RESULTS

The Importance of Music to Girls tells the story of the adventures that music leads us into - getting drunk, falling in love, cutting our hair, wanting to change the world - as well as the darker side of the adolescent years: loneliness, bullying, getting arrested. From bubble-gum pop to classical piano to punk rock, music is at first the key to being a girl and then the means of escape from all that. It is a way to talk to boys and a way to do without them. Greenlaw records the importance of music in her own life, from dancing on her father's shoes as a child to discovering her parents' records, buying her own, going to concerts and singing in the streets. The personal - her school reports and diary entries, and the girl behind them - is everywhere touched by the music that compelled her generation. Fancying Donny Osmond and his shiny teeth, disco dancing in four-inch wedge heels, wanting to be Joy Division's Ian Curtis - this is a beautiful, razor-sharp remembrance of childhood and adolescence, filtered through the medium of music.

The mood of poet Lavinia Greenlaw's first novel is sombre and oppressive as she recalls a 1970s teenage summer in a small village in the South-east of England. Greenlaw skilfully captures the feel of the era, sensitively reflects the emotions of a teenager and gently exposes the nature of English village life.

Galileo's wife, a woman dying of radium poisoning, the first dog in space, a strangely obsessed pianist, an early beneficiary of plastic surgery and a Russian boy whose adventures are limited by the immature powers of his inventor, are among the characters featured in this collection of poetry.