Books Incoming: Mid-May 2026 edition

I’m not going to lie, this was looking a lot less substantial until the last week – and there’s still a book missing from this because my copy of Star Shipped is still at my mum and dad’s waiting for me to pick it up. Anyway, two of these are already off the pile as you know – because the Richard Osman and the Tom Bower were my airport purchases and I read them on the holiday. So what of the rest. Well the Rainbow Rowell was a pre-order so almost doesn’t count as it was ordered back when Waterstones had that big pre-order offer on back in October – and I still have two books from that order to come. One of which is the final Thursday Next book* which is now expected in mid-October but it does have a cover so it’s edging closer – and of course you can also see here the first Thursday book. Now you may be thinking “doesn’t Verity already own a copy of The Eyre Affair” and yes, yes I do. In paperback and on audio. But this is the 25th anniversary edition – with annotations from the author. According to Jasper Fforde’s instagram, it’s about 8,000 words of annotations. And given that I’m going to re-read the whole series before the final book doesn’t it make sense to read the version of the first ones with the annotations? Certainly all the people I messaged in my indecision over this (full price hardback) purchase agreed with me.

Also bought at the same time is Crime Rangoon, which is the latest Noodle Shop mystery. These are so hard to get copies of in the UK in physical copies or on Kindle at any sort of sensible price that I just couldn’t help myself. More on *where* I bought them next week. The S G MacLean was my purchase at Word on the Water – which actually turned out to be a four book afternoon as I wandered my way back from there via four other bookshops – it would have been five, but I arrived at one just as they flipped the sign over to closed because it was six o’clock. Sad times for me, but potentially a good thing for my walley and my shoulder as by that point I had the Dorothy Dunnett and the Donna Leon in my (not very big) shoulder bag along with the S G MacLean – and soon added the Jill Paton Walsh too.

I would say that that was when I stopped because four books plus a purse, plus a kindle was plenty enough, but I did go to two more bookshops (including Waterstones Gower Street) after that so I’d be lying. And it was only the fullness of bag and the realisation that I was going to have to fess up to all of this when I wrote this post that stopped a couple more purchases! I did have a lovely time though – even if it has undone all the work that I had been doing on reducing the size of the actual pile. I had nearly got rid of the front overspill pile, but that’s now back up to the size of the two behind it. Oops.

Happy Saturday