Category: books

books

Book of the Week: The Rest of Our Lives

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Pinch, punch, first day of the month etc to you all – and watch out for April Fool’s jokes today. I used to enjoy going through the newspapers on April first to try and spot the joke stories and adverts. I have a long ago memory of one for a car company (BMW I think) boasting about a new feature on their cars that would turn the oven on from the car to help you with the dinner prep when you got home. I remember how outlandish it seemed at the time – and now here we are in the smart home era with devices of all sorts controllable from your phone – should you want to. Anyway, to today’s book…

The Rest of Our Lives on a book display in Foyles

The Rest of Our Lives follows Tom, who drives his 18-year-old daughter to college in Pittsburgh – and then keeps driving. Various aspects of his life are not going to plan and he drifts himself into a road trip to try and escape. Years earlier when his wife had an affair, Tom had decided that when their youngest child left for college he would leave the marriage – and that moment has now arrived. But it’s also arrived at a moment when he’s just been suspended from his job after his students complained about the politics of his law class, and he’s got a health issue that he’s busy ignoring but from the descriptions you get of it, he really shouldn’t be.

I really wasn’t sure what to expect from this from the blurb – it could have been a Rich People Problems novel but it’s actually more of a mid life crisis novel. Tom’s in denial about his health, doesn’t want to tell his wife about his work situation or to deal with the underlying issue in their relationship so he finds an excuse to up and run. He doesn’t seem to have anyone in his life that he can talk to properly about things, so you see him find excuses for what he’s doing to the people he meets – right up until the point that he can’t any more. It’s not a long book, but it’s got a lot going on and leaves you with some things to think about as it deals with male loneliness, morality and mortality. It doesn’t have the level of resolution that I get from my regular reads of mystery and romance – but I enjoyed it never the less and it’s a thought provoking read that I think would work really well for book clubs and people who like to read book-club type books.

The Rest of Our Lives came out last week. My copy came via NetGalley, but as you can see I’ve already seen it in the shops, so you should be able to get hold of it ok. And of course it’s also in Kindle and Kobo for £3.99 at time of posting, which is pretty good for a new release hardback.

Happy reading!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: March 24 – March 30

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A somewhat steady week in books because it was an incredibly busy week in reality life – I went to a concert on Monday night, my sister came to visit, I had two leaving dos to go to, we went to see Dr. Strangelove and then went to see Him Indoors’ family for Mother’s Day. And when I write it all out like that it’s suddenly not a surprise that the list is a little shorter than usual. And it’s nearly the end of March and I have no idea what’s going to go in the quick reviews on account of the fact that a good proportion of the books I’ve read this month have been Ruth Galloway ones. And I’ve got tickets to a show tonight so not a huge amount of time to finish anything else…

Read:

The Moving Finger by Agatha Christie

The Dark Angel by Elly Griffiths

The Lantern Men by Elly Griffiths

The Rest of Our Lives by Benjamin Markovitz*

Ring Leader by Patti Benning

Steak It or Leave It by Patti Benning

Started:

The Night Hawks by Elly Griffiths

Gemma by Noel Streatfeild

Still reading:

The Oscar Wars by Michael Schulman

Abdication by Juliet Nicolson

Cher: The Memoir Part One by Cher

No books bought, mostly because I bought all the rest of the Ruth Galloway’s last week…

Bonus picture: definitely springtime in the village this week. And yes that is the sun, it’s not coming from the street light.

*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.

Book News, Book previews, book round-ups, books

Anticipated Books 2025: Update

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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!

Have a great Saturday everyone!

books

Bonus review: The Favourites

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The final event of the figure skating season is taking place as this publishes. The best skaters in the world at the moment are in Boston in the US to compete for the world title. Today (Thursday) sees the Men’s short programme and the medals being decided in the Pairs, which is not to be confused with Ice Dance which is the subject of today’s bonus review – of Layne Fargo’s The Favourites. I started reading this with a plan to possibly write about it to coincide with the European Championships at the end of January – but then the American Eagle crash happened in Washington DC, which killed a number of skaters – including former world champions and aspiring juniors and I didn’t feel reading a fun skating novel for a few weeks. But it is really good, and it does deserve a mention here, so I’ve found a chance to do it after all.

Katarina Shaw wants to be an Olympic skater and when she meets Heath Rocha, a lonely teenager stuck in the foster care system, the two of them become an ice dancing partnership – and a real life partnership. They don’t have money, they don’t have the best equipment or the best coaches, but they’re determined to make it to the top and they do right until they don’t. The framing device for this book is that it’s the tenth anniversary of their final skate at the Olympics when it all fell apart – and there’s an unauthorised documentary being made about them. This means that you follow their story from their initial meeting all the way to the Olympic games, inter cut with interviews from other people who were there – their rivals, the judges, the journalists.

