We are in the thick of the autumn releases now, and I’ve already written about some of thebig hitters coming ahead of this Christmas, so today I wanted to mention a slightly more under the radar one: You Had To Be There by Jodie Harsh. The subtitle is An Odyessy through Noughties London, One Night At a Time. If you weren’t around in the early years of the 21st century, Jodie Harsh is a DJ, nightclub promoter and drag queen who was popping up all over the place in the pre-social media era of glossy celeb magazines because of her nightclub nights. Before Ru Paul’s Drag Race appeared, she was probably one of a handful of drag queens that people in the UK might have been able to name.
A lot has changed in London’s nightlife scene since the early noughties. While pubs and clubs across the country have struggled, the London nightclub and gay scene has been particularly badly hit – whether it’s all the venues that disappeared as a result of the construction of Crossrail (now known as the Elizabeth Line) around Tottenham Court Road Station or the masses of redevelopments that have happened in Soho which have seen small venues disappear because of construction work, rising rents or licencing issues because of the bougie new apartment buildings. I was never much of a club goer, but I was (and still am) a theatre goer who was on the perifery of some of these changes as well as an avid readers of the sort of magazines that featured stories about London nightlife, so I’m really looking forward to reading this.
After last week’s look at the non-fiction, this week I’m using Recommendsday to talk abou the big fiction releases of the autumn as we hurtle towards Christmas.
I’ve already written about the new Dan Brown which came out on the 9th, but tomorrow sees the other biggie September with the arrival of the new Richard Osman. After taking a break from the Thursday Murder Club last year with We Solve Murders, he’s back with the fifth in the series The Impossible Fortune, which sees the residents of Coopers Chase back on the case. You’re going to want to have read the previous book because there was a Big Plot Development at the end of The Last Devil to Die.
Also out this week is the new novel from Patricia Lockwood, Will There Ever Be Another You. This is inspired by Lockwood’s own experiences suffering the effects of Long Covid on her memory and promises to be a slightly trippy and inventive read. I read Lockwood’s memoir Priestdaddy years ago and still need to read her first novel before I get around to this one, even if I was ready to start reading books set during Covid. Which I’m not sure I am yet!
The new R F Kuang, Katabasis is already out and completely everywhere. This is Kuang’s first book since Yellowface and is a return to speculative fiction. If you are a reader of Literary Fiction, there are lots of the Big Authors who have books out this autumn – from Salman Rushdie with The Eleventh Hour on November 4, to Ian McEwan’s “literary thriller and love story” What We Can Know (which came out last week) and William Boyd’s historical spy novel The Predicament which is his second book featuring Gabriel Dax (the first being Gabriel’s Moon).
There are also new books from some of the mega thriller writers: John Grisham has The Widow (October 21) which is being described as his first whodunnit as well as being a legal thriller. Jeffery Archer also has a new thriller out this week with End Game. In (other) books that are Not For Verity there is also the Nicholas Sparks and M Night Shyamalan book Remain
But what am I waiting for, I hear you ask. Well my autumn pre-orders include Olivia Dade’s Second Chance Romance. This is the second book in the Harlot’s Bay series, and I’ve had it pre-ordered since March, because that is how I roll. If you read At First Spite, this is Karl the Baker’s story, and the heroine is an audiobook narrator who moved away from town after high school. I can’t wait. It’s out at the end of November. I’ve also got the paperback of Katherine Center’s Love Haters ordered – the ebook came out at the start of the summer, but for some reason Past Verity went for the paperback and a longer wait!
The fifth H M The Queen Presents book, The Queen Who Came in from the Cold is out the same day – it’s the early 1960s, and The Queen is getting ready to go to Italy on the Royal Yacht when someone claims to have seen a murder from the Royal Train. There is another Sophie Hannah Poirot novel coming this autumn too – The Last Death of the Year – which sees Poirot arriving on a Greek island for New Year. These can go either way for me – I’ve liked two, disliked two and just picked up the one I haven’t read on offer to see how that one suits me.
And finally, it would be remiss of me not to mention that Stephen Rowley, author of The Celebrants and The Guncle, has a new one coming in mid October. Just a warning though that The Dogs of Venice is a novella – it’s already available on Audible and only lasts 80 minutes, so it’s quite pricey as a £20 hardback (no matter how much I love him).
