Molly Guinness

When Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider read this review, they’ll exchange a pitying smile and quietly start waiting for my distress call. For woe betide any woman who thinks she can live without the Rules: they are hard and fast and apparently foolproof: ‘You can truly do the Rules on any guy, in any situation, and get the fabulous payoff: a guy who is crazy about you!’ Time and again, women have thought they could ignore just one of the Rules, only to find themselves paying $300 for an emergency consultation with Fein and Schneider. When their first book of Rules came out in the 1990s, it was a surprise bestseller. It has spawned a relationship consultancy and a clutch of spin-off books.

Being sent to finishing school in Bavaria in 1936 was a dream for some English girls: there were winter sports and sachertorte, opera and sausages, and troupes of handsome Nazis in shorts. In Rachel Johnson’s new book, Daphne Linden and Betsy Barton-Hill, 18-year-old beauties who’ve never properly met any boys, find themselves at large in Munich. In a museum 70 years later, Daphne’s grand-daughter Francie spots a picture of Hitler with her grandmother. She begins to make enquiries into Daphne’s National Socialist phase. Francie’s life has its own complications (she’s in love with her boss, and wondering whether or not to have children with her husband), and these develop as her investigation progresses.

More than 150 years after her last publication, the narrator of this novel, the travel writer Maria Callcott, has taken up her pen to tell all about her friendship with Admiral Cochrane. Freed from the shackles of 19th- century propriety, she can finally reveal what really went on during that Chilean interlude. The affair develops against a backdrop of the naval ex-pat scene in Valparaiso, exciting developments in steam power, the 1822 earthquake and a lot of charming natives. It’s as much a record of 19th-century Chile as a drama, and Rachel Billington gives a real sense of the beauty and atmosphere of Valparaiso and its surroundings.

Take some boiled maize, chew it, spit it out, put the mixture into an urn, bury it, dig it up several days later, and Bob’s your uncle: the Ecuadoran delicacy chicha. It turns out that ‘controlled rot tastes good’; the particular rot you favour will depend on where you come from. In Sardinia casu marzu is highly prized: it’s sheep’s cheese crawling with maggots. Reading Rachel Herz’s book, it’s astonishing what people enjoy, even before you get to the section on Japanese pornography. Herz knows whereof she speaks: she has acted as nose judge in the annual National Rotten Sneakers Contest, where finalists aged six to 16 vie for the accolade of smelliest shoe champion.

The French make it look easy: small babies sleep through the night, toddlers calmly eat four-course lunches, well-dressed mothers chat on the edge of the playground rather than running around after their children, and they hardly ever shout. Pamela Druckerman left New York for Paris and soon found herself with an English husband and several children. While her daughter was throwing food around a restaurant, French children of the same age would be enjoying the cheese course. Druckerman embarked on a painstaking study of parenting à la française. The result is amusing, helpful and charmingly self-effacing. Druckerman was disappointed when she found out that getting pregnant in Paris does not give you carte blanche to eat cheesecake and bond with strangers.

It wasn’t easy being the daughter of the artist Avigdor Arikha. In this memoir, Alba Arikha mixes teenage fury with glimpses of her godfather Samuel Beckett and a fragmented account of her father’s experiences of the Holocaust. Avigdor Arikha and his wife, the poet Anne Atik, surrounded themselves with the intelligentsia of Paris and drove their daughter mad: ‘I resent their purity and knowledge. Their values and morals. My father’s anger. My mother’s goodness.’ Avigdor Arikha was an irascible, dismissive and earnestly didactic father.

The horror of love: Nancy Mitford’s first fiancé was gay; her husband, Peter Rodd, was feckless, spendthrift and unsympathetic, and her great amour, Gaston Palewski, was endlessly unfaithful. She met him during the war in London and was in love with him for the rest of her life. Palewski was Charles de Gaulle’s right-hand man. He organised the French Resistance in London and commanded the Free French forces in East Africa. After the war, he was appointed De Gaulle’s chief of staff and he became known as the sinister éminence grise behind De Gaulle’s presidency. He and Nancy shared a love of France, beauty and jokes.

It’s nice to know that the trees lining the roads in Paris have microchips embedded in their trunks, that the city council is controlling the pigeon population by shaking the eggs to make them infertile and that the Café Voisin served elephant consommé during the 1870 siege. It’s nice to know that the trees lining the roads in Paris have microchips embedded in their trunks, that the city council is controlling the pigeon population by shaking the eggs to make them infertile and that the Café Voisin served elephant consommé during the 1870 siege. But the pleasure of this learning comes at great personal cost. Where an innuendo can be inserted, Stephen Clarke will insert it.

Fay Weldon’s new book is told by Frances, Weldon’s imaginary sister — one she would have had if her mother had not had a miscarriage a few years after Weldon was born. Fay Weldon’s new book is told by Frances, Weldon’s imaginary sister — one she would have had if her mother had not had a miscarriage a few years after Weldon was born. Frances steals a husband from Fay, becomes a successful novelist and finds herself in a changed world in 2013. Oh, and Frances is an unreliable narrator. Eighty-year-old Frances starts writing the book as bailiffs pound on her door and she hides on the stairs with her grandson.

A World According to Women: An End to Thinking, by Jane McLoughlin The Noughtie Girl’s Guide to Feminism, by Ellie Levenson Jane McLoughlin is furious with women. We have let the feminists down and turned off the rational sides of our brains in favour of the thrilling emotional life that popular culture provides. The feminists were too intellectual and too angry with men to win the sympathy of most ordinary women, who generally liked their husbands and fathers. Instead, popular culture took possession of female psyches and has left us unthinking, disunited and unable to cope with, or even identify, reality. A lot of the time McLoughlin is convincing.

Patrick Oxtoby is 23 when his fiancée tells him she can’t marry him. He leaves home for a boarding house by the sea. He fantasises a bit about breaking his fiancée’s spine, but focuses on the people he meets in his new town. Shaun Flindall and Ian Welkin, the other two men in the boarding house, make him feel left out by talking about London, and by being carefree and confident. He gets drunk as an anaesthetic, but is not very good at it. He flirts with a waitress, but she is kind rather than impressed. His mother comes to visit and he is crueller to her than he meant to be. As Patrick’s social failures mount, his frustration reveals itself in increasingly mad ways until he takes a disproportionate revenge. M. J.

Molly Guinness reviews Wendy Perriam’s latest collection of short stories Wendy Perriam’s latest collection of short stories tends to focus on the lonely, the mousy and the underachieving, and she combines serious and comic elements with varying degrees of success. The combination works well in ‘Birth Rage’, where a woman loses her temper with a self-obsessed harridan in an anger management class and suddenly finds her lifelong rage melting in the same woman’s arms. In ‘Germans’, there is sustained psychological accuracy; Alice has come to heal a 40-year rift with her aunt Patricia which developed when Alice married a German.

Grandmother’s Footsteps is about three generations of women. When Evelyn died she left a diary for her daughter, Verity, and granddaughter, Hester, to find. They don’t actually discover the revelatory document until years later when Verity’s husband has died, leaving another mysterious paper trail. The tagline of the book muses, ‘Will the past ever let you go?’, but Charlotte Moore actually asks more interesting questions, and is intelligent enough to show that it is rather up to those left behind to decide whether or not to let the past go. Evelyn, Verity and Hester are all very different; Evelyn was a suffragette and a woman of letters, Verity a mouse-like woman of no particular intelligence or ambition, and Hester is tidy with cool intelligence.