Woman by Natalie Angier (Virago, UK £8.99)

If you are fascinated by every tiny detail of how the female body is formed and functions, then American writer, Natalie Angier's densely written book is for you. A lover of long descriptions and anecdotal evidence mingled with scientific knowledge, Angier ploughs her way through the female geography, teasing out meaning from every unfertilised egg, hormonal twitch and chromazonal structure. Her mission seems to be to reclaim the female sex as the first sex although she claims not to be pitting the female anatomy against the male one. An academic treatise which is, in some ways comparable to Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, this book will probably be recommended reading in Women's Studies courses around the world. It will not, however, become a source book for the general reader in the way that de Beauvoir's mould-breaking book did.