I’m a big fan of Sherry Thomas’s Lady Sherlock series, so it would be remiss of me not to mention that Thomas has a new book out this week, even if it’s not another instalment in the adventures of Charlotte Holmes. The Librarians is a neither historical nor a romance – per the cover it’s “A Novel”. Those words can sometimes strike terror into my heart when it’s an author that I’ve enjoyed in other genres, but the blurb is promising. It’s set in Austen, Texas with four librarians whose secrets are threat to come out into the open when two bodies are found in the library after a murder mystery themed games night. This one looks like it’s only out in hardback in the UK, no Kindle version, so I may have to wait a while to read it, but I will be keeping my eyes peeled for it in the shops.
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).
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.
The sequel to Haunted Ever After is out today in the UK, (and came out on Tuesday in the US). Ghost Business features Sophie, who runs the ghost tour we came across in book one (if you’ve read it) who is faced with a new rival, Tristan, who works for a company who runs ghost tours across a bunch of cities. After a row between the two of them goes viral, they agree that whoever is the most successful at the end of the summer gets to stay…
I loved the first book and I’m looking forward to reading this one, albeit not as excited as I am about Jen DeLuca’s next book which is another in the Renn Faire series!
So I said yesterday I don’t know what I was going to do for BotW today, and I kept thinking about it and I still didn’t and I couldn’t come up with any enthusiasm for any of the new things I read last week so I decided to do something different because…
The Autumn new book deluge has really started now because today we had the arrival of the new Dan Brown book, the sixth in the Robert Langdon series. It’s been eight years since the last installment in the series, Origin, and I’m sure there were other people who, like me, thought that that might be it for the series. But no, he’s back and I think this may be the biggest print run of the books out this autumn – the announcement doesn’t say how big it is, but it’s a simultaneous release in 17 territories and the man has 250 million books in print. That is a lot of books.
I’ve read the first two Langtons, back at the original height of Da Vinci Code Mania 20 years ago and I also read his standalone Digital Fortress at around the same time. When the third book came out I had a go at it and then gave up on it and haven’t gone back. When I was reading the first two back I was in France and was borrowing any English books I could get my hands on and I don’t think I had the same motivation for them once I was back in the UK with free reign on anything I wanted to read. But there’s no doubt that he’s one of the authors who will shift big units – they’re the sort of books that people who don’t read many books per year will pick up at the airport. And I don’t say that as a derogatory thing – I do exactly the same with Richard Osman. And his new book is out in a few weeks too…
It’s nearly the weekend everyone, and it’s almost the end of August and more new books are starting to appear again. There are loads out this week but the ones I’m most interested in (I think) are two Agatha Christie adjacent novels.
Let’s start with Amanda Chapman’s Mrs Christie at the Guild Library because it’s a debut. The blurb promises an old money New York book conservator, a woman claiming to be Agatha Christie and the suspicious death of a talent agent. It also mentions a snarky librarian, a child computer prodigy and a badly dressed police detective and has a beautiful cover so it’s going on my list to read the sample for and see if it can go on the long list for the Christmas book options!
And the second is Sulari Gentill’s Five Found Dead. This is set on the Orient Express where a crime fiction writer and his twin sister are taking a trip as a reward after he’s finished medical treatment. But then they wake up to a bloody crime scene in the cabin next door, but no body and so of course they start investigating. And then a steward is murdered. I’ve read a couple in Gentill’s Roland Sinclair historical mystery series but has now branched out into standalone mysteries that seem to be more towards the thriller end of the genre (although not so thriller that they made it onto the thriller section of the new books list that I look at!) and so may possibly be too scary for me – but I will be checking it out if I spot it in the shops!
Back in February, The Fan Who Knew Too Much was a Book of the Week, so I wanted to mention that the sequel, Lies and Dolls, came out on Tuesday. The blurb for this promises Kit and Binfire en route to Lincolnshire to see undiscovered tapes of Vixens of the Void and promises missing action figures that lead to murder. I thought the first one could have been a bit tighter, but that was possibly because it was doing the world building work – so I’m looking forward to seeing what Nev Fountain has got planned and how it’s all developed. As you can see, I had the paperback pre-ordered – but given the state of the pile at the moment, who knows how long it will take for me to get to it!
I know I often mention new Meg Langslows when they come out but I’m doing it again this week because Meg 37 has emerged into the world because it is another excellent pun for the title in For Duck’s Sake, but also because my paperback Megs recently returned to me. I lent them to a friend a few years back, but she died just over a year ago and a couple of weeks back her husband messaged me to say that he’d found my Megs and would I like them sending back along with a few others of hers that I had borrowed before. And the answer was of course I would, so a few weeks ago four boxes of books arrived – and inside were my Megs, all the Mitchell and Markbys that I had borrowed from her the first time I read them, and some bonus books. I miss my friend so much still – there’s rarely a day that goes by when I don’t see something and think either that I must message her and tell about it or wonder what she would think about it and so I’m happy to have the books on my shelves as a reminder of her.
Anyway, in For Duck’s Sake we have Meg supervising work going on at her brother’s new house garden when she discovers a skeleton. I haven’t read last year’s Christmas book yet and I am going to at least try and save that until the actual festive season so it may be a while until I get to this because I am strict with myself about reading these in order! And Donna Andrews is continuing her two a year schedule because we have number 38 coming in just two months time in October.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 