Happy Friday everyone, and what a great Friday it is because yesterday evening Taylor Jenkins Reid announced that her next book is out in March. More on that at the end of this post, but I’ve taken the opportunity to make today’s series about the Reidverse novels.
What I’m talking about with the Reidverse are the full length novels The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Daisy Jones and the Six, Malibu Rising and Carrie Soto is Back. It’s slightly tenuous as a series in away because they’re all standalone and you don’t have to read them in order – but they do contain easter eggs and crossovers for each other. Goodreads also has the short story Evidence of the Affair featured in the series – but I’d need to read that again to figure out how it’s connected because unless I’m being very stupid, I can’t remember any of the characters from the others popping up in it.
As you can tell from the fact that all of those novel titles are hyper links, I really, really liked all of them. And I was sad when TJR announced that Carrie Soto was the last book in that world, but I get it. I still need to read Atmosphere – I tried during the Artemis mission but it turns out I’m not good at reading about peril in space when there’s actual astronauts doing a perilous mission. Maybe now is the time though after England’s defeat in the World Cup maybe a cathartic cry is what I need – and I think all of these made me cry at some point or another!
And now to the new book: It’s called The Last Days of Vic and Coco and it’s coming out in early March. In her email Jenkins Reid says she’s always “wanted to write a story about how friendship is its own kind of romance” and that this is that novel. According to the blurb it’s the summer of 1974 and is about two best friends who are also pool hustlers. They’re both untrustworthy and word is starting to get around about them – so they set in motion the plan for their biggest payday yet – but can you ever trust a hustler?
I can’t wait to read this – and I’m sure it’s going to be everywhere when it comes out. But in the meantime, if you haven’t read the Reidverse novels you should. If you like stories about Old Hollywood, read Evelyn Hugo try and figure out which bits of real stories she’s adapted for various parts of Evelyn’s life. If you like messy rock bands, read Daisy Jones, which is so inspired by Fleetwood Mac you wouldn’t believe. If you want some 1980s drama, its the beachy, sunny world of Malibu Rising and the complicated Riva siblings. And if you’re in tennis withdrawal after the end of Wimbledon, it’s Carrie Soto which has a tennis comeback fuelled by anger.
Happy Thursday – and happy new Three Dahlias day! We have two books in the series this year and the first of them, Death on a Lively Sea sees our three heroines on a super yacht in the Med with a property mogul whose father died recently in a death that he doesn’t think was natural and who is convinced he’s going to be murdered next. And so he’s done the only thing a sensible billionaire can do: invite all the suspects on a two week cruise and get some amateur detectives along to try and work it all out. I really enjoy this series – and I love that Katy Watson is finding settings for the books that pay homage to the settings of Golden Age mysteries as well. I’m really looking forward to readng this – and to reading the seventh book which is a Christmas mystery set on a sleeper train in Swiss Alps (see above again) and is out at the end of November.
After doing Books with Sports earlier in the year and first sports romances post back in 2024, I’m back with a sequel because we are now deep into the Summer of Sport – England play Argentina tonight for a place in the World Cup Final on Sunday, the Wimbledon finals were last weekend and the Commonwealth Games start next week – I’ve got two sports romances for you too. And it’s only two because the reviews are slightly extended, because I had *a lot* to say!
Abby Offsides by Anna McCallie*
This is about an American social media manager who runs away to the UK and gets a job working on a Premier League club’s social accounts. The club is basically Liverpool (but it’s called Mersey) and soon Abby’s forming a friendship with the club’s latest signing – Lachlan – who is returning to the club he grew up at. When she has to move out of her flatshare, she moves into his spare room, but is it really a friendship or is there chemistry for something more? I think this is going to be a divisive one – and it’s worth noting that the blurb and cover are very different on the UK and US version. The UK cover is the one above – the US one is the one below.
The US is more women’s fiction coded, but the UK one has a very different sell and blurb – including on NetGalley where I got it from. And the difference is something so fundamental to the plot that I might not have requested it if I didn’t know about it – and that is that the hero is married. This isnt me Toones in the UK blurb, but the US one does has a reference: “despite the nagging guilt she feels about Lachlan’s mysterious wife who didn’t relocate with her husband.”
I’m not a hardcore no cheating in my novels person, but it’s a tricky line to tread. And the problem is that this is trying to tread it with a heroine who met the hero in the workplace, and is not acting at all professionally – beyond the wife issue, Abby is also keeping it a secret from her bosses that she’s living in his flat and to top it all off she’s working in sport, which is an area where women struggle to be accepted and treated as equals and has been told by her boss that they’re not interested in employing people who want to be WAGs. And yet, there she is. Oh and the whole reason she’s in the UK in the first place is because her fiancé cheated on her… I think under normal circumstances – with any other conflict at the centre of it – this would have been a book where I would have read it, and then realised afterwards when I was trying to analyse it that I had more issues with it than I thought. But because I was already analysing and thinking about the cheating issue I was reading with a more sceptical and critical lens than I might otherwise have been. But your mileage on this may vary depending on whether you were expecting “a novel” or “a romance”. This came out at the end of June and it’s 99p on Kindle and Kobo this month – so if you want to read it and tell me what you think, the outlay is small!
