This book began as a joke (and hopefully still is). It is the result of much hard giggling, bloody scribbling, sweaty pens and tears of laughter. In A Word was born out of the UKAuthors writers' site (www.ukauthors.com) weekly Prose and Poetry Challenge, in which last week's winner sets the single-word challenge for the following week. Andrea, who has proclaimed on many an occasion that she 'wouldn't know a poem if it jumped up and bit me in the nether regions' sic], decided to have a go at the challenge. It looks as if she was right, but she became addicted. What we have here is not a collection of poetry in the conventional sense. No sestinas, haiku or sonnets (well, there is a clerihew, of sorts), but a collection of down-to-earth, gritty, humorous (and sometimes not so funny) snippets of observation and situation. In short, In A Word contains everything you need to know about life and the universe, summed up neatly and alphabetically, in one word titles. No Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Duffy or Keats, Lowne has, occasionally, been compared to Pam Ayres. 'Rubbish,' she laughs, 'I don't look anything like Pam Besides, I'm a Londoner ' And that, as you will see if you buy the book, just about sums it up.