Summer is causing seismic shifts among the salonistas. The Divine Ms Anna greets her guests this evening in the garden - dressed in a onesie. A onesie! The garment of choice for those who want to hide away from the world, slumped on the sofa while watching the Kardashians and eating Cheesy Wotsits.

The garment used to humiliate prospective grooms on their stag dos, in a far more agonising way than the traditional stripping naked and zapping with shaving foam. Guaranteed to lead to the calling off of the wedding if the bride ever sees him in pale blue nylon fur adorned with pink cow’s udders.

What, you might ask, is the Divine Ms Anna thinking of? Thankfully hers is a spectacular garment, charmingly summery and spattered with multi-coloured flowers. It emerges she bought it in Asda in Elgin when she realised none of the clothes she had with her were suitable for the unseasonal summer that seems to have descended on us this week. (It’s only June and we have a heatwave, for goodness sake.)

‘The funny thing is,’ she reflects, ‘that I stood out in Elgin not because of my onesie but because I was the only person there whose skin was completely free of tattoos.’

The arrival of Elginer Marion, with tattoos on both arms and goodness knows where else, rather confirms her statement.

But the summer break with tradition is not limited to Ms Anna’s wardrobe. The redoubtable Maggie Lennon has, it transpires, become a bird-watching expert since our last salon. A recent glamping trip has confirmed her status as a deeply knowledgable ornithologist. She stayed for four whole days in a log cabin somewhere in Perthshire, eating in the open air, having to fight her way to the communal washhouse for showers.

’Oh yes,’ she says authoritatively. ’Most unusual to see the siskin so far north at this time of year.’

Or maybe it was some other bird. Not being a twitcher myself I can only marvel at the wealth of knowledge she‘s acquired from The RSPB Pocket Guide to British Birds. In such a short period of time too.

The culinary traditions of the salon are also thrown to the winds tonight - no soup. Ms Anna bought the makings in Elgin but has arrived back home just fifteen minutes before her guests. Or most of them - La Lennon has been here since six, supervising Anna’s daughter Nina’s homework and casting a benign eye over her eight year old son Joe’s attempts at mountaineering in and out of the flat’s front windows. As it’s extremely hot and we’re eating in the garden, no soup is a good decision. Bread and cheese, roasted peppers and the best pork pies in the city are delicious and easier to eat.

My own collection of novellas, The Four Marys, published by Saraband, is the featured book tonight, bringing the salon full circle as my novel, Myra, Beyond Saddleworth, kicked it all off just over a year ago. That night Ms Anna stated her preferences in salon readings. ‘They should always have sex,’ she said firmly. 

In deference to this I’ve chosen a scene from The Diva, a story about a Glaswegian woman who becomes a great star on the operatic stage. She falls in love with a famous tenor when they appear together in an open air concert at a stately home.

Authors always have a certain amount of trepidation just writing sex scenes, given the various Bad Sex awards on offer. But reading them out loud? Is there no limit to the challenges facing the modern author? I’ve had to learn how to tweet, where to sign a book (the flyleaf), even how to take a selfie. Becoming a performer is the last straw, but the Divine Ms Anna is stern when I talk about choosing the reading.

‘Let’s be honest,’ she says. ‘Your book is full of squelchy bits.‘

There seems to be a general consensus that the book is pretty female, which is no surprise to me as I am pretty female. I’m more startled by the fact that no quarter is given to the male characters in the book. Having been a rabid feminist all my life, I’m now finding that other women leave me standing in their lack of tolerance of ordinary male behaviour. No-one likes my kind tenor because he‘s been unfaithful to his wife and the husband of the baby snatcher is written off as a waste of space. Even the hot art teacher who marries the sealwoman is roundly condemned.

‘He’s exploitative,’ says Ms Lennon in crushingly final tones.

The male gender having been dismissed, we go on to more literary discussion. The stories feature shape-shifting, baby-snatching, two infanticides and a hanging, so are not gentle domestic dramas - the book’s strapline, Is Motherhood Every Woman’s Destiny? was worked out in conversation with the fabulous Sara Hunt, Saraband’s publisher. With such subject matter there are few options for the reassuring ending. I’m thinking of adopting No Redemption as my new motto, though my publisher is not entirely convinced. (‘I can actually conceive of a situation where redemption might be appropriate,’ she notes.)

