concerts, not a book, previews, theatre

Not a Book: Second half of the year Lookahead

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It’s the morning after the night before. And away from the football after the book-ahead yesterday (why didn’t I call the post that!) it’s the not-book lookahead today. Which is mostly theatre, because the second half of the year isn’t great on the events in sports that Verity likes front. And it should be noted that aside from the Seurat exhibtion, I haven’t made it to any of the other exhibitions from the start of the year post, but I’ve still got time.

Let’s start with the stuff that’s happening first – this week coming I’m off to see Midnight at the Never Get at the Menier Chocolate Factory. It’s about the third preview that we’re going to so all I can tell you is that it’ stars Ben Platt, it’s set in 1965 and is about a secret nightclub act. I’m somewhat gutted that my trip clashes with England’s World Cup semi final, but I wasn’t thinking about that when I booked it! And while I’m mentioning the Menier, it would be out of character for me not to mention that their very excellent production of The Producers, which I have written about more times than I should have is closing in mid-September (and I will be tryng to get to it again before it does).

A slightly more known quantity is Jesus Christ Superstar at the Palladium. It opened earlier this week to very enthusiastic reviews (in the main) and has already added a run at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in the autumn to the summer run, as well as a tour early next year – which presumably must be based on incredible demand for tickets which is a surprise given that it’s been revived fairly regularly. What is maybe more surprising is that I’ve never seen JCS live so we’ll see how I find it.

The revival that I’m most excited about however is Rent. It’s got Gatan Matarazzo of Stranger Things as the big name in the cast (not that I’ve watched Stranger Things) and a really solid cast of West End performers, including Billy Nevers, who is currently in the aforementioned JCS revival. The original production Rent was one of the shows my sister and I saw on Broadway when we went on an epic trip back in the day and so I’m interested to see what this looks like, having missed Rent Remixed which was in the West End (briefly) about a year after that Broadway odyssey.

The same week that I’m seeing Rent, I’m also back at the RSC in Stratford to see Jonathan Groff in As You Like It. It’s an all-male production and Groff is making his RSC debut as Rosalind. As you know, I loved his performance in Merrily We Roll Along when I saw that in the cinema. I’ve never seen him perform live and it’s been a decade since he did anything on this side of the Atlantic, so I’m *very* excited about this. As You Like It is a Shakespeare that I’ve never seen or studied and writing this post has reminded me that I need to read the play befoe I go to see it.

And lets end with some music: I’m off to the Proms again this summer – this time to see the American Classics Prom, which has Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue which I’ve adored since Primary school and Berntein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side story (which I once played to the best of my poor ability at the Royal Festival Hall) and On the Town among other things. And I’m also off to see Caravan Palace again when they play London in November.

That pretty much covers off the stuff that I’ve got booked in already, but there are a few other things I want to try and get to that I haven’t got definite plans for yet (as well as that Producers revisit) like The Globe’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (currently trying to find a date that works for me), Pride the Musical at the National which I’m going to have to try and get to through their weekly ticket drops because it is incredibly sold out except for some very expensive tickes for preview shows this week, Cats at the Regents Park Theatre (it’s open air so it’ll be a last minute job) and Tartuffe (Remixed) in a small off West End theatre starring Mark Rylance, who remains the greatest actor I’ve ever seen live but the fight for tickets is going to be *wilde*. But I’m sure there will be more, and you’ll hear about the good stuff here on Sundays!

Book previews

Anticipated Books: The Lookahead 2 – Later in 2026

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We are past the halfway part of the year now, and almost all the books that I mentioned in my anticipated books post at the start of the year have come out – even if I haven’t read all of them – and we have a better sense of what’s coming in the autumn. And so today: we have the stuff I didn’t know about back in January and that I’m desperate to read!

Let’s start with some continuations of other author’s series because there are two that I’m really interested in. The first is a new Miss Marple novel, written by Lucy Foley and comimg out in early September. Foley wrote one of the stories in the Marple short story collection a few years back and has now written a full length novel called Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel. According to the blurb there’s a murder in a gondola on the way to the top of a mountain at a ski resort in the Swiss Alps and as cracks and tensions among the remaining guests emerge, Miss Marple is there in the shadows to work out what happened. Given that the Sophie Hannah Poirot continuations have been sucessful, it’s perhaps unsuprising that they’d try the same thing with Marple. I had mixed feelings about the short story collections, but that was mostly because there was no internal continuity among them – and then the last story did something unforgivable. But Foley was right at the start of that collection so I’ll definitely read this.

