Recommendsday: Books set in publishing

As well as one of us is famous romances, the other theme of this summer’s romances (or at least the ones that I’ve read) seems to be romances where people work in publishing. So after the Neigbor Favor this week, The Seven Year Slip the week before, and Business or Pleasure the one before that (!) here are a few more books where at least one of the main characters works in publishing. I’m going to start with romances because hey that’s the trend, but there are also a couple of books in other genres I want to mention too.

Lets start with the obvious one on the romance front- which may also be the one which started the trend (or at least accelerated it) Emily Henry’s Book Lovers. I did a post about it last year when it came out, so you can read that for more details, but it sees a high powered literary agent find herself on holiday at the same place as her work nemesis only to discover that they might have more in common than they think.

Business or Pleasure features a disillusioned ghost writer – and if you haven’t already, Ashley Poston’s (as in Seven Year Slip) previous novel, the Dead Romantics also featured a ghostwriter – this time one with a deadline she can’t make and a family emergency she can’t avoid. And as you might remember when I was writing about Seven Year Slip, it’s playing with ghosts – ghost writer and actual ghosts get it! And a late entry because I finished it this week – Sally Thorne’s The Hating Game, which is about two coworkers at a publishing company who really, really hate each other and are fighting for the same promotion. Now I have some caveats: I have a few issues with it but in the end they actually weren’t about what I was expecting – which was that their work rivalry would push my buttons for unprofessional pranks, but it actually didn’t because they didn’t sabotage each other. Lucinda does freak out a lot though and that did get on my nerves a bit so your mileage may vary – Goodreads tells me most people adore it and it’s also been turned into a film!

On to crime now and I’ve mentioned Anthony Horowitz’s Susan Ryeland books – aka The Magpie Murders and The Moonflower Murders a few times now (and I’m still hoping for a third book) and there’s also the Hawthorne series of even more meta mysteries from Horowitz. But there’s also Judith Flanders’ A Murder of Magpies. I read it back in 2015 back in the early days of this blog, when I was also reviewing for Novelicious – and wrote about it there rather than here so I’ll give you a quick review. Our detective is Sam, an editor at a London publishing house who thinks her biggest problem is that the new manuscript from her star author is unpublishable – until a police officer turns up asking about a parcel addressed to her. It’s not quite as cosy as the cover might make you expect but it is totally engrossing and has a clever and inventive solution (albeit one that this humanities grad had to read a couple of times). There is a great cast of supporting characters being set up for the series. I read it back when it was released – and there are now four in the series so I may have to get hold of some of the others as I had completely forgotten about how much I’d enjoyed it until I started checking my lists for this post!

I’m absolutely positive that I’ve forgotten something that I should have included, but hopefully it’ll come back to me at somepoint.

Happy Humpday everyone!