Category: Book News

Book News

Book news: New Emily Henry

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So I missed this being announced about ten days ago – but we have a date and a cover for the next Emily Henry novel. 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.

Book News, Prize winners

Noirville winners!

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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.

Fahrenheit Noirville: short stories from the dark side banner picture.

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!

 

Authors I love, Book News, books, reviews

The Grand Duchess of Nowhere

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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.

Book News, books

Upcoming Excitement

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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.

 

Award nominated, Book News, books

The Man Booker Longlist

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You’ll remember a few weeks back I spoke about my poor record with Booker-nominated books and their authors and my pledge to do better. Since then I’ve read one of the Muriel Spark’s from my backlog and then got distracted by upcoming new releases and #Sunathon.  Well today the Booker Longlist is out and I thought I’d check whether this year’s nominees increase my hit rate!

As five of the list haven’t been published yet, I think I can be forgiven for not having read them, and there’s one book on here that I actually already had on my to read list (but not the pile!) and that is We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler, who is one of three authors on the list who I’ve read books by.  And I need all of those three (the others are Siri Hustvedt and David Nicholls) to make the shortlist because it would really improve my record, with no extra effort from me.  Of the other authors, I’ve got an Ali Smith waiting to be read – and I really should read some David Mitchell.  As for the rest, I need to go away and read about them and read some reviews and decide which I might want to read and then wait for the Kindle discounts to come around!

The Longlist in full:

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour  by Joshua Ferris

The Narrow Road to the Deep North  by Richard Flanagan

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt

J  by Howard Jacobson

The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth

The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee

Us by David Nicholls

The Dog by Joseph O’Neill

Orfeo  by Richard Powers

How to be Both  by Ali Smith

History of the Rain by Niall Williams