The other interesting continuation is a bit more unexpected: Georgette Heyer. I know. It’s being billed as “An official Georgette Heyer Regency Romance” and I would love to know how this came about. It’s called Henrietta and it’s written by Sophie Irwin, who wrote A Lady’s Guide to Fortune Hunting, which I really liked, A Lady’s Guide to Scandal which I liked less, and How to Lose a Lord in Ten Days, which I have on the shelf waiting to be read. The blurb for this has a soldier returning from three years away to find everything changed, and a heroine who has been in love with him for years and is trying to make herself the society success she has always dreamed of and is hoping that he will notice in the process. This one is out next month.

Also out in August is a new book from Lissa Evans. My Name is MacKenzie Bly is being billed as a coming of age novel “perfect for fans of Sue Townsend” so it feels like a bit of a step change from things like Old Baggage and Small Bomb at Dimperley. It’s about a 14 year old boy whose best friend has just moved to New Zealand and is struggling through the trials of teenage life. Evans has written for middle graders before, but this isn’t specifically being marketed as YA and it’s under the Transworld Digital imprint rather than a specialist so I’m interested to see what it is like to read style-wise.

Coming up in under a week (so maybe I shouldn’t even be including it?) is the new Rachel Lynn Solomon Extra Curricular about a former popstar who enrolls in college and discovers she’s got chemistry with one of her professors. I’ve got a mixed record with professor-student romances – I loved the movie Never Been Kissed as a teenager but these days I only notice the ick – but the heroine in this is 26 and the blurb says that her past comes calling for her so I’m optimistic this is going to be on the right side of my tastes. Looking further ahead again to October and we have a second novel from Bonnie Garmus. I loved Lessons in Chemistry (I really should get around to watching the adaptation of that) back in 2022 and now this autumn we have her follow up: Peck & Peck following a new grad in the 1980s getting a job in the literary world. I can’t wait.

I’m expecting the Garmus to be very buzzy and very everywhere – and although I will be reading that one, there are a bunch more buzzy books coming out this autumn that I probably won’t be (because they’re likely to end in tears and/or devastation) but I’m going to mention because I know other people will be reading. Firstly there’s the sequel to The Time Traveller’s Wife, Life Out of Order (also in October) featuring the daughter of Henry from the original and according to the blurb “a kaleidoscopic story of love, resilience and hope when time is running out.” Then there’s the new book from John Green Hollywood, Ending, which is about a behind the scenes love story between two actors and the blurb calls it “tender, heartbreaking, and shrewdly funny,” and given I’m not over The Fault in Our Stars yet, I just can’t risk it even though I love a Hollywood-set novel, but if you can, that’s out in late September.

And because it wouldn’t be a second half preview without some non-fiction (because we all know most of that comes out timed for Christmas), there’s Lucy Worsley’s Kings and Queens: An Unusually Personal History using her experience from her years as Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces to look at the royalty who lived in the palaces she worked in. There’s also new books from Dan Jones whose Castles looks at history through twelve iconic strongholds from around the world and Simon Sebag Montefiore’s The Cauldron about the making of the modern Middle East.

And finally to report back on a few loose ends from that January post: Dark Reading Matter has moved again – but only slightly – to October. The fourteenth Frances Brody did slide again – to March 2027, but it does at least have a title now: Death at the Yorkshire Show.

Have a great weekend – and come on England!

historical, non-fiction, series

Non-fiction series: Penguin Monarchs

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A slightly unconventional series post today because a) because it’s non-fiction and b) each book has a different author but bear with me because I have things to say about them.

Penguin Monarchs are a series of 44 short biographies of British Monarchs intended to be digestible introductions to the lives of the ruler in question. All the ones that I have read are around 100 pages excluding bibliographies and illustrations – which takes them to around 120 pages all in. The first batch came out in hardback in 2014 – I know it was hardback because I went to an event in Westminster talking about one of them to march the release – but are now out in slim and quite stylish paperbacks that are very easy to get hold of in the shops.