Happy Tuesday everyone and today I have a non-fiction pick for you – and it’s a book that’s only come out in the last month or so, so I’m even timely for once!
Dan Wang is a Chinese-Canadian, who now works in academia in the US as a research fellow but who was previous a China analyst looking at the country’s technological capabilities while living and working in Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai. Breakneck is his attempt to put all of this work into one place and to look at the differences between China and the US. He sees the US and China as fundamentally similar in some ways – but that China is an engineering state and the US is a lawyerly one. He says this isn’t a grand theory to explain everything but a framework to put the recent past in and to help understand what might happen next.
I found this really fascinating and illuminating and really liked Wang’s framework as a lens to view China and its relationship with the US through. I’ve spent a lot of time reading about China and trying to understand the current geopolitical situation as part of my day job so on a macro level this is interesting to me. But on a micro level, my little sister and her now husband moved to China in the summer of 2019 and I was really looking forward to visiting them and seeing China – and then the pandemic happened and they were stuck where they were and we were stuck where we were. They came back in 2021 and a lot of the stories that they have told me from their time in Beijing fit in with what is being set out here.
This is a really thought provoking book that is also a glimpse at China beyond the big cities that people outside of China have heard of. I don’t know enough about China to be able to analyse this on a scholarly level (duh!) but as a casual reader and consumer of world news it made a lot of sense to me!
My copy of Breakneck came via NetGalley, but it’s out now and hopefully should be relatively easy to get hold of if you’re in a bookshop with a decent non-fiction section. And it’s also on Kindle and Kobo.
Well. That list is looking a bit more healthy. I was going to say it was looking better, but then I realised that not all the books on the list were better and revised my words. Because although there is some excellent stuff on there, there were also a few that were really not. But that happens every now and again, it just seems to have happened more than usual in the last couple of weeks. But on the bright side, another off the long runners list, so I can’t really complain can I?
It’s been a couple of years since the first series of Shiny Happy People, which was about the Duggar family and the IBLP, and now there is a second series this time not focusing on the Duggars but on Teen Mania, an evangelical group for teenagers which gained popularity across the US in the early 90s.
This is a three part series that shows how a group that initially presents as a evangelical pep rally for teens that also offers mission trips evolved into a militaristic group of young people being groomed to lay down their lives for Jesus. Yes, you read that right, these teenagers ended up doing military-inspired survival missions and expecting do die in the name of their faith.
And I’m not going to lie, I wasn’t expecting this to get quite so dark when it started with giant stadium rallies for teens with Christian rock music and a pastor riding in on a motorcycle. I’ve watched a lot of documentaries about various Christian movements (and written about them here*) and I thought I knew what I was expecting – but this is something else. This one is less sexual abuse and predation, more straight up abuse and fraud with added fascism and indoctrination. If you remember Generation Joshua from series one, this is like the military wing of that. It’s quite shocking.
But as we seem to be seeing increasing Christian nationalism happening in the USA, this is a really interesting look at how something that starts off seemingly healthy – I can’t imagine many parents objecting to their teens going to a Christian event with their youth group (as opposed say to going to a rock concert on their own), and a mission trip abroad where they’re raising their own money to go might seem like a good opportunity too – can end up in people being dumped a state over from the college they’re at, with no money and no food and told to get back to campus with their giant wooden cross.
This is a three part series – and I watched it back to back one Saturday afternoon while I was doing the ironing. It’s a really well put together watch, with great voices talking about their experiences and solid talking heads.
After I had been to Saucy Books the other week, I may have headed to another bookshop in the area. Because the only thing better than one bookshop, is two bookshops!
This isn’t the full frontage because at various points when I was trying to take a picutre of the whole thing, there where people posing for photos and I try not to include random people full face on here. And why were people posing for photos outside I hear you say. Well this is a bookshop in Notting Hill and you may remember that in the film Notting Hill Hugh Grant’s character runs a bookshop in Notting Hill. Now there is something of a turf war going on about this…
This one is actually the store front that was used in the movie, and the beef goes deep enough that as you can see they have a whole poster about it outlining their story. Anyway, back to the Notting Hill Bookshop, which is a bookshop, in Notting Hill, founded in the early 1980s which says it inspired the bookshop in the movie….
