books

Not a Book: My Neighbour Totoro

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Happy Sunday everyone. I thought I’d make this a bit of a themed week and follow up on the Vanderbeekers series post on Friday with a family show that children will really, really enjoy in case you’re looking for something to take them to in the next school holidays.

My Neighbour Totoro is the RSC’s stage adaptation of the 1988 Studio Ghibli film of the same name. It tells the story of two young girls who move to the countryside with their father, to be closer to their mother who is being treated in hospital. In the countryside they meet magical creatures and make new friends. That’s a very simplistic description of the plot, but if I try and do any more then it gets really long and spoilery and no one wants that.

This is a really clever mix of real actors and puppets, with adults playing the child characters and human puppeteers who run the many, many puppets of hugely varying sizes. I just thought it was breathtaking – clever and beautiful. I think children will love it – and adults will get something out of it too, because a story that is about adventure and exploration and magical creatures for children has layers that work differently for adults. I hadn’t seen the movie when I went to see it – and it was such a hot ticket at the Barbican and when it first moved into the West End that it’s taken me a while to see it and I was a bit sceptical about whether I was going to like it, but I really, really did. As you can see from the photo I was really close (I got a rush ticket on the day) but I don’t think it spoiled anything for me being able to see all the tricks up close – if anything it enhanced things for me, because I do like to see how things work and how things are done. There aren’t a lot of shows on in the West End at the moment that I would consider going back to, but this is definitely one of them. It was magical.

And I love that something magical is in the Gillian Lynne. This was the first West End theatre I ever went to back when it was still called the New London to see Cats when I was in primary school. I can remember being completely blown away by the magic and specatcle of it – and although Totoro doesn’t use the revolving stage the way that Cats did, I think this would be a similarly special first show for children.

My Neighbour Totoro is currently booking until August 2026, and they seem to have a bunch of offers to try and make it more affordable for families too which is great.

Have a great Sunday.

bookshops

Books in the Wild: The Works Spring 2026 edition

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It’s Saturday and I’ve been touring the bookshops recently so I’m back with some posts for my recent visits over the next couple of weeks. I’m starting with The Works, because I use it to analyse the trends of what’s selling in popular fiction.

So the main thing for me here is that a couple of books I thought were really good from the last couple of years have made it here now – namely The Favourites and I’m Glad My Mom Died. Aside from that, the romance selection continues to be dominated by dark romance, sports romance and cowboy romance.

The romantasy and fantasy section continues to expand – and once again it’s the crime section that is contracting to fit it. There is still Frieda McFadden though – so it’s the cozier/traditional end of the crime shelves that are losing ground here. I feel like I’ve gone from having read a lot of authors on the shelves here to very few. But there’s still Not in My Book at least.

There are a couple more that I’ve read here though – Mrs Porter Calling is great as are the other books in that series – Dear Mrs Bird is tucked at the top of the bottom rack stack; down the bottom left is one of Kate Claybourn’s Chance of a Lifetime series and Paper Towns too. I guess it’s good for my bank balance that there’s next to noting in the three for… any more, but it does make me sad that my tastes are diverging from popular fiction, even if I have enough books on the shelf waiting to last me for years at this point!

Have a great weekend!

Children's books, Series I love

Children’s series: The Vanderbeekers

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Happy Friday everyone, and this week I have a middle grade-series to talk about to make a bit of a change for you!

The Vanderbeekers is a series of seven middle grade novels about the Vanderbeeker family. There’s mom and dad and five kids, and they live in a brownstone in Harlem. In the first book the family are at risk of losing their home when their curmudgeonly and reclusive landlord decides not to renew their lease. Across the series they face various challenges in a sort of kids on a quest sort of way, but dealing with a range of real life issues – gentrification, financial problems, family problems, growing up and (potentially) leaving home and culminating in the most serious in the final book where one of the siblings is diagnosed with cancer.