Each is written by a different author, many of whom (particularly in the early days) are names you may recognise from writing popular history or biographies that you might spot in the bookshops – for example John Guy wrote Henry VIII, Philip Ziegler did George VI, Helen Castor did Elizabeth I and David Cannadine did George V. Others are written by renowned historians who hold prestigious jobs in academia who you might only have heard of if you are reading academic history books or journals.

At this point I have read eight of the series, covering both monarchs whose reign I am familiar with and those who I am less au fait on. And if you’re wondering the stuff that I’m less good on is basically everything before the early modern era. When I studied history at university my department had split history into five periods and you had to do a variety of different periods. I made strenuous efforts to stick to period 3 onwards – which meant that managed to stick to modules from the 12th century onwards and helped by the fact that I was doing French as well and had to do my dissertation on French history, to mostly be post 1700. And my historical reading these days mostly sticks to The Wars of the Roses onwards. So when I read the books on Edward the Confessor, William I and Richard I, I was substantially out of my comfort zone in terms of background knowledge.

What I do really like about all of them is that they have great bibliographies and further reading lists at the back – so if you want to go and read more on a particular aspect of the story you can or if you want to see how much of the research material that you have already read that’s also an option. It also usually comes with a commentary about what to watch out for while reading it which I appreciate too especially if they come with a side of historian snark. For example in Piers Brendon’s further reading to Edward VIII you have “Michael Bloch was [also] a clear partisan of the Windsors but his volumes contain rich deposits of original material” and “William Shawcross’s official life of Edward’s sister-in-law, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother (London: Macmillan, 2009) is extremely long and full of inside information. But it omits almost everything to its subject’s discredit, succumbing to the prevailing weakness of royal historical biographies – retrospective sycophancy.” Burn!

And so to my conclusions: for the monarchs that I was knowledgable about, I found them interesting summations of the lives and reigns and I enjoyed seeing which threads of the monarch’s life they thought were important enough to explore in the limited amount of space they have. For the monarchs that I wasn’t as familiar with it was a different experience because for one or two certainly I didn’t think the narrative of the events of the life was clear enough for the casual reader (if you can call me casual) but that comes with the proviso that history pre 1200 is really hard because it’s so dependent on chronicles – some of which are not contemporaneous – and interpreting what their biases might be and what is real and what’s not. All of which is to say that it can be complicated guesswork on an era and a mindset that are incredibly different to anything we are familiar with now.

Have a great weekend!

Book previews

Out Today: Mrs Spy sequel

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When I wrote about Mrs Spy in my Recommendsday post, I mentioned that there was a sequel coming, so it only seemed right to come back around and mention that it is out today. It’s called The Spy and the Snake and according to the blurb sees Maggie on a mission in Budapest pretending to be the wife of a British defector. As the blurb mentions that Maggie’s daughter is away at university I think we must have jumped on a year or two from Mrs Spy, so I’m looking forward to seeing what changes have happened in the interim and how a few years more experience have changed Maggie.

books on offer, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: July 2026 Kindle offers

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It’s the second Wednesday of the month, and while we swelter through another heatwave (at least it’s July this time I guess?) it’s time for some Kindle deals.

Lets start with some of the ones that I bought while writing this post Kills Well With Others by Deanna Raybourn, which is the sequel to Killers of a Certain Age, which is 99p and I think for the first time. The third Castle Knoll book – How to Cheat Your Own Death – which only came out in April is 99p too, as is Uniform Justice by Donna Leon which is is the 12th in the Commissario Brunetti series which I’ve just started reading. And I also bought The Final Problem, which is a murder mystery set on a Greek Island whee an aging actor most known for playing Sherlock Holmes finds himself investigating a death and Murder at Canterbury Cathedral by Jim Eldridge whose Museum Mysteries I’ve been reading recently.

Sticking with mysteries/thrillers but moving to stuff I have actually read, there’s The Queen Who Came in from the Cold the fifth H M the Queen Investigates book; Dissolution, the first Shardlake book; Murder Before Evensong, the first Canon Clement; Mrs Spy by M J Rowbotham, Missing in Soho the second Misty Divine book and The Comfort of Ghosts, the final in the Maisie Dobbs series which is also in Kindle Unlimited.

