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!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 