McFarlane’s light touch reveals an engaging and incisive wit

Fiction: Don’t You Forget About Me, By Mhairi McFarlane, Harper Collins, €9.20

For way too long, women’s fiction has been saddled with a much-maligned classification, ‘chick-lit’. The term reached a zenith (or, perhaps, nadir) two decades ago, and any novel written by a woman, about a woman, was consigned to the chick-lit stable. There was an intimation that these books were somehow ‘lesser’ than those written by male counterparts: the glossier and more ...