Away from mysteries, recent BotW The Heir Apparent is 99p as is new release Abby Offsides which I read last week about (and have thoughts on that I will share at some point!), the new Ashley Poston, The Someday Garden, which is also in Kindle Unlimited for those of you who subscribe, Emily Henry’s Book Lovers, as well as the much older One Day by David Mitchell which is about to be a musical as well as a movie and a TV series and Julie Soto’s Forget Me Not which I read back when it had a much less goth-y cover! The Eights – which I have on the physical pile – is 99p, and in non-fiction Travellers in the Third Reich is 99p and I can really recommend it, as I can also with The Formula.

A couple of my favourite Georgette Heyers are 99p this month – Venetia and These Old Shades as is What Happens in London from Julia Quinn‘s Bevelstoke series. And Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Casting Off is 99p too – this is my favourite in the Cazalet series I think (because it ties everything together so well) and I actually saw someone reading a paperback copy of this on the train last week and it made me *so* happy.

In stuff I haven’t read but that sounds interesting, there’s Hannah Bonham-Young’s Out on a Limb about a friends with benefits that turns to more in what I suspect is a pregnancy plot, I also bought Father Material which is down to 99p just a month after release, and First and Forever by Lynn Painter and The Lives and Deaths of the Princesses of Hesse which is a biography of four of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters. And surely that’s enough for this month. I hope your wallet has fared better than mine did when I was writing this.

Happy Humpday!

Book of the Week, new releases

Book of the Week: The Shampoo Effect

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Yes I know, this is the least unexpected BotW pick since, oh I don’t know, the last time I previewed a new release book on the Thursday and then promptly had it on the read list on Monday. But in my defence, I do try not to do this and pick my previews accordingly – and indeed when I went back and checked this the last time it happened is more than a year ago with A Murder for Miss Hortense (but only because I spaced out reading Dolly All the Time, The Paris Match and Finders Keepers from their previews – mostly because those were paperback preorders and not *right there* on my Kindle tempting me). But although there were a lot of books out last week, this was the one I was most excited about given how much I loved Pineapple Street. And also one of those other books that was out last week was a second Miss Hortense book – and was trying not to repeat on that front too. Anyway, with that slightly defensive opening over, to the review:

Caroline has always wanted to be a writer and when she gets a year long writer’s fellowship, she gives up her job in publishing and moves to Greenhead, Massachusetts and the cottage that writer the fellowship is endowed for once lived in. In Greenhead she meets Van. Van is one of the locals – an outdoorsy, ecologist who is like a big friendly dog made human. Soon they’re seeing each other and and Van is including her with his group of friends – including Bailey, who he’s been falling into bed with ever since they were at school. Van’s friends aren’t overly pleased at the advent of this rival to Bailey, and this only gets worse when Bailey realises that she’s pregnant with Van’s child. She’s definitely only in their circle because Van wants her to be – and what she does when she’s not anymore throws everything in the group up in the air even more than her presence did in the first place.

The blurb doesn’t reveal what it is that Caroline does – and as it happens a long way into the book (I want to say after the 60 percent point) I’m not either because it’s a huge spoiler, but it’s totally delicious and turns what was already a really good read into something truly excellent. This is very much a rich people problems novel as well as the Greenhead group with their family summer homes and ski trips, Caroline’s mother is a hugely successful writer and there’s never any sense that Caroline’s finances are dependent on whatever she writes on the fellowship being a success and so she’s an outsider only in that she doesn’t know them, not so much in status or class. And so it’s all about relationships and drama on that front and even if people break up you know they’re going to be OK financially, even if they’re upset interpersonally.

All of which makes it exactly my sort of soapy, beach read and I absolutely devoured it, messaging various people as I went along with choice quotes and how much I was enjoying it. It would be a perfect sun lounger read – and I can see why it’s the July pick for Jenna’s book club* because it’s a summer read and I can see people having diverging views about it – and in fact if you look at the goodreads reviews you will see that! If you liked Pineapple Street (which obviously I did), I think you’ll like this. That was about Rich People Problems in Washington DC, this is about Rich People Problems on the coast. The relationships are dysfunctional – and apart from Caroline that’s because they all have so much history together – and do they even really have that much in common any more aside from that shared history? Read it and find out, if you like the same sort of books that I do (and maybe that’s why are you here?) then I don’t think you’ll regret it.

