The Women's Room, by Marilyn French (Vi rage, £7.99 in UK)

This novel, now canonical in the history of recent feminist literature, is twenty years old and has sold over a million copies. The heroine or anti heroine, Mira Ward, established what has since become a stock figure in contemporary fiction - the housewife who finds out painfully that marriage, children and a nice suburban home are not everything, and who opts instead for a voyage of adult self discovery. Like Mrs Humphrey Ward's once famous "problem" novels, it already seems very much a book, or tract, for a specific time, which relies a good deal on the self identification or committed sympathy of a certain type of reader. Otherwise, The Women's Room reads pretty much like a good many other better than average novels in the middle brow range, well told but without any special individuality or distinction of style.