One of our cats is called Tonks — she had the misfortune to be grabbed off the streets of Denver during a period the shelter was naming all its rescues after Harry Potter characters. Bringing Tonks home in spring 2012 was my introduction to Tonks. My introduction to her literary namesake came shortly after, when I read two of her poems in an anthology and was taken enough with them to buy Bedouin of the London Evening. But it turned out I liked the feline Tonks more than the poetical one.

This novel is a too hip for its own good swinging sixties Bridget Jones's Diary, substituting an arch, dismayingly self-conscious wittiness for BJ's self-deprecation. Aided by the obligatory gay friend and girl friend, our heroine, Min, weighs the merits and demerits — mostly the latter — of several suitors (including her husband who buries himself in his dusty academical work in the British Museum instead of enduring her relentless flippancy) over the course of a few days. One of the guys keen to get in her pants is the titular fat bastard, a famous bore of an opera singer whom Min strings along for 125 pages or so before flirting herself out, and that's your lot. Like its characters, and in my opinion its time, this book is very slight.

Unlike Tonks the cat.