Electra's head over high heels in lurve! She's fallen hook, line and sinker for a testosterone-packed hunk. He's cute, he's cool and he's been expelled from school. What more could a girl want? There's only one minor problemo: she already has a boyfriend. She should do what's right and walk away. But will she? As if!

Electra's family is falling apart. Her dad's moving out, her mum's given in to her daytime TV addiction, and her little brother (aka The Little Runt) has just been caught shoplifting. Even the guinea-pig's gone mental. And all Electra can think about is whether green eyeliner compliments or clashes with blue eyes. Where can a girl turn in her hour of need? To her best friends, of course. Together, they think up a plan: persuading the class geek to stalk her dad seemed like a good idea at the time ...

Electra's head over high heels in lurve! She's fallen hook, line and sinker for a testosterone-packed hunk. He's cute, he's cool and he's been expelled from school. What more could a girl want? There's only one minor problemo: she already has a boyfriend. She should do what's right and walk away. But will she? As if!

Electra's family is falling apart. Her dad's moving out, her mum's given in to her daytime TV addiction, and her little brother (aka The Little Runt) has just been caught shoplifting. Even the guinea-pig's gone mental. And all Electra can think about is whether green eyeliner compliments or clashes with blue eyes. Where can a girl turn in her hour of need? To her best friends, of course. Together, they think up a plan: persuading the class geek to stalk her dad seemed like a good idea at the time ...

Everyone's got major lurve-action except Electra. She hates swimming against the tide; she'd rather go with the flow. She should be planning how to hook a hunk, but all she can think is, What's for lunch? She can be VERY shallow.

Writer Helen Bailey's world fell apart in early 2011 when she and her workaholic husband took off on a well-earned break to Barbados and days after arriving Helen watched helplessly from the beach as he was dragged out to sea in a rip-current and drowned. Alone and more than three thousand miles from home, she was a wife at breakfast and a widow by lunchtime. With her life as she knew it shattered, Helen began to chronicle living after such devastating and shocking loss in a blog - Planet Grief - and gained a worldwide following from many who had experienced huge loss, whether through death or divorce. And now her blog has become a book. Anecdotal, witty, heartbreaking and utterly grounded, When Bad Things Happen to Good Bikinis covers all the obvious struggles in the aftermath of a loss, as well as many not-so-obvious but just as poignant everyday obstacles. Helen has emerged from her nightmare, and her story will bring wry humour, comfort and hope to a huge number of people, whatever their circumstances.

National Book Award Finalist • Here is the unforgettable story of the Binewskis, a circus-geek family whose matriarch and patriarch have bred their own exhibit of human oddities—with the help of amphetamines, arsenic, and radioisotopes. One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Their offspring include Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan . . . Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins . . . albino hunchback Oly, and the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family’s most precious—and dangerous—asset. As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the U.S., inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; as its members conduct their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry, Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene. Family values will never be the same.