Jacqueline Wilson's Girls In Tears is the fourth instalment in her successful Girls series, following the lives and loves of three buddies-Ellie, Magda and Nadine-each very different but each bound by an absolute bond of friendship. As ever, things are not running so smoothly for the girls. Ellie's romance is on its last legs, thanks to a persistent boyfriend, Nadine is "in love" with a boy she met on the Internet and is planning to go and meet him despite the other girls' insistence that things may not be quite as they seem, and Magda's hamster has died, leaving her less than happy with her friends' response to her grief. Each of them is shedding tears (rivers of them, in fact) and none of them can quite get to grips with the idea that their all-time best mates seem to be so absorbed in their own problems that communication between them is fast breaking down. Jacqueline Wilson, award-winning queen of tell-it-as-it-is children's literature, hits the teen spot with this straightforward, highly enjoyable novel, adding further flesh to the bones of the characters her loyal readers will have come to love in Girls In Love, Girls Under Pressure and Girls Out Late. She tackles the everyday issues that really count (school, boys, family life, friendship, bad hair, imperfect bodies. [+]

These days the term "multi-generational novel" conjures up something flabby and cliché ridden, which makes it all the more refreshing that Nomi Eve brings so much verve, warmth and imagination to the genre in her debut novel. Eve shows off a range of talents here-she adroitly weaves 150 years of Jewish and Israeli history into the lives of her characters; she is alive to the intersections of legend, magic and everyday reality; she has an intimate knowledge of the business of grafting and growing fruit trees. But her gift for conjuring up the pleasures of the senses is the finest of all. It's difficult to think of a writer since Colette who has so revelled in the language of smells, tastes, textures, and exquisite sexuality. The novel opens in 1837 when Esther Herschell, the beautiful granddaughter of the chief rabbi of the British Empire, marries the learned eastern European Rabbi Yochanan Schine, and the young couple takes up residence in a "half-grand, half-decrepit" house in Jerusalem. Within paragraphs Esther embarks on a delirious love affair with a handsome young baker and Yochanan finds out about it, which mysteriously only heightens the married couple's pleasure in each other. So commences a narrative driven by sexual undercurrents, unexpected emotional reactions and the spell of Jerusalem with its "twists, turns, bakers and twin arcane whispers of piety and perversity. " Eve moves the family stories along briskly, and in the twinkling of an eye World War I has broken out, and Avra Schine, Esther and Yochanan's light-fingered granddaughter, is stealing bullets from the Turkish Army to supply daring Jewish spies. Avra bears handsome, blue-eyed identical twin sons, Moshe and Zohar, who come of age during the years of struggle and tragedy that preceded Israeli independence. As the generations revolve, Eve filters the terrible saga of mid-20th century Jewish history through the lives of the Schine/Sepher family-their marriages and deaths, dreams and desires, and the orchard that anchors each generation to the town of Petach Tikvah. [+]