King Charles, at your service! Moment newly-crowned monarch 'gallantly' rushed to the aid of dignitary who got her heel stuck in the mud Me and Mr Booker is a short, satisfying read not wildly original but extremely well executed.Kim Kardashian SUPPORTS Tristan Thompson at his Lakers game which could be yet another sign the love rat is back together with Khloe Kardashian The story unfolds fairly predictably, but Taylor maintains tension with a nice balance between teenage longing and an almost nostalgic eroticism, with the more prosaic aspects of this kind of affair always dancing around the edges of something much darker. Martha is smart and a little jaded, yet desperate to seek out any hint of escape and excitement and still caught up in a degree of innocence - the only explanation, really, for why such a sharp girl would fall for the spineless and shallow Mr Booker. At least that's my excuse.' 'For what?' asks Mrs Booker. 'So now I am emotionally scarred for life. She switches quickly from poetic or pithy observations: 'They broke up,' she says of her parents. Think Elizabeth Bennett rather than Isabella Swan. Taylor has perfectly captured her as a fine balance of innocent and worldly. For a start, though it is Martha who is coming of age, she often comes across as the most adult character here. The story falls, at first glance, into that slightly cringe-worthy genre - the coming-of-age novel. For Mrs Booker she is the daughter she desperately wants, while Mr Booker has a rather more predictably questionable motive. Without children of their own, they 'adopt' Martha. Little wonder, then, that her head is turned by the arrival into this vacuum of Mr and Mrs Booker, accompanied as they are by a whirlwind of whisky, cigarettes, general fabulousness and tales of the world beyond Martha's experience. Sixteen-year-old Martha is biding her time, trapped for the moment in a small town, where she lives with her emotionally bruised mother in the shadow of a manipulative, delusional father and an absentee brother.

What makes this first novel from Australian writer Cory Taylor stand out from the crowd is the intelligence and appeal of her heroine. Stories of young, attractive women desperately trying to escape their small-town roots by allowing themselves to be seduced by older, apparently more worldly men, are not new.

Me and Mr Booker by Cory Taylor