With One Lousy Packet of Seed is Lynne Truss's splendidly malicious novel about contemporary celebrity journalism and its intrusiveness. Much of the plot has to do with the attempt to find something new to say about garden sheds by Osborne, a writer who has done so many profiles that famous people have started to blend into each other in his mind--Truss is often at her funniest when her characters get closest to being entirely deranged. Osborne is one of the regular contributors to a small gardening magazine on its last legs--Come into the Garden has a staff almost entirely made up of obsessives of one kind or another, and Truss gets to settle a lot of personal scores with sub-editors and researchers.

Much of the book is also a vicious but genteel hatchet-job on the cosy British crime thriller's casual snobbery--the escalation of mistaken identities and occasional violence heads off into the darkest of dark comedy. Truss is also capable of being charmingly erotic and rather touching--With One Lousy Packet of Seed has a satirical edge and a humane side that balance it neatly. --Roz Kaveney