Right-ons

Jenny Turner

• Gaudi Afternoon by Barbara Wilson
  Virago, 172 pp, £4.99, August 1991, ISBN 1 85381 264 1
• The players come again by Amanda Cross
  Virago, 229 pp, £12.99, August 1991, ISBN 1 85381 306 0
• Poetic Justice by Amanda Cross
  Virago, 176 pp, £4.99, August 1991, ISBN 1 85381 025 8
• Birth Marks by Sarah Dunant
  Joseph, 230 pp, £13.99, April 1991, ISBN 0 7181 3511 3
• Burn Marks by Sara Paretsky
  Virago, 340 pp, £4.99, April 1991, ISBN 1 85381 279 X
• Deep Sleep by Frances Fyfield
  Heinemann, 198 pp, £13.99, September 1991, ISBN 0 434 27426 7

If you are a woman who loves women, and Latin American magic realist blockbusters, and if you’ve been to Barcelona for a brief holiday recently, Barbara Wilson’s Gaudi Afternoon is just the novel for you. It has a great new heroine, Cassandra Reilly, an Irish-American dyke of fortysomething, who seems to spend her life sorting out people’s problems here and there, translating the odd thing from the Spanish and having a girlfriend or two in every port of call. Cassandra has wit, a pleasant writing-style, and a good ear for dialogue. She has a cool way of filling you in on just enough detail about her chosen setting to let you know she’s read slightly more historico-architectural guides to Barcelona, dallied somewhat longer around the bars of the Gothic Barrio, the sloping paths and ceramic follies of the Parc Güell, than you have. And the extracts she lets you in on from La Grande y Su Hija, the book she’s translating at the moment, take the piss very prettily from the wilder excesses of the Eighties translations-from-the-Spanish boom.