I’m back with another stack of books that I’ve managed to acquire some how. There’s two pre-orders here – the new Vinyl Detective and Steven Rowley’s The Celebrants, which has been out in the US for ages but has only just got here. Then there’s my two purchases on the way to Portugal – which were When Grumpy Met Sunshine and Death at the Chateau. Then there’s the books I brought back from Portugal. Seven Scamps was a belated birthday gift and the two Julia books are loans (I think!) from the same friend. The Patricia Wentworth, Susan Elizabeth Philips and Jenny Colgan were acquisitions from the book exchange in Portugal. And then at the very back is Delayed Rays of a Star which was an impulse purchase second hand. So just a few then…
In a touch of serendipity given this week’s BotW pick, I saw two Kate Clayborn books in the wild in the works last week, so as they’re now even easier to get hold of, I wanted to remind you all of Clayborn’s Chance of a Lifetime series – which are more straight romance or at least feature less complicated lives than The Other Side of Disappearing is. So head on over to my post from last year to find out more.
Yulin Kuang’s debut romance is an enemies to lovers trope about two writers linked by an incident in their past who end up working on the same TV show. I know you know I’m reading this at the moment, so I can’t give it a review yet but it’s a really interesting premise and without giving too much away, I’m really not sure if their shared past is overcome-able (is that even a word?) and any sensible person would have decided not to work together, but hey this is a romance novel and people don’t do sensible things in them always! Kuang is working on the adaptation of a couple of Emily Henry’s novels and I love them so I’m hoping optimistic.
It’s the second Wednesday of the month, and you know what that means, it’s time for me to tempt you to spend a whole bunch of money on cheap Kindle books!
In relatively recent picks, Come as You Are is 99p – this one was a BotW pick last year – and I think the price is down now because a second book in the series has just come out – and although that one is more expensive to buy Lips Like Sugar is also in Kindle Unlimited! Also 99p is Delilah Green Doesn’t Care, which is the first in Ashley Herring Blake’s Bright Falls series. As you know I’m currently reading the last one (when I can find the paperback, which I keep misplacing!) in this trio of romances featuring a friendship group in a small town. Alexandria Bellefleur also has a new book coming out this month and I think that’s why all three of her Written in the Stars series are £1.99 at the moment.
I’ve written whole posts about how much I love A J Pearce’s books about Emmy Lake, so it’s only right that I flag to you that the second in the trilogy (so far) Yours, Cheerfully is 99p this month – and the first one is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment as well. Double bonus. I read Alexander McCall Smith from time to time – and I think The 44 Scotland Street series is my favourite of his – and the first one of those is 99p at the moment. He’s definitely an author to read in order and if you binge too many in a row (like MC Beaton) you may notice patterns and trends and enjoy them less so pace yourself for best effect.
In older favourites, Jenny Colgan’s Little Beach Street Bakery is 99p. The heroine escapes a horrible relationship and does some healing through bakery, way before sourdough was the craze of the early pandemic. I have a special place in my heart for this book, because I won a competition when this came out and the prize was a new oven. I think enough time has passed now that I can admit that what I actually got was a stack of John Lewis vouchers to buy the oven – and as I didn’t need a new oven at the time, I held on to them and they bought new pillows and a new washer dryer when the one that I inherited from my grandpa gave up the ghost! Thank you lovely competition.
Another old favourite is Trisha Ashley – and her Wedding Tiers is 99p this month if you want to visit her Lancashire universe. We’re only a just over a month away from the first part of the third series of Bridgerton dropping on Netflix, but if you can’t wait (and bearing in mind everything I’ve said about the difference between the books and the series) then The Further Observations of Lady Whistledown is 99p – this is a collaborative effort with Julia Quinn and two other authors each telling a story in the Whistledown world.
This month’s bargain Georgette Heyer is Bath Tangle, which isn’t one of my favourites, but which I probably should re-read again to see if I’ve changed my mind on it, as can sometimes happen as I get older and wiser. This has a formerly engaged couple coming back into contact with each other when he is appointed her trustee after the death of her father. Devil’s Cub and An Infamous Army are among the ones at £1.99, There’s also a PG Wodehouse omnibus on offer for 99p if you want some Jeeves and Wooster.
I should probably mention some non-fiction too right? The Dress Diary of Miss Anne Sykes is 99p. I don’t recommend a lot of cook books, but when I do it tends to be Rukmini Iyer – I love her Roasting Tin series, and The Green Roasting Tin is £1.99 if you are someone who can cope with cook books on tablets.
And in books I bought while writing this post, there’s Genevieve Cogman’s Scarlet – I’ve read The Invisible Library and really liked it and this is French revolutionary vampires and comes with comparisons to Gail Carriger who you know I love. I’m excited to read it – and there is a sequel coming next month too. I also bought The Storied Life of A J Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin, which was her big book before Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow went mega-huge. And finally I bought The Partner Plot which is the new book from Kristina Forrest, who wrote The Neigbor Favor which was a book of the week last summer.
A new release pick this week and I think if you saw it on the list last week you might have predicted this because I do love Kate Clayborn.
The heroine of The Other Side of Disappearing is Jess. She’s been bringing up her half sister Tegan on her own for the last decade, since their mum ran off with a boyfriend she had only know for a few months. She’s also been keeping a secret – that her mum’s boyfriend was a con man who was the subject of a true crime podcast. At the start of the book she discovers that not only has Tegan worked out the secret, but she’s contacted the podcast’s producers and is planning to go and search for their mother. Jess isn’t going to let Tegan face whatever is out there without her, so she joins her on the road trip with the podcast host and her producer Adam. Adam is a former college football star and recent journalism graduate. He’s working on this podcast for reasons of his own, but when he meets Jess he has to rethink what he has planned.
