Books by Alison Lurie

'Vinnie Miner, 54-year-old Anglophile professor, is in London on a six-month foundation grant. Fred's is a fraught liaison with a waitress while Vinnie drifts into a relationship with an engineer from Oklahoma she met on the plane, a brash uneducated stereotypical American who finally beguiles her (and the reader) with his uncomplicated goodness...

'Emmy Turner's marriage to a hard-working and dullish lecturer at Convert College suffers from various tensions. Emmy has a highly sensual affair with a non-creating musician-in-residence, and her husband suspects everyone but the right man, going nearly insane with jealousy in the process...

Alan Mackenzie's bad back is ruining both his and his wife Jane's lives. After years of happy marriage, these two attractive and intelligent people have stopped making love and are starting to resent each other.

'Marvellous entertainment' Sunday TimesJust married and newly arrived in Los Angeles are Paul and Katherine Cattleman.

Jenny has devoted her life to her husband, the naturalist Wilkie Walker. As he grows even stranger, Jenny becomes involved with some exotic local characters - including Gerry, an ex-beatnik poet, and Lee, the dramatically attractive manager of a women-only guest house.

Once the Tates were an attractive family, but now Erica is bored, Brian's career is at a standstill, and the children have become revolting teenagers. Then Erica discovers that her husband is carrying on with one of his students. The author won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for "Foreign Affairs".

Are some of the world's most talented writers of children's books essentially children themselves?