Now I watch a *lot* of figure skating, and although I’m not a skater, I know a fair amount about how the sport works and the politics of it all. And my experience of fiction featuring skating has been a bit mixed – but I couldn’t resist this because it was getting comparisons to Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones and the Six, which as you know I really, really loved. So I took a chance. And it’s really good. Everything is turned up to eleven, but apart from all the (on ice) partner swapping, the skating details felt pretty flawless and Fargo has done a really good job of creating an alternative universe of the early 2000s Olympic cycles.

It’s also a real page turner, which doesn’t require you to know about figure skating to enjoy it – it will create the world for you. But if you are into skating, the areas of the sport where Fargo has taken liberties and made changes have been picked really well (and are often areas that fans of the sport complain about). And like another TJR novel The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, you can also have fun spotting which real life incidents and characters she has been inspired by when creating the storyline. I wouldn’t say that all the characters are tremendously deep or well developed, but there’s so much plot and it moves so fast that you don’t really notice until you’re looking back at the end.

My copy of The Favourites came from NetGalley, but it’s had a big, buzzy release and I’ve seen it in a whole load of bookshops over the last month and a half since it came out. And of course it’s on Kindle and Kobo too at a pretty good price (for a hardback release anyway) of £3.99.

books, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Spring-time books

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It’s daylight during my train ride to work at the moment (until the clocks change at the weekend, but lets gloss over that) and the weather is improving (mostly) so today I’ve got some spring-like books for you.

Obviously lets start with Elizabeth von Arnim’s Enchanted April. I’ve written a whole post about it already and I really do love it. I actually (finally) have the movie version to watch on the Tivo (it was shown on BBC Four a few weeks back) and I have been saving it until it started to feel spring-y. Which is maybe this weekend?

I did a whole post of books about fresh starts last year, but the other sort of book that I like to read at this time of year are coming of age or people discovering themselves type novels so books like Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle or Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm or even Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love.

It’s also a great time to read soothing books set in the countryside – often the sort of books where not a lot happens – like Diary of a Provincial Lady or some of the early Angela Thirkell Barsetshire novels.

And of course there are plenty of boarding school books set in the spring term – I honestly thought I had a list somewhere of which Chalet School books where set in which terms, but I cannot find it anywhere. This is very annoying to me. And I don’t have my actual collection to hand right now so I can’t even pick one and be sure-sure because the internet is not helpful for this. Urgh. Shall I just punt at Chalet Girls in Camp because by the nature of camping in Austria (in 1930) it has to have been Easter or later? Well I’ve done it now haven’t I?! It should at least be marginally easier to get hold of than Juliet Overseas because it was reprinted a lot more times. I’ve got at least two copies myself…

Happy Humpday!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: March 17 – March 23

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Another good week – nice books and good entertainment when I wasn’t reading with a theatre trip, Formula One on the TV (albeit still in a somewhat antisocial timezone) and a bit of a day out on Sunday too. And it’s starting to feel like spring. The temperatures have improved and it’s light when I catch the train to work now. Of course the clocks haven’t changed yet, so I’m about to be plunged back into darkness but I’ll enjoy a few days of being able to see the alpacas in the field when I go passed them while I can – it’s been a long old winter.

Read:

Hand in Glove by Ngaio Marsh

The Woman in Blue by Elly Griffiths

Dead Water by Ngaio Marsh

The Chalk Pit by Elly Griffiths

Ruth’s First Christmas Tree by Elly Griffiths

Murder Below Deck by Orlando Murrin*

Juliet Overseas by Clare Mallory

To Catch a Raven by Beverly Jenkins

Started:

The Oscar Wars by Michael Schulman

Still reading:

The Rest of Our Lives by Benjamin Markovitz*

Abdication by Juliet Nicolson

Cher: The Memoir Part One by Cher

Ummmmm. A few. Because y’know I’m reading the Elly Griffiths back to back and acquiring the next one(s) in the series as I go…

Bonus picture: Kirby Hall this weekend, where we went out to get some culture

Hilariously, the secondhand book sale selection had one of the Puffin Island books in it – the first time I’ve seen any of them in person for ages. It’s like I willed it into being by writing about them on Friday!

*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.

books

Book of the Week: My Big Fat Fake Marriage

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This was the preorder that arrived last week and is the follow up to When Grumpy Met Sunshine which was a BotW this time last year. And given the Elly Griffiths binge and my rules about repeating authors and later books in series, it was the obvious choice for today’s post.

