Making Love

Hardback: Doubleday, £12.99, May

Miranda Brown is an impressionable young shop worker who devours a continuous stream of romantic novels to escape her miserable bedsit existence. In an unusual act of rebellion she steals a book from the public library - but this is no ordinary library book. This book contains a theory about love so dangerous that every other copy has been destroyed by MI5 and the author has mysteriously vanished. Soon Miranda has attracted the attentions of the Secret Service and she finds herself romanced by a tall, dark spy intent on discovering just how much she knows.

Interspersed with Miranda's story are pages from the library book itself, revealing that love is not a natural emotion at all, rather it is an artificial construct first developed by the state over 800 years ago. However in an ironic plot twist it is the book itself - whose voice tells much of the story - that, contrary to its contents, falls hopelessly in love with all its readers, Miranda included.

Scriptwriter Marius Brill has created a witty, postmodern fantasy. Cleverly constructed, mind boggling, yet at the same time logical.

Caroline Simms, Waterstone's Keele