Marian Keyes: Sushi For Beginners

Michael Joseph

$29.95

Review: Penelope Bieder*

Here's a fat and funny novel to sink back into. Like a comfortable couch, it holds you up and hugs you supportively as you race through an entertaining story of three different young women living and working in Dublin.

In delicious, voyeuristic fashion you can learn all you want to know about both the contemporary magazine and stand-up comedy worlds (and the never-ending nightlife of Dublin) without stirring from said settee.

Though they are all so unlike each other, our heroines - Ashling, Lisa and Clodagh - each imagine they can escape something or someone from their past. This novel charts their trials and tribulations as they fall apart, get themselves back together again, mend their broken hearts or break them all over again.

Lisa, employed by an ACP-like magazine empire, is on her determined way up the tricky magazine career ladder in London when she is most affronted to be sidelined, in her view, to start a women's mag, Colleen, in Dublin.

She personifies every alarming stereotype about Prada-wearing magazine editors. She's as hard as her Guerlain-polished nails, she's obsessed with her appearance and judges people on theirs alone, and her constant diet, where each week she allows herself only to eat foods starting with a certain letter of the alphabet, is an entertainment in itself.

An expert on junkets, she expects to have first pick of the endless array of invitations, clothes and makeup that stream into the office.

Lisa has spent her life so far pretending to be someone she's not and, when it all turns to custard, she finds she does not cope well with misery. That is definitely only for other people.

Ashling, her deputy editor, and the book's major babe, provides a clever foil to Lisa's excesses. Kind, witty, clever, she is hampered by an ongoing battle with low self-esteem that you just know she is going to win.

Finding out how she gets there is great fun, and Keyes is spot-on about the everyday details of life on a magazine. (She fondly acknowledges the staff of Irish Tatler for revealing their world to her - more than a few secrets and horrors are unmasked.)

Clodagh is the gorgeous blond, stuck in the suburbs with two demanding children, restless and envious of her friend Ashling's apparently glamorous life. She rarely goes out in the evenings, but to others she is the lucky one. Her handsome hubbie makes bucketloads of money, and she lives in a big house happily spending it.

Writing so well about the everyday details of life is Keyes' secret gift.

She manages to convey characters' emotions in brief, colourful vignettes: "Sunday evening blues - the thunderclap of dread that clangs inside at around five o'clock on a Sunday afternoon. When it hits like a ton of bricks that you've got to go to work on Monday morning. Even though there's still some hours of the weekend left to run, it's to all intents and purposes over as soon you get that deathknell of despair."

The book is a breeze to read and shows Keyes at the top of her form. Sushi for Beginners is Irish-born Marian Keyes' fifth novel, following her international best-seller Last Chance Saloon. Fans should note that Keyes will be in New Zealand later this year.

* Penelope Bieder is a freelance writer, based in the Coromandel.