Irish Independent
Marin Keyes has sold 2.5 million books worldwide. Her latest is likely to be another bestseller, says Martina Devlin.
Time to break out a new batch of bumper stickers, Marian Keyes Does It Standing On Her Head. Maybe not literally, but she certainly coasts with deceptive ease this business of coasting from one bestseller to the next.
She's onto her fifth in as many years with the current novel, the latest in a series of stepping stones leading her inexorably towards the Maeve Binchy high ground - especially as Maeve has announced her retirement.
Public appeal continues unabated for the wry packaging of a contemporary slice of life for the thirtysomething generation. The US has Sex in the City, Britain has Bridget Jones and in Ireland we have Marian Keyes ... and we're getting the best bargain.
Her speciality is effervescent prose with an edge - she produces snappy, intelligent, amusing fiction but the sting is a glimpse of the dark side of reality; in the latest case she lobs homelessness and clinical depression into the melting pot.
Marian Keyes' characters don't just dithered over slingbacks or mules and follow it up by splashing out on a handbag with a price tag that could keep a family of four in groceries for a month. Granted they do some of that but the also look at the world around them.
So in addition to the men trouble and girls' nights out readers expect from this genre, there's a glimpse of the seaminess inextricably entwined with city life.
Her characters drink cocktails and give lads the eye, scour the shops for that perfect lipstick and chat on the phone for ages to their galpals. Let's face it, most women do. Marian Keyes is chronicling our lives, not reinventing them.
But her women are rounded, three-dimensional beings. They're able to differentiate between end-of-the-month cash flow problems and genuine poverty, between a bad hair day and a truly wretched life. And if that sounds trite, a mountain of women's fiction out there can't make the distinction.
This author creates a credible world, not the parallel universe that passes for reality in some novels. And like trail-blazer Maeve Binchy, Marian Keyes has the ability to use an Irish setting and predominantly Irish characters and to imbue them with universal appeal.
And so to Sushi for Beginners, her latest excursion into chick lit and a novel which, like its predecessors including Rachel's Holiday, reconciles sassiness and humour with revealing glimpses of life's underbelly. It's a combination which had led to 2.5 million sales worldwide for the Dun Laoghaire-based novelist.
Sushi features Lisa Edwards, a London-based mag hag - aka an impossibly glamorous magazine editor - who's dismayed to find herself exiled to Dublin, charged with setting up a new glossy.
The label conscious and freebie-driven Lisa is tempted to turn on her spindly stilettos and head for home until she meets Jack Devine, the messy, manly managing director of the Irish Company. So what if he has a girlfriend, she relishes a challenge.
Then there's Ashling Kennedy, Lisa's assistant, whose stand-up comedian boyfriend Marcus Valentine is set to go stellar. She likes the attention as his girlfriend but sometimes wearies of pandering to his insecure ego. A homeless man named Boo lives outside Ashling's block of flats, his pinched face and omni-present blanket a reminder that even when life seems miserable she has no cause for complaint.
Or has she? Her best friend Clodagh Kelly, the one who has it all - handsome, rich husband, two children, period home decorated to perfection - is about to provide some complications.
Marian Keyes' dialogue sparkles but her characters are her greatest strength they become as intimate as the reader's closest companions. It's a wrench to lose touch with them by finishing a novel. On the other hand there's no option but to continue turning the pages because the author has enough twists to keep you guessing to the end.