STRAP in for an intense, hot ride through a sticky Scottish summer with three young women as close as the weather. Roisin is devoted to her charismatic friend Eve but has always had to share her with others.

There’s little else in her life, she can’t hold down a job and she’s stuck in a grubby flat with geeky Cal. Enter wealthy, mysterious Claire, with whom Roisin reluctantly starts a relationship. But how will this affect things with Eve?

An absorbing read about love, compromise and deceit, with flashes of Edinburgh and Paris to liven things up.

I LOVE novels where you learn something – and this one is an entire history course.

Grace O’Malley was a 16th-century Irish chieftain whom the colonising English thought a dangerous pirate. Lawhon’s meticulously researched tale presents a bold, beautiful and brilliant woman whose devotion to Ireland was rivalled only by her passion for the man she could not marry.

Packed with sword-strapped chieftains, high stone halls and roaring fires, this swashbuckling, supersized adventure- romance rips through Grace’s hair-raising true-life adventures, culminating with her meeting (speaking Latin) with her greatest rival Elizabeth I.

I absolutely loved it, wept copiously at the ending and felt utterly bereft when it was over.

GREY’S Anatomy fans will get this novel more than I did because the TV show’s main characters inspire the central relationship, and the book’s title. Even so, I enjoyed the dance between the story’s black narrator and her rich, white flatmate.

Writer Tania was doing well in scratchy circumstances until old friend Margot moved her into her luxury flat. Now Tania’s got writer’s block and any number of complexes. Soon she is off the rails; drugs, drink, sex and dangerous parts of town – all described in fascinatingly alarming detail.

Throughout, Margot is the one constant, but how much of a friend is she really?