What I really love about this series is how well drawn and well developed all the child characters are. They each have distinct and different personalities and there are different relationships between then depending on their ages and their positions in the family. It feels like a very real and realistic portrait of a family. It’s also a lovely depection of a community – the Vanderbeekers are very rooted in their area, which is why the threat of losing their home hits so much in the first book. It’s not just about the fact that it is upheaval, it’s that they will find it hard to find somewhere else in their neighbourhood – let alone somewhere else that’s big enough considering their current (beloved) home is bulging at the seams already. I’m not sure the book ever used the word gentrification, but that’s what’s going on as the families who have been living in the area find themselves being priced out and squeezed out of the area. And the importance of community is a big theme through the books. In a time when the internet and online culture can make the world feel more fractured than ever, it’s great to have a middle grade book series that is set in the present, but stresses the importance of real life community and friendships.

Now I’m not going to lie, this are a little harder to get hold of in the UK. I read a lot of the series via my US library card when I had that, and then when it expired I ordered the last two in paperback as they came out – which was a year behind the hardback releases. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen them in UK stores, but it’s definitely orderable if you want, and they’re also on Kindle at a sensible price – the second one is even in Amazon Kids at the moment.

Have a great weekend!

Book previews

Out Today: New Alan Bennett

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A bit left field for this week’s new book because Alan Bennett is a legend. This officially comes out today, but the copy I pre-ordered for my little sister arrived on Tuesday. So you may already have your copy too. Enough Said is the fourth volume of Bennett’s diaries, taking you from 2016 – 2024 when Alan turned 90. He will be 92 in May and so every new thing at this point is a blessing and a treat. A Question of Attribution was on TV over Christmas, and I’m waiting for The Choral to pop up on a streaming service so I can catch up on that too.

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: The Tower of London in books

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Happy Wednesday everyone. Having recently read a mystery that was set in and around the Tower of London – and walking past it on my way to the theatre, it got me thinking about books that I’ve read set there. And so here I am with a very mixed bag Recommendsday for you.

Now obviously there are any number of history books that feature the tower given that it was the major seat of power and royal residence from the eleventh to about the fifteenth century and then less a residence more a prison from the Tudors onwards. So you can basically pick a history book about a major figure in English history and the Tower will feature in it. I’m not good with recommendations for history pre-Tudors, but I have read two of Dan Jones three books of medieval history (The Plantagenets and The Wars of the Roses, also known as The Hollow Crown) and I have the third one (Henry V) ready to go on the Kindle. And if you want to read Tudor history, the David Starkey books are an accessible place to start.

And as you know there is a lot of fiction written in and around the Tudors – I’ve written about Philippa Gregory’s series before, but there is also the Shardlake series where the Tower pops up, and obviously Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy – which I’ve read two of but can’t bring myself to read the end of because I know how it ends for Cromwell and Mantel has done such a good job of making you like him!

If you only know one thing about the Tower of London, it may be the story of the Princes in the Tower, aka Edward V and his younger brother Richard, who disappeared after being put into the Tower by their uncle and guardian the Duke of Gloucester, who then turned himself in to Richard III. What actually happened to them is one of the big debates in history and so crops up in a lot of fiction. The most famous is probably Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey, where her series detective Alan Grant is ill in hospital and uses the time to try and solve the mystery himself. It regularly crops up in lists of best mystery books ever. The Chronicles of St Mary’s series also hits up this time period in Plan for the Worst, but given that this is book 11 in a quite complicated series, I wouldn’t advise starting your St Mary’s journey there.

Now one series you can pick up midway through without being completely lost are the Daisy Dalrymple books by Carola Dunn. Book 16, The Bloody Tower, sees new mum Daisy picking up the threads of her journalistic career by writing an article about the Tower of London. It sees her spending a night there so that she can witness the ceremony of the keys – and then stumbling across a dead body the next morning. I think this was the first novel I read with the tower in it – and it’s got a lot about the day to day of the Tower in the 1920s in it as well as the murder mystery.

And then that brings me up to the book that got me thinking about writing this post – Murder at the Tower by N R Daws. Mrs Bramble is a palace housekeeper at Hampton Court, but when her friend Reverend Weaver is accused of a murder at the Tower of London after a congregant drops dead during a service, she heads there to help clear his name. At the Tower she finds secrets and feuds and a long list of suspects. And a long list of suspects is the thing that I think caused me the most issues with this – the huge cast of characters meant it was hard to follow who was who. I also didn’t love the writing style which just added up to a bit of a disappointing read for me overall. This came out earlier this month and I requested this from NetGalley because I really like a historical mystery – and I wanted to see whether being in conjunction with Historic Royal Palaces made for any different details than other mysteries that I have read that are set in and around the Tower of London. I didn’t realise this was the second book featuring the same characters or I might have thought twice because I do like to read in order.