It’s not a huge shop, but it is bigger than the shop front would suggest, and it is stuffed with books and made more crowded by the number of customers (huge when I was there, I was glad I hadn’t come straight from work and had taken the time to ditch my rucksack, even if carrying my purchases home in the shoulder bag wasn’t the best idea for my poor shoulder!). And the huge number of customers and crowded nature of it all are the reasons why the photos aren’t exactly ideal sometimes. Sorry about that.
I thought whoever was doing the book picking was doing a pretty good job too – this table right at the front shows what I mean – it’s got stuff for the Casual Reader (things that you might be able to pick up at the supermarket), it’s got prize winning authors for the Serious Reader, and things that you might not have come across before for people like me who visit a lot of bookshops and want something different!
It’s also got a small romance section, which is always nice to see, even if a lot of the books are either things I’ve already read or not my end of the genre (see my previous comments about New Adult).
They’ve also got a tonne of extra-bits – like Paddington and London related stuff in the kids section as well as loads of collectible hardbacks, notepads, souvenirs to say you were there. I bought myself Hattie Steals the Show (which you’ve already seen in Books Incoming) and a bunch of book related post cards.
Happy Friday everyone and I have a romance series for you this week, because all three of these are in Kindle Unlimited at the moment and so now is an ideal time to read them if you haven’t already.
So Olivia Dade’s Spoiler Alert series is three connected romances featuring cast members from a TV show that is somewhat Game of Thrones inspired. God of the Gates has been wildly popular but some of the actors (and the fans!) aren’t happy with the turn that the plots have taken. In Spoiler Alert, one of the stars is taking out his frustration with that by anonymously writing fan fiction, which is how he meets April although of course she doesn’t know who he really is. Then – both unknowingly – they meet in real life when Marcus asks April out after one of her fan costumes goes viral because she is plus size. When they start dating, he realises who she is and how is he going to detangle that one. All the Feels was a BotW, so there’s a full review of that already but it sees Alex assigned a minder by the show runners to keep him out of trouble until the final season airs. And Shipwrecked finds two actors who had a one night stand who find themselves co-stars and stuck filming together on a remote island for the duration of the series (because their characters are shipwrecked there) and so really need to not do anything that could end up in them hating each other and still having to work together. But when the series ends, they finally give in – but the trouble is they both have very different plans for the future.
You don’t really need to read these in order – but they do all take place at basically the same time (or at least parts of them take place at the same time) which makes for a really fun experience if you do read them all even if not in the proper order. Olivia Dade writes rom coms – these are funny as well as sexy and I like her characters who aren’t cookie cutter romances heroes and heroines. She was one of the first romance authors who I read who was regularly writing plus sized heroines or slightly older couples, by which at this point I mean in their 30s or up*, and I appreciate that too. I think I’ve re-read the first two twice each now – and probably the only reason I haven’t re-read Shipwrecked is because I own it in paperback so it’s not handy on my Kindle in the same way. They make great sunlounger books, so if you’re planning a late summer trip, these might be a good choice for you.
These are available in paperback as well as on Kindle Unlimited, and surprisingly given they are in KU at the moment, they are still on Kobo, although they are somewhat pricey there and they aren’t linked together as a series, so here is Spoiler Alert, All The Feels and Shipwrecked over there too.
*which given the amount of romances that have early 20s or college age characters at the moment is very welcome to me. New Adult seems to have subsumed the who genre.
You may remember Sarah Sigal’s Socialite Spy, which was a BotW back in 2023. Well this week Sigal’s new book is out – and it’s another novel featuring Lady Pamela Moore. We re-join her in 1938, and she is still using her work as a society columnist as cover. This time she’s trying to infiltrate the Parisian circles where the Duke and Duchess of Windsor are encountering fascists and Nazi sympathisers. I really enjoyed the first book, and I love a story that features Edward and Mrs Simpson, so I’m really looking forward to reading this. It’s in Kindle Unlimited, so hopefully I’ll get to it sooner rather than later!
September is the start of the mega Christmas release schedule and as ever there is a shedload of celebrity memoirs and non fiction coming out this Christmas season. SO this week I thought I’d mention the ones that I am particularly looking forward to.
