Best-laid plans

TO DO LIST1) Buy hummus2) Pay Pilates teacher3) Find prostitute for son... When it comes to sex, even the best laid plans come unstuck - in the stickiest way possible As a crossword-addicted English teacher, Lucy never expected to be arrested for kerb-crawling.

But her autistic twenty-year-old son Merlin is desperate to lose his virginity, and a prostitute seems like the only option . . . only Lucy picks up an undercover policewoman instead. Let off with a suspended sentence, Lucy resigns herself to the fact that her son will never have sex, let alone find love... until the morning she miraculously discovers Merlin in bed with a girl. But is tough, tattooed Kayleigh just taking Merlin for a ride?

If so, why? And what has brought Lucy's snake of an ex-husband wriggling back into their lives?

As all her best laid plans for Merlin's happiness chaotically unravel, will Lucy ever be able to cut her son's psychological umbilical cord and start to live her own life? And will the funny, quirky and marvellously magical Merlin ever find real love?

With plenty of comic twists and emotional turns, Kathy Lette's riotous yet heartrending novel tackles the taboo subject of sex for the `differently abled' - and shows us that when it comes to sex, we all have special needs ...