Foreign Parts, by Janice Galloway (Vintage, £6.99 in UK) Cassie and Rona are driving across France; to say anything more about what happens in this eccentric scrapbook of a novel would be to give the game away. The text of Foreign Parts is a patchwork of snippets from guidebooks, faded letters, tatty postcards, old holiday snaps and stream-of-consciousness mono logue from the irascible Cassie, who conducts a running interiorised comparison between this holiday and others she has spent, both with Rona and with her ex-boyfriend Chris. The spiky, disjointed style draws the reader right into the centre of the drama - here is a novelist who is interested in reworking the notions, not just of character and plot, but of form and language as well, within a witty and accessible framework.
Arminta Wallace