Book excerpt: First published in 1991, Dirty Weekend is the story of a young woman who overcomes her fear and transforms herself from victim to avenger. Over the course of a very dirty weekend she goes out in the night and kills seven men and one myth. The men make the mistake of attacking her. The myth is that only women bleed. 'An act of writing that is avant-garde in the literal sense. A literary turning-point' - "Naomi Wolf, New Statesman & Society" 'A dark and brilliant book' - "The Daily Telegraph" 'Glinting, rapier wit' - "Publishers Weekly" 'Taut prose, black humour and a confrontational style make this a challenging and terrifyingly funny first novel' - "Time Out" 'I can still remember the visceral shock I felt as a young single woman reading Helen Zahavi's first novel, which burst upon a rather staid early-1990s U.K. literary scene like a firework. Every woman who has ever had a fantasy about taking revenge on a man can identify with its heroine' - "Louise Doughty, Wall Street Journal"