As the carrot cake is handed out and more wine is poured, there is discussion of the demands society makes on women, the myths around motherhood, and of women finding their own identity outside marriage and childen. Though it seems I have failed as a writer: ‘I thought the baby in the second story was going to turn out to be a demon child,’ says Maggie Lennon accusingly. ‘That would have been a much better story.’ A plotline I’ll save for future use.

Despite the breaks in tradition Ms Anna is in contemplative mood tonight, looking back to the past and the start of the salon. She had just separated from her husband and wanted to find out what she liked rather than what they had done as a couple. ‘It’s totemic for me,’ she says. ‘I had to work out who I was again, what I wanted to do.’ She gestures round the high-ceilinged room with its elegant cornices, its feeling of space.

'This place can soak up a lot of people. I like it when it's full of friends, noise, wine, books. Joe complained after one salon that he couldn't get to sleep because we were laughing too much. Sorry Joe, but that's the way I like it.'

Looking round at everyone still volubly discussing identity and stereotypes and gardens and Asda’s bread, I can only agree. Divine, Ms Anna.

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

'The pork pie is v.v.good,' said the Divine Ms Anna. Those of you with a literary bent will recognise the quotation, from the Helen Fielding masterpiece, Bridget Jones. But then that's the sort of high quality allusions you get at Ms Anna's literary salons.

There's also roasted red pepper soup, loads of wine and sparkling conversation— a focus group with soup, as Mark Douglas-Home called it when he was the featured writer, just doesn't cover it.

We gathered in Ms Anna's high-ceilinged flat in Glasgow's West End to hear the Australian writer, Helen Fitzgerald, whose book The Cry struck a nerve with every woman in the room. A crying child on an aeroplane to Australia, an overdose, a cover-up— the ingredients sound like those of a thriller, but The Cry is a psychological study of guilt, of motherhood and of women's immersion in the world of the men they love.

Although the book's subject matter is dark, it is so compelling to read that most of us devoured it immediately we got it. The unsinkable Maggie Lennon (her discreet hair colour offset with a pair of large earrings), identified so closely with the characters that she was up at eight in the morning to finish it off. 'How did you know all about me?' she demanded. Her life, it transpired, had contained similar patterns to those of the book's central character, Joanna— affairs with unsuitable men and crying children who she claimed to calm down with brandy in her breast milk. 'I had the only children on the planet allergic to Kalpol,' she said.

This may have been poetic licence, it being a literary evening. There was certainly no criticism, only laughter, from the other women there. Many of them had been through the crying baby on the plane nightmare which starts off The Cry, one of whose major themes is the way people sit in judgement on women's motherhood skills. 'If it's a man they just say, Oh, what a good daddy he is, but women get blamed,' said Sara Hunt, publisher at Saraband Books.

Helen Fitzgerald, tall and austere looking but with a fine turn of wicked wit, said she hadn't done many events like this. She'd been invited to a book group in one of Glasgow's leafy suburbs after her first novel, but the good ladies of Netherlee uninvited her once they discovered that Dead Lovely dealt with 'adultery, weird sex and madness' during a hike along the West Highland Way. 'Clearly such things don't go on in Netherlee,' noted the Divine Ms Anna, wearing a bright red cardigan with a black and white polka-dotted dress tonight. Unusually for her, this did not seem to match any of her household accoutrements.

Discussion of the book moved into discussion of the characters, whose traits most of us recognised in ourselves. 'I always use the things about myself that I dislike,' confessed Helen, though all the female characters in The Cry are feisty, thoughtful women whose only flaw is that they fall in love with manipulative men. (Not the case for Helen herself, who is happily married to screenwriter Sergio Casci.)

The Cry, it appears,falls into a new category, domestic noir, though Helen said that her publishers, Faber & Faber, wanted her to make the next book more 'thriller-y,' a requirement that the focus group (now on to almond cake and wine) found quite unnecessary. Faber gave her a two book deal after she submitted a half page synopsis of the novel, which came to her suddenly one day in Beanscene, but they were not so keen on her next idea, a novel about the sexual abuse of a dementia sufferer. Not willing to take their word for it, she consulted several other publishers, who were all equally unkeen. She seems to be going ahead anyway, incorporating the storyline into a wider plot. It's not hard to see where her feisty characters come from.

Having published ten books since 2007, she is now, unsurprisingly, fed up with writing. But those of us who have become fans of her mordant wit, penetrating psychology and taut writing style are going to try and tempt her into Beanscene soon. Who knows where her clever, funny imagination will take her next?