Five Minutes Peace

Top 5 parenting books

Read my  recommendations for the best pregnancy, baby and parenting books on Carrie and Danielle.

Are there any books you'd add to the list? Tell us in the comments.

BOOK REVIEW: Fearless Fourteen by Janet Evanovich

It seems amazing to me that I've been reading Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series of books for so long. I bought the first - One for the Money - in a now defunct store in London's Trocadero. I used to buy my books there because I fancied a man who worked there. I no longer live in London, I've been married for almost 13 years (not to the bloke from the Troc!). I've got a four-year-old son. These Evanovich books predate all of those life changes!

And partly, I think, that's what I find comforting about this series. I always know where I am with a Stephanie Plum book. I know the characters and the setting. I know that, whichever car Stephanie is currently driving probably won't make it to the end of the book. I know that Grandma Mazur will make me laugh. But is that enough?

KATHERINE CENTER reviews American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld

Katherine Center - author of The Bright Side of Disaster, one of the Top 10 books I've read this year - reviews Curtis Sittenfeld's American Wife:

I just finished Curtis Sittenfeld’s new novel, American Wife: “a work of fiction loosely inspired by the life on an American first lady.” And oh, how I loved it.

The writing is so fine. The dialogue is so crisp and smart, the inner landscape of the main character is so textured and complicated. The story felt completely real to me. I read the first of four sections with tears in my eyes for page after page, and then, by the last section, I was toting the book with me everywhere–pulling it out at stoplights, walking and reading in the halls of my son’s school at pick-up, and, this afternoon, letting my kids make a potion out of a mushed-up hard-boiled egg and a cup of orange juice. All so I could keep reading.

BOOK REVIEW: Got You Back by Jane Fallon

I really loved Jane Fallon's debut novel, Getting Rid of Matthew, so I was looking forward to her second, Got You Back.

Getting Rid of Matthew features a woman having an affair and then the unthinkable happens: her boyfriend leaves his wife for her. And she finds that she doesn't really want him after all.

Got You Back also focusses on an affair. James lives part of the week in London with his wife and child, and part in Lincolnshire with his girlfriend.

BOOK REVIEW: An Affair Before Christmas by Eloisa James

I absolutely adored Eloisa James's Desperate Duchesses. In fact my rave review is quoted in James's latest book, An Affair Before Christmas. Taking place immediately after Desperate Duchesses, An Affair Before Christmas focusses mainly on new characters, the Duke of Fletcher and his wife, Poppy.

Poppy's beyond-overbearing and opinionated mother has convinced Poppy of a wife's (particularly if that wife is a duchess) duties to her husband and of what she can expect in return. And let's just say that Poppy's mother's opinions of both men in general and her daughter in particular are far from high. So although Poppy is in love with her husband (and he with her), she's never been able to show him in, you know, the bedroom. And, after four years of marriage, it's started (started?) to become a problem.

But, along with Poppy and Fletch, An Affair Before Christmas also features Jemma, the Duchess of Beaumont, who behaved so scandalously in the first book. The Duke of Villiers, with whom Jemma was conducting a shocking chess match (no, really) in the first book, is in bed with fever, following a duel with Jemma's brother, Damon. So their chess match is postponed, leaving Jemma at a loose end... and free to get into yet more trouble.