Let’s start with Tim Curry’s Vagabond which comes out in mid October. Curry has had a long and successful career – you’re likely to know him either as Frank-n-Furter in the Rocky Horror Picture Show, Pennywise in the original It, Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island, or the voice of Nigel Thornberry in The Wild Thornberrys. He’s always been a somewhat private person and he’s been largely out of the spotlight and only doing voice work since he had a major stroke in 2012. So I’m really excited to find out what he’s got to say about his career (because I’m not expecting any revelations about his personal life) and as he’s reading the audiobook, I think I may well consume it that way so I can listen to his wonderful voice.
The other big actor memoir that I’ve seen this autumn is Michael J Fox’s Future Boy which is specifically about the period in the 1980s where he was making both the Back to the Future films and the sitcom Family Ties. That’s out in mid October. The week before that there’s Ozzy Osborne’s Last Rites, which takes you (apparently) right though his life to that final gig just a few weeks before he died in July.
But the other book on my list is Making Mary Poppins by Todd James Pierce. Mary Poppins is one of my very favourite ever movies and as you know I love stories of behind the scenes in Hollywood. I’ve already read both of Julie Andrews’s memoirs so I’ve heard about the filming from her, but I’m sure there is much more to find out.
The Big Political Book this autumn is Kamala Harris’s 107 Days, which is out next week and looks at her very brief campaign to become President, starting from when Joe Biden announced that he would no longer seek reelection.
Talking of American politics, not a memoir per se, but Michelle Obama has a new book out in early November – The Look is an examination of her evolving style over the years and the impact that fashion and style can have on you. And there’s also a new cookbook from Samin Nosrat whose Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat won a bunch of awards back in around 2017. Good Things is recipes to cook – 125 of them in fact. Padma Lakshmi also has a new cookbook out – All American – with recipes from all the many cultures she’s come across during her decades travelling in the US.
I’m really interested to have a look at Cory Doctrow’s Enshittification, which is looking at why so many things in tech and online start off being good and then go downhill as it is monetised and the impact that this has on everything in our lives. That’s out in mid October. In a similar sort of area, I’m also interested in Streaming Wars by Charlotte Henry, which is about the changes in the media industry that streaming platforms like Netflix, Disney+, Spotify and the like have caused, and what happens next. That’s out at the start of October.
I won’t be the only person out there who studied The Handmaid’s Tale at A Level, even if I’ve only read one (maybe two?) of Margaret Atwood’s other novels in the years since (more if you count her graphic novel series AngelCatbird). But she has a memoir out this autumn The Book of Lives out in early November. In other notable prize winning authors, Zadie Smith has Dead and Alive, an essay collection, out at the very end of October and Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me is already in the shops.
At this point I can’t tell if this is going to be a shock for you if you saw the list yesterday? I mean I feel it probably shouldn’t be because it was only Sunday that I wrote about how much I love books about behind the scenes in hollywood and this is a book about how a somewhat legendary movie got made.
If you don’t know what Spinal Tap is, I’m not sure where you’ve been, but they’re a fake rock band created by Rob Reiner, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, and This is Spinal Tap was the first mockumentary. It’s the thing that all the others are based on and the source of various pop culture reference to the point where if you see it now it’s hard to imagine how different it was.
Most of this book is the history of how the film got made and what happened next – when a fictional band started become real – from appearing at the Freddie Mercury tribute concert to putting out albums. Rob Reiner has done most of the work on this part of the book and it is to tie in with the fortieth birthday of the movie (last year), the fact that the quartet have got the rights back to the movie and property again and that there’s a sequel which is in movie theatres now. We can gloss over whether the sequel was good idea or not (the reviews suggest maybe not) but it’s a really fun read to see how the movie got made – but also what a collaborative effort it was and what a pivotal role in all of the stars lives.
Now flip the book over and the other end is a mock oral history of the band written by the quartet in their characters. This has some funny moments, but it’s not as good as the other end is. But it’s also less than half the length of the other bit so it doesn’t outstay its welcome!
My copy came from Big Green Books who look like they may have a few signed ones left, but I think it’s going to be pretty easy to find normal copies in the shops if you want it. It’s on Kindle and Kobo too, but priced accordingly considering it’s a hardback release. There’s also an audiobook read/performed by the four of them. And if you haven’t watched This is Spinal Tap, you really should!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 