Review in The Observer, Sunday August 1, 2004, by Hephzibah Anderson

The love in A Good Voyage is all very chaste, with a kiss among the rose bushes its denouement, but Sophie Cunningham fills the pages of Geography (Doubleday, £12, pp229) , her unforgivably tedious study of erotic obsession, with thrusting and throbbing and panting.

Catherine is a woman obsessed. An Australian ex-hack turned marketing whiz, she meets Michael (older intellectual type, specs and sexy wrinkles) on a business trip to LA. There, they have great sex against a range of movie locations. Back in Oz, Catherine faxes and phones and sends cute postcards. The feeling is reciprocated, but it quickly becomes apparent that Michael is a cad and that the relationship, such as it is, is going nowhere. Nevertheless, it drags on for seven years.

Cut to India, where Catherine is telling the whole sorry tale in instalments to Ruby, her newfound travelling companion. Just as Michael's 'intense blue eyes' are a cliched giveaway of all that follows, so the course of Catherine and Ruby's relationship is made screamingly clear from the moment she has all her hair chopped off.

What makes this a truly bad book, however, is its lashings of intellectual pretension - half-thought musings on globalisation and the media that reach a crass climax when Catherine and Ruby switch on the TV in hotel room and see a plane cruise into the World Trade Centre.

'"That looks bad"' says Ruby. '"It does. But there is a world of time for bad news and we are only travelling together for a short time more. Let's turn off the TV,"' comes the response. Give me honest Mills & Boon any day.

Posted by Sophie at 10:47 AM