And that’s your lot today – Happy Humpday!

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: The Love Haters

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I mentioned yesterday that I had to crack out an emergency book over the weekend because I wasn’t feeling very well and that’s what I’ve ended up picking today: the latest Katherine Center, The Love Haters, which came out in paperback back in November. And it’s particularly good timing because it turns out that Center has written an Amazon Original story that is out today too.

Katie Vaughan is a videographer. For her day job she works for a small media company who make corporate and promotional video. For herself she makes day in the life videos about people who have done something heroic. The trouble is the passion project doesn’t pay the rent and there is a massive round of layoffs happening at the day job. So that’s why when her boss Cole offers her a last chance job she takes it. Trouble is, it’s filming a coast guard rescue swimmer and Katie doesn’t swim and the swimmer is Hutch, Cole’s brother. Hutch is internet famous after his rescue of a dog went viral, but he’s turned down every interview request since. But Katie really needs her job, so she heads off to the Florida Keys, where she finds that everything is just a bit different – and Hutch is definitely not what she was expecting either.

So I had a few qualms at a couple of points when I was reading this. Firstly there was a point where I was worried that this was going to have too much comedy based on humiliation, then there was a big third act twist that I was a bit dubious about and then I was concerned about the finale. But every time, it pulled it around – for me at least. I can see from the reviews that some people have found the plot strand around body image too much for them, but as someone who grew up in the terrible times that were the early 2000s I could totally understand where Katie was coming from and found her evolution on that front quite satisfying. Hutch is a great character – I wasn’t really aware of Coast Guard Swimmers being a thing before this book, but it was the perfect match of character and job and makes total sense for the way that the ending plays out. I don’t know that it’s my favourite of hers – I think I love The Rom-Commers the most, and it’s not a surefire recommendation for people because for reasons that may be apparent from what I’ve already written, but I read this in the space of an afternoon and evening and really enjoyed it.

This is out now in Kindle, Kobo and paperback. It’s showing up as being in stock in some of the London Waterstones so I think you should be able to get it in stores too.

Happy Tuesday!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: March 9 – March 15

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It’s really starting to feel like the weather can’t make up its mind what it’s doing at the moment. One day it’s so warm you barely need a coat, another it’s blowing a (freezing) gale and raining. I dislike this because it’s impossible to dress for but also because I don’t know if I want to read cosy autumnal books or spring-y new start ones. I’ve got such a huge to-read pile that I really should just pick one and go with it, and yet I find that really hard to do. A solid week of reading though – a couple from the NetGalley list, a couple from the shelf and one break-glass-in-case-of-emergency read because I wasn’t feeling very well. Onwards…

Read:

Murder at the Spirit Lounge by Jess Kidd*

Death at the Bar by Ngaio Marsh

The Corpse in the Waxworks by John Dickson Carr

Death Waits in the Dark by Julia Buckley

The Pie and Mash Detective Agency by J D Brinkworth*

Veiled Threat by Patti Benning

Murder on the Eiffel Tower by Claude Izner

The Love Haters by Katherine Center

Started:

Death with a Dark Red Rose by Julia Buckley

Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Fairies by Heather Fawcett

Still reading:

Game Changer by Rachael Reid

Square Haunting by Francesca Wade

Ritual of Fire by D V Bishop

Pet Shop Boys, Literally by Chris Heath

Four ebooks and two books bought, two pre-orders arrived.

Bonus picture: Tower Bridge by night on the way to the theatre last week.

*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.

Exhibitions, not a book

Not a Book: Seurat and the Sea

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Happy Mothering Sunday everyone, and I have been doing some more high culture to report back on today, with one of the first of the big London art exhibitions of the year and one which is very much in my area of interest.

Georges Seurat’s most famous paintings are Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte and Bathers at Asnieres. I’ve never seen the first which is in Chicago, but the second lives at the National Gallery and I will go and look at it every time I visit. In Washington back in 2018, I went to the National Gallery of Art where they have a selection of his works and wandered around that. So it’s no surprise that I would be very excited to go and see the first dedicated exhibition of his seascapes which is on at the Courtauld at the moment.

