Good in Bed

Cannie Shapiro is twenty-eight and mostly content. She writes about pop culture for The Philadelphia Examiner, she has good friends and a rat terrier named Nifkin, and she has made a shaky peace with being a plus-size woman. Her life has some rough edges: her mother has recently come out as gay, and her father drifted out of the picture long ago.

Then she opens a national women's magazine and finds a column called Loving a Larger Woman. The byline belongs to her ex-boyfriend. The shock throws her into misery and sets off a year that turns out to be the most remarkable of her life.

The book is contemporary women's fiction with a comic voice and a heroine who is easy to recognise herself in. The story moves from Philadelphia to Hollywood and back home again, and it follows Cannie as she grieves what she has lost, looks hard at her past, and works out who she wants to be.

The tone is funny and warm, with real hurt underneath. Readers get a character-driven story about body image, family and starting over, told with humour even when Cannie is at her lowest.