Paperbackers

Penny Jordan is the author of hundreds of Penny Dreadfuls whose characters have outlandishly eventful lives. Like Amber Vrontsy,the heroine of Silk HarperCollins,Rs 299,who is let loose in 1930s London. Skip ahead a few 20 pages,and you find her gawping at a naked man a depraved French artist,bien sûr rising out of the surf,and an affair unfolding between her cousin and a married lady. Skip another 100,and the Frenchman has turned out to be a gigolo,shes had his baby and married a homosexual count. Skip another 200,and the cousins mistress has taken her life,he has become an opium-fiend and the husband frolics on a yacht with his lover Otto,a secret Nazi. Skip ahead and,voila,the Frenchman returns to save her from being raped by a rampaging,lust-crazed former suitor,comforts her,and knocks her up again.

All of this proceeds in querulous soft-focus prose,with lines like Winter held her now,bare and sometimes bleak but still beautiful. Or eternity … in some ways,it was no longer than the length of a small sigh,a single breath in the heartbeat of time. Jordan tries her hand at sensuousness in descriptions of heavily slithering silk or bare bodies,which are depending on the gender either thickly muscled and barred with black hair,or heaving softly and whitely under hastily cast-aside Chanel clothes. And the Frenchman,curiously enough,speaks rather poor French. For instance: Mon dieu,if it isnt the little virgin. Or,You have dreamed of me at night,nest-ce pas? Oui? Oh non!

The language that author Trisha Ashley speaks in,though,is pure,Oprah-tastic oestrogen. It doesnt get girlier than Chloe Lyon,the heroine of Chocolate Wishes HarperCollins,Rs 299,who reads her Angel Cards every morning before breakfast,is passionate about geraniums and vintage Georgette Heyer books,and chants a Mayan spell over vats of chocolate so that her hollow chocolate angels sell better. Everyone around her is just as relentlessly quaint: her Pagan grandpa,who conducts rituals sky-clad,plans to open a museum of witchcraft in his Victorian Gothic home and writes novels such as Desirous Devil under the pseudonym Gregory Warlock; her Goth half-brother; her horse-loving and antique book-selling friends whose drinks she spikes with a love philtre to pair up. And the new vicar of Sticklepond,her ex-flame Raffy Sinclair,who has undergone a metamorphosis from rock god to Man of God. They parted in university after a stormy showdown,which never got resolved. You can guess what the Angel Cards hold.

Moving on from the hysterical to the historical. No one matches the Brontë sisters in literary genius,mystique and general biographical tumult. Child prodigy,hardship and loss,romantic passion and early death its all there in The Taste of Sorrow Hachette India,Rs 350,an accomplished,poetic work by Jude Morgan,whose previous novels have brought back to life other romantically doomed Romantic geniuses like Byron,Shelley and Keats.