The Courtauld says this “major, focused display is the first devoted to Seurat in the UK in almost 30 years” which I can believe – because I don’t remember another one, and I have had my eye open for one since I first saw Sunday in the Park with George in the summer of 2006. This exhibition has 26 paintings, oil sketches and drawings that Seurat made during a series of summers he spent on the northern French coast between 1885 and 1890 before his early death at the age of 31 in 1891.

I find it really hard to write about art but there is something about the light and movement in Seurat’s works that always gets to me – and these seascapes are really something. They are arranged chronologically so that you can see the his technique and style developing of the the years, as well as seeing some of the studies alongside the major works that they were preparatory for. They have a sense of stillness and calm, despite the fact that they are seascapes. I spent some time standing on the far side of the gallery staring at them from a distance when they look almost like photographs and the effect he was aiming for with the pure colour is at it’s most effective. But up close the detail is incredible too.

The Courtauld also has other Seurats, including studies for la Grande Jatte and others in its regular collection along with other works by the impressionists, so if you’re interested in this period in art, this is well worth the entry fee. This was one of those occasions where I bought myself the exhibition poster and am now spending a stupid amount of money on the frame for it. And I’ve added to my postcard collection too, only to discover that I’ve got a mix of landscape and portrait postcards so I still don’t have enough to fill my big postcard display frame! Anway, if you want to go and see this, do your planning now because there are already some dates that are sold out. It’s already been extended so instead of ending in April it now ends in May and they have added late night opening on Fridays to cope with the demand.

I leave you with some Sunday in the Park with George, from the Sondheim Prom to mark his 80th birthday back in 2010. I’m bracing myself for the bunfight that will be ticket sales for next summer’s revival with Jonathan Bailey and Ariana Grande. Pray for me – and my wallet!

The pile

Books Incoming: Mid-March 2026

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As you can see, all restraint on the ebook front was out of the window in the actual book purchasing. Here we have the Liza Minelli pre-order, the Game Changer from Birmingham, The Scandalous Life of Ruby Deveraux was my purchase in Old Hall bookshop Dress Code was an extra purchase in the charity shop after Old Hall because they didn’t have any change and didn’t take card for less than a pound so I needed a second book on top of Death at Nonna’s Kitchen. The three Mirabelle Bevans and Take Six Girls all came from the same secondhand bookshop so I was making a postage saving (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it), Beatie Cavendish and the White Pearl Club is the book that precedes the Beattie Cavendish I read last month and finally Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries was this week’s Foyles purchase after I enjoyed Agnes Aubert so much. So any work I was doing getting the size of the physical pile down is clearly straight out of the window…

book adjacent, theatre

Book Adjacent: The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

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I know it’s meant to be a series post on a Friday, but I’ve seen so much stuff recently that if I save it all for Sundays, some of it will nearly have finished by the time I get to it. So you’ve got a bonus theatre review today – of the musical based on Rachel Joyce’s The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry.

The story, for those (like me!) who don’t know it, is about Harold Fry a retiree in Devon who receives a letter from Queenie, a former colleague from 20 years earlier saying that she is in hospice care and dying of cancer. He writes a (not very good) letter back – but when he gets to the post box, can’t bring himself to post it so walks to the next one, and then the next one until he decides he’s going to go and visit Queenie – all 600 plus miles – on foot. As he goes he thinks about his life, his marriage and his son and starts to work through the issues in his past. His journey also acquires a cult following – people following it on social media and even joining him along the way.

I haven’t read the book that this is based on but that really didn’t matter to en joying the show – it just means that I can’t tell you how far this deviates from the book in terms of the story.There is darkness and sadness in the story as it unfolds (which I haven’t gone into because: Spoilers) but ultimately it is a life affirming slice of a normal man’s life who decides to do something abnormal on the spur of the moment. Mark Addy is great as Harold, but Jenna Russell is really heart breaking as his wife Maureen – she was actually nominated for an Olivier award for this last week, and I think she really deserves it. I’m not sure there was a weak performance – but I thought the puppet dog was particularly effective.

The music is by Passenger, who I couldn’t have named a song by but when I looked it up I did know Let Her Go (video below so you can see if you know it too) and I would describe it as sort of folk inspired and fitted really well with the design of the show too. This started at Chichester last year, and I’m glad it’s got a London run so more people can see it.

This is on at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket until April 18th.