First and Forever by Lynn Painter
Duffy is a huge fan of her local NFL team, but she’s become enemy number one with the fans after she shoved the team’s mascot away from her for being a creep. She goes on to a TV show to try and clear her name – only to find herself face to face with Connor Cunningham, the team’s star player. The team is on a terrible run, but Connor is their star – and desperate to stay with the team who he suspects are going to trade their best players away as part of their rebuild plan*. So when the team ask him to take Duffy out on a date after their TV appearance generates some good press – he just can’t tell her what’s going on. You know where this is going.
This reads a bit new adult, and Duffy is a bit Not Like Other Girls as well as oblivious, but I’d rather have Duffy than Abby from the last book. A simple conversation could have fixed the issues in their relationship and Duffy’s family are terrible to her in a sort of oblivious way rather than a mean one, but it’s pretty readable and non-toxic NFL romance. Do I prefer the Chicago Stars series? Yes. But is it better than any of the Tessa Bailey Sports romances I’ve tried? Also yes. This is a pretty new release – it came out at the end of May and it’s also 99p on Kindle and Kobo at the moment, so again it’s not a big outlay and I liked this more than I liked Abby Offsides, so this one is more of a recommendation than the other one.
Also, this is a great opportunity to tell you that if you read that last post and remember me mentioning a massive hanging plot thread in the Simone Soltani book that the third book in that series, Crash Into You, comes out in August and is about the driver at the centre of that hanging plot thread – so we finally know that Zaid suffered two broken wrists which is not as life threatening as the first book implied (although definitely potentially career threatening) unless I’m missing something mega. Given that I didn’t love Cross the Line and the blurb for this says it’s also a pregnancy plot, I will probably give this one a miss – but that may well be right up some of your streets.
On the books I’d like to read front, Playing for Keeps by Alexandria Bellefleur which came out in January, is sports adjacent – featuring Poppy, a publicist for an NFL quarterback and Rosaline, the publicist for a popstar whose two client start a romance (yes, it’s also Tayvis adjacent) and I’ve got The Open Era on the Kindle although I’m not sure that’s actually a romance-romance for all that it’s recommended for “fans of Heated Rivalry and Challengers”.
Happy Humpday!
*This is an actual thing that NFL teams do try when they’re doing really, really badly – the Miami Dolphins seem to be currently trying it for the second time this decade!
Happy Tuesday everyone, it’s due to be sweltering again today and it’s also the France v Spain semi final so I suspect nota lot of reading is going to be occurring. But I do have something from last week’s heat affected list to talk about.
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I’ve struggled with how to describe the plot of this because the blurb really doesn’t give anything away. So here is what the blurb says:
A woman is on trial for her life, accused of murder. The twelve members of the jury each carry their own secret burden of guilt and prejudice which could affect the outcome. In this extraordinary crime novel, we follow the trial through the eyes of the jurors as they hear the evidence and try to reach a unanimous verdict. Will they find the defendant guilty, or not guilty? And will the jurors’ decision be the correct one? Since its first publication in 1940, Verdict of Twelve has been widely hailed as a classic of British crime writing.
So as you can tell this is an unusual type of murder mystery. Postgate introduces you to each juror – their backgrounds and the things that might influence their opinions as they are sworn in, and then jumps to the events leading up to the crime (without telling you who did it) and then the trial itself.
This was originally published in 1940 and as the blurb says murder was still a capital crime, so the defendant’s life is in the hands of the jury. It’s really well written to give the reader plenty to think about as you’re reading the book and I found the ending really clever too. If I had one problem with it, it’s that in the Kindle edition I read, there seemed to be an element missing from the graphics in the deliberation section, but I need to go and look at a paperback copy to see if that’s an issue in those, or maybe even a deliberate thing. This actually came out nearly ten years ago, when the BLCC range was a lot smaller, and is one of the genuinely forgotten but deserving reprints.
It’s in Kindle Unlimited at the moment, which means that the only version you can get through Kobo is the audiobook one, and of course it’s also in paperback and is one I’ve seen fairly regularly in stores. You can buy it directly from the British Library in their store at the library on the online one where it’s only £8.99 and is also in their 3 for 2 deal. Bargain.
It’s so hard to concentrate in the heat isn’t it? And to sleep. And to do anything other than slump somewhere and drink cold drinks and moan about how hot it is. That was basically my week. Lots of time on hot trains not being able to thing about anything except how hot I was. This week is meant to be a bit cooler (please, please, please) but we’ve also got an England semi-final at the World Cup (which I’ll be missing at least part of) and then whatever comes next. Who knows what all that means for the list…
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!
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 SolomonExtra 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 