On reading the synopsis, I though this bloke was a really lame, sad person. Who in their right minds is so addicted to brands that he needs to set fire to them in order to 'cleanse' himself? Then again, I do actually know loads of people who can't possibly live without buying Louis Vuitton and what not, so our author, Neil Boorman, isn't alone in his very modern fixation.

Here's the rundown. Boorman realises he's got an unhealthy attachment to shopping and spending on luxury brands. Decides to burn the lot, starts to see a therapist, hires a publicist (!), and gets a book deal (full disclosure: I work for his publisher). He burns everything, and what he's not legally allowed to burn, he destroys with a sledgehammer. At the end of the book, he finds out his girlfriend/wife is pregnant and is learning about unbranded baby care.

Boorman has just completed a year of living without brands, and he's also trying to raise his baby with as little exposure to brands as possible.

With the basics out of the way, here's what I thought of the book. Boorman writes very honestly, he's not afraid to sound shallow. He rolls with the punches. Although I can't really understand why he is the way he is, I can empathise with his struggle.

I like that he has really done his research on the history of advertising and how advertising agencies manipulate consumers, and was absolutely astounded at his list of items to be burned (even I don't own that many shirts). You can see that his personality doesn't change over the course of the book, but he becomes more self-aware, kind of like how someone recognises the 'triggers' when they are trying to quit smoking.

For our budding anti-brand warriors, another book that could be read in conjunction with this is Toxic Sludge is Good For You, another book I read recently about the public relations industry.

He meets Candy at a train station and immediately likes her.

He keeps on trying to find her and talk to her but people he doesn't know won't let him.

When he finally does find her and talk to her, he finds out that she is a crack addict. And she can't stop.

He wants to help her. He takes her to a cabin in the woods and makes her get rid of all her drugs.

The story of a painful cleansing without synthetic drugs to hold her off. She just stopped.

She screamed at him and hit him and hurt herself to try and get more drugs, but he didn't back down.

Then they come after her. The men that he got her away from. The drug dealers and sex addicts. They want her back.

The book is very intense at the end and sad too. Will he get the girl the way he wants her? Or will she go back to the drugs because she can't handle the suffering? We all know the teen stories about love and hurt, but what if the person you fell in love with was addicted to crack? And you tried all you could to help them off and all you got in return was screaming and hitting. Would you give up? Or keep trying until they were finally okay?

This story isn't very predictable, maybe a little at the beginning, but towards the end it gets harder and harder to follow which makes for a good story if you are a good reader.

You can picture everything in your mind and you feel as though you are there and part of this.

Charlie is a prostitute: young, good-looking, the sort that can stop traffic. She's intelligent and, rather like Rita in Willy Russell's play, is desperate to improve herself. Nigel is a community psychiatric nurse (I think - since he calls the other characters his patients) married to a teacher. Gary is Charlie's boyfriend - he's what a lot of people would call 'mental'. Either he's schizophrenic, suffering from drug-induced delusions or just has an overactive imagination - whatever the reason, an imaginary character called Galileo lives alongside him. This works very well. I like the way Galileo is introduced - it's interesting, arresting and unusual. Both Charlie and Nigel are addicted to cocaine. The book contains a lot of fascinating detail for someone like me who has never even tried weed (yes, I know - I've never had a life). Charlie's desperation to get another fix comes over very well - and is a convincing motivation for all that she does. Ralph, a more minor character, is Gary's friend. He generally bumbles through the narrative and is involved in a piece of black comedic slapstick at the end.

Nigel, it turns out, is not the do-gooder that he initially seems. Like Gary he is driven by his hormones, and is also incredibly gullible and naive. Gary is mainly out of it. His schemes and motivations come from Galileo and another imaginary figure called Chastity - who, of course, is unchaste. Sex, and the promise of sex, as well as the constant need for drugs, dominates Gary's life. He speaks, and thinks, in expletives and there are several sex scenes - motivated by lust rather than anything more noble.

When hormone-driven Nigel meets attractive Charlie in the absence of Gary, the inevitable results. What follows then is a puzzle of who exactly is manipulating whom. The ending is just a little rushed, to my mind, but satisfying and not expected. It is also a happy one, in which love, ultimately, prevails.

UNDER CONTROL is Mark McNay's second novel. It is a fast-paced and flows along well. It is a quick, easy read and a convincing insight into a world in which everyone has lost control.

I received this copy from Canongate as an uncorrected proof and so cannot include any quotes.

"Coming back from an addiction to starvation"

From a young age Marya Hornbacher felt she was fat. At age nine she was bulimic. And through-out her life she fluxuated between bulimia and anorexia, and at the age of 18 she had been hospitalized 5times, including a stay in a mental asylum. This book tells of her life, and how she dealt with her fears of gaining weight and her constant battle against bulimia and anorexia. In her own words Marya has said, "I would do anything to keep people from going where i went. This book was the only thing i could think of".

Reading this book probably wasn't one of my smartest moves. As i myself have suffered from anorexia, but reading this did show me how life changing this disorder can be. And because of that i didn't have to go to extreme lengths, i didnt need to test the bounderies as Marya Hornbacher did and recalled them in this book. There was no need to see it for myself as i had read what happens. This book is extremely moving in the way Marya writes and how painfully honest she is. A compulsive read, although very hard to take in.