My copy came via NetGalley but I think this is going to be everywhere. Pineapple Street was, and as previously mentioned, this has been picked by one of the big US book clubs so I’m expecting this to be as everywhere as Pineapple Street, if not more so. And of course it’s also on Kindle and Kobo and in audiobook.

Happy Reading!

*Jenna is Jenna Bush Hager, daughter of George W Bush and presenter of the Today Show on which her book club is a feature.

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: June 29 – July 5

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Not going to lie, I’m really feeling it after getting up to watch the England match in the middle of the night and my brain’s not really working right now. So this might be a shorter than usual post because of the brain fade but basically the top line is that I finally finished a long runner and because I was writing the offers post I may have bought some things…

Read:

Scot and Soda by Catriona McPherson

A Pocketful of Rye by Agatha Christie

Abby Offsides by Anna McCallie*

Death and Other Occupational Hazards by Veronica Dapunt

The Shampoo Effect by Jenny Jackson*

The Masqueraders by Georgette Heyer

A Superior Death by Nevada Barr

False Scent by Ngaio Marsh

Started:

First and Forever by Lynn Painter

For Never and Always by Helena Greer

Still reading:

A Taste for Murder by Matt Baker

Any Way the Wind Blows by Rainbow Rowell

Lets not talk about it because the Kindle offers post was expensive.

Bonus picture: a landmark on the Kindle reading log… but I’m still annoyed about the day 1903 days ago that I missed.

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

not a book, streaming

Not a Book: Child Star

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Happy Sunday, and if you’re sick of sport (and I’m sure some of you are!) I’ve got a pop culture documentary recommendation for you today.

Child Star is a documentary made by Demi Lovato and cinematographer Nicola Marsh looking at the trials and tribulations of being a child star, particularly around the issues that Lovato has faced as a former child star herself. She talks to other former child stars as well as looking at the history of child stars. This came out in 2024, but I clearly missed it when it originally came out and have only just found it on Disney+ – which is an interesting home for it in itself given that Lovato was a Disney child star herself.

There is a long history of child stars having well publicised issues as they grow up. So this was always going to be in my interest area. And honestly, the more I see and hear about what it was like for child stars, I become more convinced that children shouldn’t be allowed to be stars. Because oh boy there is so much damage on display her. Demi is quite clear eyed and reflective about her own experiences, and among the talking heads are other former child stars from different generations -among them Drew Barrymore, Raven-Symone, Christina Ricci and Jojo Siwa. I have long said that most of the children who are child stars have exactly the wrong sort of parents for parenting a child star and I’d love to watch a documentary about that too, but this is more about the impact on the children of fame and the pressure of having a job and adult responsibilities when you’re still a kid.

Towards the end of the documentary it gets into the latest evolution of child stardom – child influencers – and the lack of protections they have compared to the traditional entertainment industry – which is also an area that I’m super interested in and am waiting for the kids of family bloggers to grow up enough to have thoughts on – let alone the child influencers themselves. But that is another, longer story. This is a good look at what it was like to be a (Disney) child star in the early social media era and where that sits in the history of child performers. It’s not a cheerful watch, but it is an interesting one.

Have a good Sunday.

Best of...

Best Books of 2026 so far

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We are past the halfway mark in the year, and so it’s time for me to take stock of what my favourite reads of the year so far have been. And as ever, at this point in the year, I’ve mostly been looking at which books I’ve given the highest ratings to on goodreads, and not just which ones were Books of the Week – because sometimes I can read more than one excellent book in a week. And I’m going to start with the New Releases – in no particular order of preference. And I’m saying that deliberately because I never know if recency bias is playing tricks on me until I’ve got some more distance. And also because I forget how long ago it was that I read something until I remind myself of dates for things.

