We’re about to hit the big autumn new book wave, but before we get there, I wanted to mention that the paperback edition of Sonia Purnell’s Kingmaker is out in shops from today. This was my Book of the Week at the start of October last year and was my favourite non-fiction read of 2024. It’s a fascinating re-examining of the life of Pamela Churchill Harriman, making a case for her as a behind the scenes political operator and power player rather than the husband stealing courtesan that she has previously been seen – and portrayed – as. I only read it because I’ve read a fair bit about Truman Capote’s Swans, where she appears fairly often, but it was so much more than I was expecting – and really really worth a look.
Back in January I did a couple of posts about new books coming this year – the standalone stuff and the series – and now we’re a few months into the year there are a bunch more books that I’ve got on the list as coming this year I thought it was time for an update/extra post. This mostly straight up romances – with a side of a romance author writing their first contemporary fiction novel. I think that’s probably because most of the mystery authors write in straight up series which I’m better at keeping track of, so I covered those off at the start of the year. Or my brain could have just been a bit broken and I forgot about a bunch of authors I really like in January – or maybe some these books really weren’t available to preorder when I was writing that original post. Anything is possible…
Lets start with another book from Jen DeLuca that’s set in Boneyard Key, following on from Haunted Ever After last autumn. Amazon is currently claiming Ghost Business comes out in the UK in Mid August, but given that the actual author says September, I know who I’m trusting on that one. And it should also be noted that DeLuca is now writing a fifth instalment in the Ren Faire series and I cannot wait for that to arrive (presumably in 2026).
Next up, and it should be noted that this was announced last year, and I’m really not sure how it didn’t make it into either of the earlier posts, but Sarah MacLean has her fist contemporary fiction novel coming out in July. It’s called These Summer Storms and it has the children of a billionaire on the family’s private island after their father’s death only to discover that he’s left one final challenge for them to complete in order to receive their inheritance. Yes. Rich People Problems on a private island. It sounds great. I can’t wait.
Also left off that earlier list is the new Elissa Sussman, which I pre-ordered a full year ago, which was already nearly a year after Once More With Feeling Came Out. Totally and Completely Fine is due on July 8 – the same day as the Sarah MacLean – and this makes me very happy. Funny You Should Ask was a Book of the Week and Once More With Feeling would have been except that it was only a few months after I read Funny You Should Ask, and I have rules about repeats (that I sometimes stick to) so it went into a Recommendsday post for new romances instead. Anyway, the blurb for Totally and Completely Fine has the widowed younger sister of mega star Gabe (our hero from Funny You Should Ask) meeting a handsome (and also famous) actor on the set of her brother’s new movie. I am very optimistic about this one.
We also have dates and titles for the new books from Katherine Center and Annabel Monaghan. Center’s new book is The Love Haters which has a video producer trying to save her job by making a profile of a coastguard rescue swimmer (another job that I didn’t know existed until I read the blurb and had to google) and Monaghan has It’s a Love Story which features a former teen sitcom star who is trying to get her career as a producer off the ground and goes too far in her quest to get her first movie greenlit. They’re out a week apart at the end of May. Also in May is Dream On, Ramona Riley by Ashley Herring Blake – which is set in New Hampshire (which is great for my 50 states challenge!) and about a small town waitress and a Hollywood star who comes to town to film a rom com – but the two of them have met before. There’s a trend going on for time travel or time skip romances and joining that club is Time Loops and Meet Cutes by Jackie Lau, which is coming in June.
And finally (for now) in November we have the second Harlot’s Bay book from Olivia Dade. I loved At First Spite and Second Chance Romance features Karl the Baker from that and his former high school crush, who thinks he’s dead after his obituary mistakenly appears in the local paper. It sounds utterly delightful and I wish I didn’t have to wait so long for it, but hey, it’s good that books I want to read are spaced out!
