The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank

If it ain't broke, don't fix it, would appear to be the overarching philosophy of Bank's follow-up to her bestselling debut, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, as this winsome comedy of metropolitan manners demonstrably proves. Here, once again, the author laces together a witty sequence of interludes in the life of a lovelorn Jewish heroine, from adolescent gaucheness in small-town Pennsylvania, with its ritual torments of bat mitzvahs and Hebrew school, to trying to find her feet and a soulmate in the Big Apple. So far, so chick lit, and at first glance there is a somewhat prescriptive feel about the way Sophie Applebaum is outshone by beautiful flatmates, out of her depth among publishing colleagues ("Here her resumé got a little repetitive - honors, honors, honors") and serially disappointed in love. On closer inspection, though, you realise that it is not just the attentiveness of Bank's writing that raises the bar for the genre, but the warmth and humour emitted by her character. Sophie's sparky vitality and the smart-bomb precision of her bons mots are persuasively balanced by an all-too-human vulnerability, and self-deprecating observations ("The women are young, young, young, liquidy and sweet-looking; they are batter, and I am the sponge cake they don't know they'll become. I stand here, a lone loaf, stuck to the pan") that skewer her inadequacies with wincing candour. Readers who expect the expected will be pleasantly surprised at how doggedly hardwon are the small victories of an everywoman playing with a losing hand.