Cover Stories

Fay Weldon has signed a deal believed to be worth around £250,000 with HarperCollins to write her memoirs. The Word, the Flesh and the She-Devil, which will be out for Christmas, will be a frank account of life, love, religion, psychoanalysis and the pain and pleasure of the creative process. Weldon has a backlist of some two dozen novels, several short-story collections and some non-fiction and children's titles, as well as three husbands and four sons, so we can expect a lively read.

Lynda Lee-Potter's twittery, upper-class voice always seemed to be the one they had most fun with on What the Papers Say. But in a new book, On Class, to be published by Metro this autumn, the Daily Mail's star turn reveals that her roots are in a mining community in Lancashire. As a child, she aspired to the role of Enid Blyton heroine but assumed she was condemned to be for ever socially inferior. She married "above herself", to Jeremy Lee-Potter, who went on to be, briefly, a bigwig at the BMA. All grist to the mill for this, her first book, described as "a mix of autobiography and pungent social analysis". Of course, Jilly Cooper got there first, with Class, when she was a Sunday Times columnist, her bonk-busters not yet a gleam in her eye...

Eva Rice, the 20-something daughter of Sir Tim Rice, is to launch herself as a novelist. Standing Room Only, which Hodder publishes this summer, is set in the world of rock'n'roll, where Lydia decides to manage the band Moja because she fancies the lead guitarist. The author is lead singer with a band called the Replica Saints, and the book will coincide with a single of the same title. It is not Rice's writing debut: she has already published a guide to the works of Enid Blyton.

A treat this summer for fans of George Melly: in a new series of Classic Biography, Penguin is to publish his three-volume autobiography in one volume. Owning Up: the Trilogy will include Scouse Mouse, the story of his Liverpool childhood; Rum, Bum and Concertina, the story of Melly's National Service years; and Owning Up, which chronicles how he fell among jazz singers and painters in Fifties London.