As a book reviewer for Queen magazine, Elizabeth Jane Howard

worked on the principle that there was little point in writing about any book I thought bad - it would be like telling people how not to get to the post office. Reviewing is not literary criticism: a reviewer is there to tell people what they might like to read and why.
Well, Slipstream is certainly not bad; it is well written and Howard has neat, sometimes amusing ways of putting things, like the post office analogy. Besides, her career bristles with romantic episodes. There are a few boring pages, mostly about moving house and having the builders in, which she seems to have done with prodigious frequency. But the question is: who might like to read nearly 500 pages about her and why?

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