I’m starting with the only non-fiction book on the list: Receipts from the Bookshop because what better place to begin than a book about selling books, in a year when I’ve bought way more books than I should have done. If you want a slice of life about life in a small town where everyone knows you (and your mum) and you sell books (with your mum) this is for you. I don’t read a lot of new non-fiction – I don’t request loads from NetGalley and often when I get given it it’s in hardback so it sits on the pile for so long that it’s no long a new release when I read it. Let this be a lesson for me to read it faster in the second half of the year!

On to new fiction, I’ve tried to restrain myself and put some limits on how many I’m picking, so I’m going with three. The first is Dolly All the Time – which may be the recency bias, but it is just such a lovely romance where someone who is used to relying only on themself and being the problem solver for their entire family finds where they want to be and finds love. Next I’ve picked Star Shipped, which again could be the recency, but this is a lovely romance and just worked extra well for me because it tapped into all the feels I have about sci-fi series from my childhood and teenage love of the 80s and 90s Star Treks, but also because there’s no huge enormous calamity that hits them – it’s low angst and relatively low stakes, but a wonderful romance. And finally I’ve picked Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter. I loved the world, I loved the characters, I loved the Howl’s Moving Castle vibes I got from it – and in fact I liked it so much I went out and bought Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries and then when I liked that two I bought the next two in that series too. It also started me on a bit of a quest for more cozy fantasy novels so that shows just how much I liked it!

On to the new to me books and really it’s actually more proper old this time than usual because I think the fiction is The Wyndham Case which I liked so much I immediately bought the rest of the series basically all at once instead of following my usual rule of finishing the one I have before buying the next one! Then there’s Call for the Dead as I finally got to reading more of the George Smiley series. I have more waiting to be read – but I want to do it in order and I have a gap now before the next one I own, so if the book gods could put a reasonably priced copy of The Looking Glass War my way that would be great, please and thank you. And finally there’s Deliberate Cruelty, which is the reason for that disclaimer about not everything being a book of the week! I read this the same week as Meet the Newmans, which was new that week and so got my pick, but if you’re interested in the Capote set (and lord knows I am)this is really, really interesting – I think I might have liked it more than Capote’s Women – and I liked that a lot.

Now who knows how many of these will make the end of year list – or whether by the time we get to Christmas something that I’ve left out here will have been gradually gathering momentum in my mental list of favourite books. You never know, it wouldn’t be the first time!

Have a great weekend – enjoy the sport if you’re a sport person – we’ve got Wimbledon, the British Grand Prix *and* the World Cup, and spare a thought for me hiding from the hoards of fans who’ve descended on my home town because it’s the F1 down the road. Fingers crossed we at least get a Red Arrows spotting out of it tomorrow!

books, stats

Reading Stats: June 2026

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Books read this month: 35*

New books: 28

Re-reads: 7 (5 audiobooks)

Books from the to-read pile: 9

NetGalley books read: 3

Kindle Unlimited read: 4

Ebooks: 12

Audiobooks: 5

Non-fiction books: 3

Favourite book: Dolly All the Time

Books bought: lets gloss over

Most read author: Rachel Reid – four from the Game Changers series

Books read in 2026: 201

Books on the Goodreads to-read shelf (I don’t have copies of all of these!): 587

I am aware that the numbers don’t seem to add up this month – and that’s because there were two Wells books that I reread (for the umpteenth time) which are actual hardbacks, and have already been on my shelves for years so don’t really fit into any of the categories. But that’s why. Usually they do add up because the rereads are either audiobooks or ebooks. But not this time, and possibly the July stats they may not – and the July is because we have Book Con coming up in the middle of the month and if there’s one reason I might end up re-reading things I already own, it’s because a talk about it has inspired me – and all of the Girl’s Own stuff is physical copies. Anyway, aside from that, not a good month for reducing the NetGalley list, but a pretty good one for reducing the actual physical pile (the third over flow pile is significantly smaller than it was!) but I guess reading stuff that I actually bought on Kindle (as opposed to getting a e-proof of) is also something that I should be doing, so I guess I can find a bright side in everything!

Bonus picture: The RSC before The Tempest – on one of the first gorgeous weekends of the year.

*often includes some short stories/novellas/comics/graphic novels – but not this month!