huge best-seller worldwide including NZ. Lace 2 followed but that was something of a pot-boiler and didn't do anywhere near as well. In 1987 she wrote another best-seller, a huge 500+ page blockbuster set on an island in Indonesia called SAVAGES. By then she had moved from Penguin with this title being published by Sidgewick & Jackson. I helped Conran a little with some research for Savages which she acknowledged in the book, the only time I think I have ever been mentioned in a book!

I had got to know Conran quite well some years previously, 1976 I think, when Penguin published a New Zealand edition of her mega-selling SUPERWOMAN at which time we toured her around NZ gaining huge media coverage and achieving amazing sales. The editor/collaborator on the NZ version was Auckland journalist/author Sue Miles.