You know how I sometimes say I don’t know if this was just announced or if I had just not noticed? Not this time. This was just announced yesterday and was not my original plan for today but I couldn’t not do it, given that as soon as I read the email from Taylor Jenkins Reid I clicked on the preorder link in it and preordered the signed edition Waterstones had. And when I came back to my inbox, there was an email from Waterstones telling me about the book that I had just ordered. Ahead of the game I tell you. Anyway…
I don’t need to give you the plot of Atmosphere because the blurb is right there in the Instagram post, but if what Taylor Jenkins Reid said when Carrie Soto came out still holds, this is not going to be linked to that quartet – although whether those characters will exist in this new world (as Easter eggs for us nerds) or not I do not know. I enjoyed those four books so much that I’m a little trepidatious about venturing into a new world – especially because space and sci fi aren’t usually my thing and I am Aware of certain space shuttle related events in the mid 1980s – but clearly not nervous enough not to have ordered that signed copy immediately. A nice treat coming my way in eight months time – the big question is will I remember that I’ve preordered it or will I accidentally order it again before then? Anything is possible…
Also before I go: there hadn’t been an email from Taylor Jenkins Reid since April and then she sent one on Tuesday with book reccs – so another one twenty four hours later announcing a new book was quite the shock – and delightful surprise because I was disappointed at the end of Tuesday’s email that there was still no news of anything new!
You guys. It’s finally coming. I never thought it would. But it has a date now – an actual date, not just a year – and the date is on the publishers website as well as on Amazon. The eighth Thursday Next book is coming in 2025. And so before I start my re-read of the series ahead of the publication of Dark Reading Matter – “the eighth and last” in the series, I thought I’d remind you about them so you can join in too.
Back when I last wrote about the series, it had been eight years since book seven – it’s now been 12 and I had been thinking it might never happen – especially given that we’ve had a sequel to Shades of Grey from Fforde before we got another Thursday Next. And as ever I wonder how quick I am to spot this (see also yesterday’s post about the next H M The Queen Investigates) but I’m pretty sure this is pretty recent – Fforde’s own website isn’t updated with the release dates as I write this…
And if you want an explanation of the series, he has a good one on there which explains the fact that it’s a world where the Crimean war never ended, where time travel is possible as is entering a book and removing characters from existence. If you like books and reading, this is the sci-fi-fantasy-crime mash up for you. Also, it has this quote from Terry Pratchett.
‘Ingenious – I’ll watch Jasper Fforde nervously’
Terry Pratchett
As well as the Thursday Next novels, Fforde’s nursery crime series are set in the same universe so if you want to be a completist you can read those too. I probably will. Now the only question left is whether a) the cover of book eight will match and b) will I be able to cope with a hardback among my set of paperbacks. Who. Can. Tell.
Now while I was writing yesterday’s Kindle offers post and discovering that there’s a Her Majesty the Queen investigates book on offer this month, I also discovered that there’s a fifth in the series coming! The Queen who came in from the Cold is out in the UK in hardback first (and Kindle) on Feb 6th. The blurb says the Queen is planning her trip to Italy on the Royal Yacht Britannia when someone claims to have seen a brutal murder on the Royal Train. The Queen and her private secretary get to work – and as the title suggests there are meant to be spies and Cold War skullduggery. I can’t wait!
I spotted this on Friday night and honestly I nearly screamed outloud with excitement:
I’ve been saying for ages that I would like another book in the Susan Ryland series and now my prayers have been answered. I’ve wondered as well how easy it would be to come up with another plot for this given that the author of the Atticus Pund series is dead, and in the second book Susan seemed to have unravelled as many secrets as had been hidden there, so I’m thrilled Horowitz has come up with something – and the blurb is intruiguing:
Susan Ryeland has had enough of murder.
She’s edited two novels about the famous detective, Atticus Pünd, and both times she’s come close to being killed. Now she’s back in England and she’s been persuaded to work on a third.
The new ‘continuation’ novel is by Eliot Crace, grandson of Miriam Crace who was the biggest selling children’s author in the world until her death exactly twenty years ago.
Eliot believes that Miriam was deliberately poisoned. And when he tells Susan that he has hidden the identity of Miriam’s killer inside his book, Susan knows she’s in trouble once again.
As Susan works on Pünd’s Last Case, a story set in an exotic villa in the South of France, she finds more and more parallels between the past and the present, the fictional and the real world – until suddenly she finds that she has become a target.
Someone in Eliot’s family doesn’t want the book to be written. And they will do anything to prevent it.
