All Is Vanity - Softcover

'Anyone who has ever tried to write and been blocked will howl with recognition...the novel is both a page turner and a cautionary tale of consumerism run amok' New York Times (New York Times)

Christina is called 'The mother of all tales' as she gives an interview on being a mother and a writer to Jackie McGlone in The Glasgow Herald (Glasgow Herald)

Enthralling... a funny yet touching tale (Los Angeles Times)

A wickedly entertaining comedy... A devastatingly accurate picture of misguided ambition and self-delusion... Funny and fast-paced (USA Today)

Breezy and beguilling... a page-turner (New York Times Book Review)

'Schwarz has a wicked eye for human foibles... As funny as it is cruel, the novel sweeps you along its fast-track slide to hell' Publishers Weekly (Publishers Weekly)

'A book that twists quickly from a witty comedy to a study of self-deception and betrayal' Sunday Mirror (Sunday Mirror)

A sharp, sassy satire... that makes you laugh out loud (Glasgow Herald)

As they reach their mid-thirties, Margaret and Letty, best friends since childhood, begin to chafe at their sense that they are not where they ought to be in life. Margaret, driven and overconfident, decides to rectify this by quitting her job and whipping out a literary tour de force. Frustrated almost immediately, Margaret turns to Letty for support. But as Letty, a stay-at-home mother of four, begins to feel pressured to make a good showing in the upper-middle-class Los Angeles society into which her husband's new job has thrust her, Margaret sees a plot unfolding that's better than anything she could make up. Desperate to finish her book, she pushes Letty to take greater and greater risks, and secretly steals her friend's stories as fast as she can live them. Hungry for acclaim, Margaret sacrifices one of the things most precious to her, until the novel's suspenseful conclusion shows her the terrible consequences of her betrayal.