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.
There’s clearly something in the water with books set on islands this year. After Sarah MacLean’s book set on a private island, Beatriz Williams’s latest is back on Winthrop Island, which featured in The Beach at Summerley a couple of year ago. This is another time slip novel with one strand set in 1846 and the other set in what sounds like the present day. There is a cache of paintings, a movie star, a chef and a steam ship disaster across the two threads and it sounds great. I continue to be really annoyed that Williams most recent novels haven’t been getting kindle releases over here – I’m now about three books behind because they just don’t seem to turn up in the shops and there’s no kindle option. All of which is annoying because I really like her writing.
After writing about the Secret Bookshop series, I wanted to mention that Ellie Alexander has a new book out this week and it’s a rerelease of the first in earlier series of hers. It’s called A Murder on the Mountain and the premise is that a new reporter for an outdoors magazine who witnesses a murder while on an assignment covering an adventure race. It’s in Kindle Unlimited so I’ll give it a go at some point and try and remember to report back!
The first book featuring Sally Smith’s barrister and (very) reluctant detective Gabriel Ward was a BotW back in April and as the sequel is out today and I read it as soon as I could after finishing that first one, today I have a bonus review of it for you.
We rejoin Gabriel in the run up to Christmas 1901 where he is about to tackle a difficult libel case, representing an actress who says that a tabloid has impugned her reputation. But then a mummified hand is delivered to the Temple’s treasurer and Gabriel is once again pressed into service to try and find out what is happening without inviting the police into the Inner Temple. And as more body parts arrive – including one with a fatal consequence – it becomes clear that someone has got a grudge against the Inner Temple itself.
Sally Smith has come up with another twisty and intriguing mystery and has also continued to build out the world that she created in the first book. Gabriel’s world and circle continues to expand, and his cloistered and sheltered life is a great device to enable her to explain the background to things and the rules of the world without it feeling like an info dump. And Gabriel’s growing friendship with Constable Wright makes for a great unlikely duo who actually compliment each other really well.
I would have read another one of these straight away had that been an option, so the sooner Sally Smith can write a third one the better – and hopefully enough people will buy this to get in on our shelves this time next year. My copy came from NetGalley, but my paperback copy of the first book came from a bookshop so I’m hoping this one will be findable in stores too. I’ll certainly be looking out for it. And of course it’s on Kindle and Kobo too.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 