BOOK REVIEW / Bookshop Window:: No Exit - Julie Burchill: Sinclair-Stevenson, pounds 12.99

Julie Burchill has gone to the new-look Nineties Prague for the setting of her new sex-and-shopping novel, No Exit, but she might as well have stayed at home. The shopping's not so good there, after all - unless it's Semtex you're after - and the sex is much the same, albeit 'with lashings of drugs and slavery'. On every corner, Czech blondes in white plastic high heels are abducted by heartless Americans to live a life of Western vice. Finally their racket is broken by our unlikely hero, a World Service journalist called Gary, who abducts the prettiest of the blondes, in the name of love. Exploitative and formulaic as it is, the novel could still have been a page-turner if it weren't for Burchill's creaking prose.