This is a road trip book, but with a larger cast than you usually get on road trip romances. And it is still a romance, but this is probably edging closer to what you might call Women’s Fiction than Clayborn has before. Because as well as being the story of Jess and Adam it’s also about Jess and Tegan and their relationship, the way they have built their own sort of family together – and the damage that their mother’s disappearance has done to them. But now I’ve written that I realise that I’ve made it sound like it’s a sad and miserable book, but it’s not! It’s actually pretty uplifting and as well as the romance you’re dying to know what happened to the con man and if they’re going to find their mum. So that’s a romance, a mystery, a road trip and a side of self discovery. It’s a really lovely read.
My copy of The Other Side of Disappearing came from NetGalley, but it’s out now in Kindle and Kobo and I can see copies available for Click and Collect in most of the central London Waterstones stores too.
Well well well. I actually finished a non-fiction book in a reasonable time frame. Who knew I could do that? Certainly not the long runners list recently. Anyway, reading that and trying to make some more progress on that long running list along with a fun evening trip to a concert dominated my efforts this week. Let’s see if I can actually get the list shorter this week…
Well I wrote the Kindle offers post so there were a few…
Bonus picture: the clocks have changed, the evenings are lighter and hopefully soon the mornings will be too when I’m getting up for the train. It definitely feels less awful being up before 6am when it’s light already!
*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.
Just a quick one for this Sunday and I wasn’t actually going to write about this one because the tour is about to end, and I wasn’t sure whether there was any point in writing about it if you couldn’t go and see it – but in exciting news, it’s available on streaming, so I can write about it after all!
So this is a (self confessed) loose adaptation of HG Well’s sci fi classic The Time Machine. And in case you couldn’t tell from the trailer, it’s a comedy. And boy is it comic. It’s bonkers and really quite meta. And actually on the night that we saw it even more meta than usual with the addition of an understudy – complete with script in hand – that I still wasn’t sure if it was part of the plot until I went and googled at half time and found the reviews which clearly stated that it wasn’t normal! But it tells you a little bit about the nature of the thing that I wasn’t sure whether it was a fake-out or not*.
Anyway, if you like your casts small, your productions lo-fi and for both of those things to be a feature in the actual show, then this is great fun. I laughed a lot. Not Mischief Theatre or Spymonkey levels of laughter (where your sides actually ache), but quite a lot. Definitely more than I’ve laughed at a lot of other comedies over the last couple of years. Some of that is the writing, but a lot of it is the performers – who throw themselves at it body and soul – as I’ve mentioned, the line between reality and acting is very blurry here and that’s a good performance thing more than anything else I think.
And if still you don’t believe me that it’s good, it’s actually got an Olivier Award nomination for Outstanding Achievement in Affiliate theatre this year. I haven’t seen any of the other nominees, so I’m rooting for this one. And if it does win, maybe it’ll get some more tour dates. In the meantime, you can rent it via Original Theatre’s website and take a look for yourself. It took a bit of digging about on the website, but it’s £5.99 for a 48 rental, or £8.99 for a month’s access to all their shows, which includes the Adrian Lukis Being Mr Wickham which I keep hearing good things about, and several interesting looking plays.
Have a great Sunday everyone.
*Unlike at Spymonkey where I knew that Stephan was really dead, and Petra genuinely in Vegas, which the people around us weren’t convinced about at the interval and were hoping they’d turn up in the second half!
Were we in the north recently? Did I find a bookshop to visit? Did I make a purchase? Yes on all counts. And it was a delightful bookshop so of course I’m writing about it!
The Hedgehog Bookshop has two floors of lovely books and goodies. The first floor has kids books and stationery and all that sort of thing. But upstairs is where the good stuff is on a book front from my point of view.
In one room there’s a nice comfy sofa with a hedgehog cushion where you can sit and peruse your choice from what seemed like a very thoughtfully curated selection of fiction, with something for practically anyone I would have thought.
There are best sellers, BookTok picks, recent top sellers, modern classics, evergreen picks and a big old selection of crime and mystery of various types. This was not the only crime bookshelf…
And in the other room there’s an eclectic mix of non-fiction, again with something for pretty much anyone across history, celebrity memoir, cookery, the whole lot.
My purchase was a book about the history of cathedral architecture which you could see in the bonus books incoming the other week. Have a great weekend.
Most read author: Ngaio Marsh or Patti Benning – not sure which gets more on the page count – there are more Patti Bennings but they are all 100 pages or so, the Alleyn books are longer
Books bought: 10 books across ebooks and physical books and three pre-orders
Books read in 2024: 107
Books on the Goodreads to-read shelf (I don’t have copies of all of these!): 740
The Patti Benning novellas are just so easy to read and there are so many of them that it’s easy just to go straight on from one to the next and ignore the other stuff on the pile. Still I guess it means that I’m getting value for money out of my Kindle Unlimited subscription right?
Bonus picture: two books behind on the beat-the-to-read pile bookshelf, but I’m still confident…
*includes some short stories/novellas/comics/graphic novels – including 13 this month! All those Patti Benning novellas plus one graphic novel.
Before you ask, I haven’t read this, but I have started to see this every where which is why I’m mentioning it today. This is a debut novel, with a heroine who realises her attic is creating an endless supply of husbands for her to try out. But how do you decide whether to stick with the one you have or keep going to see if you can find a better option? This has blurbs from Marian Keyes and Gabriele Zevin and is being comped with Really Good, Actually – so if you’re looking for a book at the airport in the near future and liked Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow this could be the one to pick!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 