Cassie McCullough

And I just don't want Sam to regret not seeing her.

Can you please talk to her?

I'll do what I can, Trent said.

Leave it with me.

Nicole sat and looked at her phone for a long while.

Samantha, the unstoppable force, seemed to have become an immovable object.

So, you know, it really gets, I think, just, I stopped when I saw that.

That is snappy.

I mean, you know, I think this is a very, very successful genre novel, and I think it should be picked up and will be picked up by a lot of readers.

I mean, it is

very clear about what it's trying to do it's probably you know in the genre of chick lit which you know sort of emerged in the 80s that sort of idea of that you know women writing for women and we saw Bridget Jones's diary come out of that and sex in the city and I think this is you know one of the granddaughters of that genre.

Well, when I think of Bridget Jones on her couch with mascara running down her eyes and a bottle of vodka nearly empty in her hand, singing all by myself by Celine Dion, I think that we are pretty much in the same territory.

I mean, this is women getting wasted and some of them hiding it and some of them not, and for reasons that are very understandable and very relatable.

Yeah, yeah.

No, Tina's wrecked her life, but she knows it.

And we won't give away much more about the nature of Tina's self-knowledge because that's part of the, you know, the great twist of this book.

But yeah, I mean, it's a subject that I think is increasingly being part of the discourse that you'll see in lots of, you know, magazines really.

I mean, this is a topic that's close to women's hearts.

It's time now on the bookshelf to meet this week's guests.

From New Zealand, exciting, Gina Inverarity joins us, writer and former book editor.