Harm's Way, By Celia Walden

A "womb of comfort" has sheltered 18-year-old Anna from pain and loss. Through nepotism, a job is secured for her at a Paris museum where she hopes for an éducation sentimentale. A friend of a friend, Beth, takes Anna under her attractive 40-year-old wing, and they thereafter gorge themselves on huge slices of tarte tatin.

Sexual appetites are just as insatiable. Morally unscrupulous Anna begins an affair with Beth's French boyfriend, Christian. Her ignorance of real suffering is exposed in nauseating sentences such as: "Christian and I were a static island, shadows frozen like Hiroshima victims."

"La vie est mal faite" – "life is badly made" – is the French saying with which Anna attempts to excuse her proclivities. Fiction is not always perfectly made, either, and by the end no authentic pain has been evoked, although Anna admires her own "new depth of experience". Walden fascinatingly reveals, however, the extraordinary levels of selfishness pervading a world in which wallets and libido are larger than hearts and minds.