Recommendsday: January Kindle Offers

It’s January. It’s incredibly cold. So you should buy books. And there are some kindle bargains to help you with that!

Let’s start with two authors who I mentioned in my anticipated books post at the weekend. Firstly Taylor Jenkins Reid whose tennis comeback story Carrie Soto is Back is 99p this month just in time for the Australian Open. Then there is Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five – also 99p and really worth reading – especially given how much it upset a lot of the so-called “Ripperologists”. If you’re interested in social history and the lives that women lead in the past (and that don’t often get covered) you will find it really interesting, even if (like me) you don’t usually do Jack the Ripper content.

We’re under a week away from another Presidential inauguration (and we just had the funeral of another former president), and Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife is on offer – this is her book that’s inspired by Laura Bush. I like it (but not as much as I like Romantic Comedy) and I am looking forward to her collection of short stories that is coming out next month. Ready Player One is back on offer – I like the book way more than the film, and I say that as someone who likes the film, although I still haven’t managed to bring myself to read the sequel.

On the non-fiction front, there is Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking – which I actually listened to on audiobook (read by Carrie herself) a few years ago (while painting the spare room at the old house), but as a tale of growing up in Hollywood it’s incredible – and really funny and well written: after all Fisher was a script doctor who punched up the scripts of movies including favourites of mine like Sister Act and The Wedding Singer. On the history front, we have Alison Weir’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII which is a good starting point if you’re interested in the wives and want to know more. Also in the historical overview section of reading is Ian Mortimer’s The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England, which is some of the most fun you can have reading about an era where the Plague could get you if the dysentery didn’t and if a woman made it to my age she was doing well. Talking about fun historical reads: Greg Jenner‘s Ask a Historian is also on offer, I’m guessing because there’s about to be a new series of You’re Dead To Me.

Excellent news on the Terry Pratchett front: Men at Arms is £1.99 this month. It’s the second in the Watch sequence, but it’s still early enough in the series that you can read it standalone without missing too many jokes. This one is playing with all the tropes about secret kings as well as a band of misfits finding home in the city police force. Also on offer is the graphic novel The Last Hero, which was a BotW a couple of years ago. This month’s Georgette Heyer is Black Sheep, there are Agatha Raisins and Hamish MacBeth’s on offer in the form of Down the Hatch and Death of a Spy. Josephine Tey’s The Man in the Queue which is the first in the Alan Grant series is 99p

In stuff I have waiting on the tbr pile (virtual or otherwise) that is on offer, we have Beth O’Leary’s The Road Trip (now in a tie-in edition because of the Paramount+ adaptation), Frank and Red by Matt Coyne, which is about an unlikely friendship between a curmudgeonly old man and the six year old who moves in next door to him. The Socialites was my Amazon Prime reads pick last month – and is now out and 99p. It says it’s for fans of Taylor Jenkins Reid (tick), Katherine Tessaro (tick) and Fiona Davis (tick) and follows three girls from their convent school in the 1920s to their lives as actresses and writers and similar. This definitely falls into the fictionalised real people area of my reading wheelhouse.

And finally, in other stuff worth mentioning, Elusive, the second in Genevieve Cogman’s French Revolution series is on offer, ahead of the release of the third in the series later this year.

Happy Wednesday!