Don't Go Away. We'll Be Right Back: The Oops and Downs of Advertising by Indu Balachandran

Loose Screws
by Karen Templeton

In the space of a few hours, thirty-year-old Ginger Petrocelli had gone from bride-to-be to bride-who-never-was. So here she sat, alone in her cramped apartment, wedding crinolines askew, drowning her sorrows in a hundred-dollar bottle of Veuve Cliquot, when her doorbell rang. And her trip to hell in a handbasket was about to escalate.

At the door: Nick, Ginger's "first." Only, he's a police officer now, and he wants to find out what she knows about her M.I.A. congressman fiance. When was the last time she'd seen him...She'd better not leave town . .

And the spiral continues: her cozy little sublet (really, she liked having her shower in the kitchen) is about to be yanked away, and the prestigious little design firm where she works is about to go belly-up. So what's a girl to do..

Her answer, born of desperation: move in with her crazy, widowed mother -- who Ginger claims sucks the life force out of every creature within one city block of her -- and her grandmother, who spends much of her day engaged in heated arguments with her dead husband. Well, it's a plan. But bizarrely, as the summer progresses, her eccentric but lovable relatives give her the courage to make choices based on what she wants, not what she wants to avoid.

Angels
by Marian Keyes

The only one of her siblings not burdened with the "diva gene," Maggie Walsh always prided herself on her normalcy-until she caught her irreproachable husband having an affair and was sacked from her dependable job. Suddenly her perfectly organized existence has become a perfect mess. Rather than stew in her sorrow, she decides, for the first time in her life, to do something daring-and flees to the shelter of her best friend Emily in the faraway wonderland of Los Angeles. In this mecca of tanned, beautiful bodies, un-svelte, uncool Maggie is decidedly a fish out of water. Yet overnight, she's mixing with film folk, pitching scripts, even experimenting with sex -- and discovering that the end of a marriage is not the end of everything. And before she's through, neither the City of Angels nor Maggie Walsh will ever be the same again.

Getting Over It
by Anna Maxted

Helen Bradshaw isn't exactly living out her dreams. She's a lowly assistant editor at GirlTime magazine, she drives an ancient Toyota, and she has a history of choosing men who fall several thousand feet below acceptable boyfriend standard. Not to mention that she shares an apartment with a scruffy , tactless roommate, her best girlfriends are a little too perfect, and the most affectionate male in her life-her cat, Fatboy-occasionally pees in her underwear draw.

Then Helen gets the telephone call she least expects: Her father has had a massive heart attack. Initially brushing off his death as merely an interruption in her already chaotic life (they were never very close, after all), Helen is surprised to find everything else starting to crumble around her. Her pushy mother is coming apart at the seams, a close friend might be heading toward tragedy, and, after the tequila incident, it looks as though Tom the vet will be sticking with Dalmatians. Turns out getting over it isn't going to be quite as easy as she thought.