This is coming out at the end of March and I’ve no idea how recent this announcement actually is – I’ve checked the usual places and there was nothing, but I think it must be pretty recent because it’s the first time Amazon has suggested it to me and that algorithm knows I like Horowitz so suggests them to me on the regular, and of course it hasn’t got a cover yet. Anyway, I’m really excited about it – and in addition to that, the TV adaptation of The Moonflower Murders is hitting the screens in the US this weekend, so hopefully it’ll be here in the UK soon too.
So I missed this being announced about ten days ago – but we have a date and a cover for the next Emily Henrynovel. The blurb is out as well and has a heroine who is starting over after her fiancé realised he was actually in love with his childhood best friend and a hero who is the ex of that childhood best friend. They end up as roommates and decide to stage photos of themselves together for revenge on their mutual exes, just for show of course, definitely no real feelings involved…
Fake relationships are totally my cup of tea as you know, so this sounds delightful – if only I didn’t have to wait until April for it! But it is already pre-orderable on Kindle and Waterstones have a signed hardback edition up for preorder too.
Yes, it’s taken a bit longer than planned, but the Noirville winners have finally been announced. In case you missed my original post, I was super excited to be part of the competition amongst an illustrious group of judges.
You can read the winner’s list here – and I’m thrilled that pretty much all my favourites made the cut. The standard was incredibly high though and it was really, really hard to separate the stories. All the judging was done blind, so I was really excited to see who was behind the stories that I’d enjoyed reading so much. So today I’ve got a whole load of new people to add to my twitter watch list so that I can see what they’re going to write next.
It was such a great experience to have the chance to be a judge on this. It was also absolutely terrifying – definitely out of my comfort zone! The actual published book will be out in a couple of months and I can’t wait to see the finished book, and obviously hear what everyone else thinks about the collection.
Congratulations to all the winners – and commiserations to the people who missed out. Here’s to the first Noirville Short Story collection – may it be the first of many!
This is where my review of Laurie Graham’s latest book The Grand Duchess of Nowhere would usually be – but in exciting news, I’ve actually reviewed it over on the wonderful Novelicious. You can read my thoughts Ducky’s Adventures by clicking here.
And in case you’ve found your way over here after reading Novelicious and come to see what I write about – Hello! It’s lovely to see you. This blog started as a means of forcing me to take action against my burgeoning to-read pile and to try and control my book buying. It hasn’t entirely worked. You’ll find I post a weekly list of everything that I’ve read, a monthly update on the state of the pile and what I’ve bought and then other posts reviewing books that I’ve read, authors that I like and just general recommendations.
Please do go and read my review of The Grand Duchess – and then go and buy a copy. And if you’ve already read (and I hope loved) Ducky’s story, then go and fill in a gap in your Laurie Graham back catalogue. If you’re new to Ms Graham’s work, may I recommend Gone With the Windsors (my favourite) or At Sea or Mr Starlight. But really they’re all good.
Now seemed like a really good chance to mention a few books that I’m really excited to read over the next few months. And also if I tell you that I’m going to read them over the next few months, then I might actually manage to do it!
Firstly, out this week just finishing, Laurie Graham’s The Grand Duchess of Nowhere. I love Laurie Graham’s books – as I may have mentioned before, Gone with The Windsors is one of my all time favourites, so I’m always excited to read something new from her. Grand Duchess has just come out in hardback, so it may well go on my Christmas book list if I don’t manage to resist snapping it up before then!
Coming out in November is the latest book from Marian Keyes. I’m expecting The Woman Who Stole My Life to be one of the big books this Christmas and I’m excited to see what Marian has come up with this time. She’s one of my favourite authors on Twitter (so funny) and her books are always the right balance of funny, sad and thought provoking.
Also on my watchlist is Mhairi McFarlane’s It’s Not Me, It’s You – which is out the same day as the Marian Keyes. The blurb for this is totally up my street – a quest for the heroine’s real self with dodgy jobs, weird bosses and handsome journalists. Sounds perfect and I’m really looking forward to it.
Now there are a whole bunch of other books that are coming out soon that I’m hoping to read too – but they’re all themed around a major festival that happens in December and I refuse to start talking about that this early. Having worked in a shop through sixth form and university I have developed an aversion to the countdown to that particular event starting too early. But rest assured, I will be posting about books suitable for reading at that time of year in enough time for you to get them on your gift lists or to stock up for reading in front of roaring fires whilst you eat seasonally appropriate food stuffs. Just not in early October. I can’t do it.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 