Meet Sophie Applebaum - as enchanting a heroine as Jane in The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing. Sophie is an outsider and an inventor of rules, simply because she does not fit into any neat description of who she might be: she's Jewish, but lacks religious feeling; a book-lover but a mediocre student; a loyal friend often unpleasantly surprised and a less-than-devoted employee. She falls in love precipitously but isn't sure whom she should marry - or if she wants to marry at all despite all the family pressures and social clamour on this subject. We follow the life cycle of her family, and we follow her to school, through college, to her first job with terrible typing skills, through to the realisation that work isn't fulfilment, that your parents aren't quite what you thought and that Mr. Right is sometimes only all right... Readers who loved The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing won't be disappointed; this is a sparkling, heartfelt, deeply explorative book characterized, as always, by Melissa Bank's light touch, signature humour, and her vast talent for capturing a moment, taking it to heart, and giving it back to her readers.

Melissa Bank's first book, The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing, was published by Viking in 1999. She lives in New York City