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Monday 8 February 2016

Book review: All She Wants

As something of a break from the various urban fantasies I've been reading lately (and because it was discounted on Kindle, my usual reason for trying anything I hadn't already planned on buying,) I thought I'd give Jonathan Harvey's venture into comic novels a go. Harvey is course the playwright best known for Beautiful Thing, although for the last several years his day job has been as head writer on Coronation Street. And that informs the story of All She Wants, about a soap star whose career goes on the skids early on in the book, before we flash back to her earlier life in which all she ever wanted was to star in the Liverpool-set soap filmed near where she grew up. It's funny, although its story is every bit as soapy and random as those its lead character has to act in, and the attempt to add a more serious side with a wife-beating storyline feels a bit glib in the circumstances.