Connie’s experience of men and relationships is… not good. They always turn out to have some horrible secret or nasty personality flaw. So she’s pretty sure her new neighbour must be hiding something really terrible behind his cheery façade and bow tie. Beck is an editor at a publishing company – and is just as sunny as he seems, except that he’s been single his whole life but told his co-workers he’s married and maintaining the lie is ruining his life. Before she knows what she’s doing, Connie’s stood up for him in front of a co-worker, and now she’s his wife. And they’ve got to keep the pretence going at a two week writers retreat…

Grumpy-Sunshine romances and cinnamon roll heroes have been a massive trend over the last few years, and I think Beck in this is possibly the biggest sweetest least unproblematic hero I have read in a long time. In fact he’s so nice and sweet that it was a bit much for me at times, especially when paired with Connie’s total cynicism about relationships and men, which is never properly explained in any detail. That said, I did really enjoy lots of this, although I wanted more comeuppance for Beck’s terrible coworker, and the fact that I read this in less than 24 hours (and on the first weekend of the new F1 season) says a lot about how readable this is, even if I didn’t like it as much as I liked When Grumpy Met Sunshine.

This came out last week – I had the paperback pre-ordered but it’s also in Kindle and Kobo.

Happy Reading

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: March 10 – March 16

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Well I can confirm that I am in a full on binge of the Ruth Galloway series. I read three this week, but I also spent a couple of hours tramping around central London after work one day looking for the next in the series at a sensible price (new and secondhand shops, from Charing Cross Road to St Pancras. It was good exercise and in one shop another customer liked my bag (from Strand Books in New York) so much he asked if he could take a picture of it. So that was fun. Anyway, we’re halfway through March, I’m not halfway through my NetGalley books for the month, and I’m acquiring books at a rate of knots. But I’m having fun doing it and I did make some more progress on Cher’s memoir, so I’m not too cross at myself.

Read:

Singing in the Shrouds by Ngaio Marsh

A Dying Fall by Elly Griffiths

False Scent by Ngaio Marsh

The Outcast Dead by Elly Griffiths

The Ghost Fields by Elly Griffiths

My Big Fat Fake Marriage by Charlotte Stein

The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie

Started:

To Catch a Raven by Beverly Jenkins

The Rest of Our Lives by Benjamin Markovitz*

Still reading:

Murder Below Deck by Orlando Murrin*

Abdication by Juliet Nicolson

Cher: The Memoir Part One by Cher

Well as you could tell from Books Incoming, quite a few. That is to say four paperbacks bought and a pre-order arrived plus one ebook and another book preordered.

Bonus picture: the rather delightful wool display system in a haberdashers store in Soho.

*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: March 3 – March 9

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Another busy week in life and reading – complete with a migraine in the middle to add to the mix. Anyway, a good proportion of actual books, even if some of them were new purchases rather than from the shelf. And I did get another one off the long running list. Yay me.

Read:

Off With His Head by Ngaio Marsh

The Ten Teacups by Carter Dickson

Death at the Bar by Ngaio Marsh

The House at Sea’s End by Elly Griffiths

Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld

A Room Full of Bones by Elly Griffiths

A Traveller in Time by Alison Utley

Started:

Murder Below Deck by Orlando Murrin*

Still reading:

Abdication by Juliet Nicolson

Cher: The Memoir Part One by Cher

Ummmm. Quite a few books acquired. And it’s not just the Kindle offers post that’s responsible – there were also a couple of actual books…

Bonus picture: out by the canal in the lovely spring weather at the weekend

*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: February 24 – March 2

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A really, really busy week. They just are some times aren’t they? But it was fun, and I did things in real life and things just seem to all come at once sometimes don’t they? Anyway, it’s March now, and I have a quieter week planned this week – at least I have less things booked into this week than I did last week…

Read:

Opening Night by Ngaio Marsh

The Tube Train Murder by Hugh Morrison

Scales of Justice by Ngaio Marsh

Shocked in Chicago by Patti Benning

Book Boyfriend by Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka*

The Janus Stone by Elly Griffiths

Started:

Abdication by Juliet Nicolson

Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld

The Ten Teacups by Carter Dickson

Still reading:

A Traveller in Time by Alison Utley

Cher: The Memoir Part One by Cher

One – the new Curtis Sittenfeld because Foyles had signed copies which wer just sitting there staring at me in Foyles, two days ahead of release day – so I cancelled my Amazon pre-order and went with it!

Bonus picture: Another night out at Late Night West End – this time it was Shanay Holmes (current Nancy in Oliver) speaking to John Robyns.

*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.