Big Women, by Fay Weldon (Flamingo, £6.99 in UK)

An idea is born in a suburban London kitchen one night as a group of women dance naked around the room and decide to form a publishing house; there follows a painful adolescence, all sulks, pouts and navel-gazing, until, all sleek self-confidence and newfound assurance, feminism takes its place in the adult world - to the consternation of its parents, who expected it to turn out to be a different entity altogether. That's the general idea; add character by the bucketload and Weldon's finely-tuned sense of the ridiculous, and you get a seductively diverting read which (maybe just once, but once is enough, after all) will make you pause and say, oh, yes, I was there. Even if you're a man.