Two Kinds of Wonderful by Isla Dewar Review £9

Two Kinds of Wonderful by Isla Dewar (Review, £9.99, 343pp) Two Kinds of Wonderful by Isla Dewar (Review, £9.99, 343pp) All families are unhappy. If not, they are either terminally boring or deluding themselves. Such is the ethos of this bitter little comedy from the popular Scottish writer, Isla Dewar. The only solution is dissolution or a leap into the wild blue yonder, a family version of the student's urge to see India, circa 1967.Roz is "a wanton and disgraceful woman" who, ten years earlier, walked out on two teenage children and her husband of 16 years.

Now in her forties, she has reverted to teenagerdom, living in a pigsty, getting pissed and sleeping in, while working as a cartoonist for a dreadful family-values magazine. She is responsible for the Beseleys, a fantasy "ideal" family, in which Mum is a fatuously contented doormat.Following the funeral of her feisty, well-loved mother-in-law, Nan, Roz finds herself invaded in her London flat by her adult Edinburgh offspring: lazy Jamie, who takes up residence on the couch, and wild Zoe, beautiful and promiscuous and on the rebound from her own fragile attempt at family.Sub-plots abound Roz goes to Mull to scatter Nan's ashes. She enjoys a wholly unconvincing passion with her daughter's partner Nan's dashing past is revealed. Minor characters are sketched in, aptly cartoon-like: the ridiculous young fogey Roz works for, and his secretary, an archetypally plain Jane prone to metaphorically flinging off her glasses.Being interesting is signalled by doing things like U-turns on motorways, house-wrecking, and that old favourite, sex with strangers in train toilets Boringness is marked by tidiness, prurience and inhibition. The erring wife is a pioneer, the dumped husband cardboard to such a degree that the reader has a hard time imagining how anyone could ever have fancied him.The hated Matthew's "sin" of boringness is characterised primarily by a habit of obsessive counting: stairs, buttons, the number of times he polishes the inside of the hubcaps of his car. Clearly, this man has an obsessive-compulsive disorder.But this is a lightweight book and it's best to take it as a cartoon, like the poor Beseleys. Roz is determined to drag them screaming into the modern age which, alas, means making them miserable; or rather, all apart from Mum.

Tears, eating disorders, three-day sulks: the unfortunate Beseleys undergo a transformation from the Waltons to EastEnders in a few weeks, till Roz lets them come over all new-age supportive.The main dynamic is Roz's burgeoning relationship with her adult children, and a general maturing It's predictable. We know from about page 20 that Roz will end up with nice Fred-in-the-background, that she will make peace with her children, that emotional justice will prevail, and that all will end on a whacky, heartwarming high As it does.. Fasting, Feasting Read by Paul Bhattacharjee & Sudha Bhuchar BBC, 2hrs 15mins, £8.99 Fasting, Feasting Read by Paul Bhattacharjee & Sudha Bhuchar. BBC, 2hrs 15mins, £8.99 "What is plenty, what is not?" Anita Desai's Fasting, Feasting is a fascinating story of the sharply contrasted lives of the children of a conventional Indian family Uma's life is a fasting. Shamed when the husband who applied for her hand through the newspaper's marriage-market columns turns out to be a crook who is already married and just wants her dowry to prop up his ailing business, her only recourse is to live at home in the most traditional way imaginable: looking after her parents. Her brother Arun, intensively crammed by hired tutors, is sent to Massachusetts.

Through his eyes we see how foreign Western life can seem, how questionable a blessing is the feast he is experiencing. For all the kindness of his hosts, he is still caught up "in the sugar-sticky web of family conflict". Desai writes with clarity and a powerful visual sense, and telling images stay printed in the mind: Uma's sari swirling in the river she half-deliberately falls into; Arun watching a bulimic American girl sweating damply as she retches into the lavatory, and her mother's "bright plastic copy of a mother's smile". The use of two excellent readers, Sudha Bhuchar and Paul Bhattarcharjee, allows the story to be even more effectively contrasted.Demolition Angel.

Read by Lorelei King (Orion, 4 tapes, 6hrs, £11.99)The force and energy that Lorelei King puts into her reading, Robert Crais's skilful plotting and plenty of details about the making of bombs and illicit computer hacking make this a real winner. Carol Starkey is the "demolition angel" of the title, a skilled bomb technician who literally died for a moment when a tiny earthquake upset all her and her partner's calculations as they were defusing a bomb. Deeply scarred physically and mentally, she has been seconded to LAPD's Criminal Conspiracy Section, and is surviving on gin, cigarettes and Tagamet Then there is another explosion, and another dead colleague. Meticulous detective work uncovers the existence of Mr Red, a lunatic bomb-maker whose hobby is killing bomb technicians.