We are in the sixth month of the year, so this month I have leant into the holiday books end of the kindle offers. I was going to say that for me holiday books are romantic fiction and light crime, but that’s a lot of what I read when I’m not on holiday too. But for the purpose of buying in advance, that’s what I’m after. I’ll do you a post in a few weeks of what I’m looking to buy at the airport this year, because those are slightly different things! Anyway, to the offers.
Last year’s Emily HenryFunny Story is 99p, as is this year’s Mhairi McPharlane Cover Story, which I haven’t read yet but which sounds a lot of fun (people who can’t stand each other forced to pretend they’re in a fake relationship to save an undercover investigation). Christina Laurens’ The Paradise Problem is also 99p – I loved this when I read it earlier this year. There’s also Victoria Hislop’s The Island, which I read years ago and enjoyed, and Sarah Adams’s When In Rome about a burnt out popstar in a small town, which was once of the first of the crop of Taylor Swift-inflected romances I read. And the new Rachel Lynn SolomonWhat Happens in Amsterdam is 99p too (I bought it while writing this!)
If you’re a bit higher brow than me for your sun lounger books, then Tracy Chevalier’s The Glass Maker is 99p – I have this waiting to be read on the Kindle but just haven’t got to it yet because I’m still in that world of wanting to know going in that I’m going to get a resolution, preferably happy at the end of books. If you want some Romantasy, then Stephanie Garber’s Once Upon a Broken Heart is 99p – this is the first in a completed trilogy so you can read straight through to the end if you like it or there is Rebecca Ross’s Divine Rivals, which is the first of two – and it should be noted that I haven’t read any of these!
Moving on to the regular author check in: we’re still in a world of the Georgette Heyer murder mysteries being the ones on offer – this time it’s Footsteps in the Dark, the Discworld offer this month is Equal Rites and Borrower of the Night, the first in Elizabeth Peters’s Vicky Bliss series is 99p too.
It’s the second Wednesday of the month and time for kindle offers again. And I have to say that it’s a really good crop this month with lots of books I’ve talked about on offer and a few things that I would like to read too.
Let’s start with an incredibly recent BotW which is 99p – Legends and Lattes. It feels like every month at the moment there is a great Christina Lauren on offer – this month it’s The Unhoneymooners which was a BotW back in 2019. There’s also an older Katie Fforde on offer – Restoring Grace – which features a house in need of restoration (which I love as a trope) and a pregnancy (which I don’t). Previous BotW Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis, Daisy Jones and the Six is back on offer – which reminds me that a) I still haven’t watched the TV series and b) it’s not long until Taylor Jenkins Reid‘s new novel is out (yes, I have it preordered).
There’s another very recent BotW which is on offer, but this time for £1.99 – it’s A Case of Mice and Murder. I cannot overstate how much I enjoyed this – and it’s sequel which isn’t out until July, but I have read already thanks to NetGalley. Former BotW The Potting Shed Murders is 99p ahead of the sequel coming out in July. Chris Brookmyre‘s The Cracked Mirror is also on offer.
Tales from The Folly aka the Rivers of London Short Story collection has a new (or at least tweaked) cover and is 99p – a reminder that with this one some of the stories had already appeared elsewhere and that also you need to have read the books for any of this to really make sense for you. Book six in the Brighton series was in the latest Books Incoming at the weekend but book one, The Zig Zag Girl is on offer – 99p or in Kindle Unlimited. Terry Pratchett’s A Hat Full of Sky is 99p and one of my all time favourites, Making Money is £1.99
In mystery books that I haven’t read (yet), Vera Wong’s Guide to Snooping and Georgette Heyer’s Duplicate Death is 99p and there’s also an Andrew Taylor book that’s not in his Restoration series, but set in the late eighteenth century – The Anatomy of Ghosts is set at a Cambridge College which is being haunted by a murdered woman. If you are an Alexander McCall Smith reader there are two on offer – The Enigma of the Garlic, which is the sixteenth 44 Scotland Street book and The Great Hippopotamus Hotel in the No 1 Ladies Detective Agency one.
In romance novels I haven’t read, Remember When, the latest Mary Balogh – number four in the Ravenwood series – is 99p, Harriet Evans’s The Wildflowers, which centres around the daughter of a pair of actors, likened to Burton and Taylor. I mentioned Maeve Binchy in a Recommendsday a month or so back and her Nights of Rain and Stars is on offer
And finally in non-fiction, Going Infinite was a BotW in the autumn and Michael Lewis’s original book Liar’s Poker – about Wall Street greed in the 1980s is 99p. Also about the 1980s, Going to War is about football fans in that decade – with tragedy, recession and hooliganism all making their mark on the game. There are a couple of royal-related books on offer – Valentine Lowe’s Courtiers about how the modern royal family operates and Nigel Cawthorne’s The War of the Windsors about the relationship between King Charles and Prince Andrew, while Robert Lacey’s The Battle of the Brothers isn’t on offer, but is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment.
I’ve been on a massive Elly Griffiths binge over the last month and a half so it would be remiss of me not to mention that her latest book The Frozen People is 99p at the moment. It only came out a the end of February and it is the first in a new series featuring cold cases and what the blurb would suggest is time travel – and so of course I bought it while writing this post! In other murder mysteries, former BotWThe Darkest Sin is 99p, as is the second Three DahliasA Very Lively Mystery, and the second in the Rivers of London series, Moon over Soho.
In Golden Age crime writers, Josephine Tey’s Brat Farrar is 99p, Georges Simenon’s The Hanging Man of Saint-Pholien. As a side note: more and more classic crime novels are now getting lots and lots of very cheap kindle editions, where it’s hard to know if they are any good or not. So it’s not exactly 99p, but all the “proper” Harper Collins kindle editions of the Miss Marple series are £2.99 at the moment. They’ve also got relatively new audiobook readings with narrators like Richard E Grant, Stephanie Cole and Emilia Fox, which are the ones that I’m listening too at the moment. And as E C R Lorac’s books perform well in their BLCC editions, there are more of her books popping up in other Kindle editions too – lots of which are 99p, although as ever I can’t vouch for the quality of all of them, although the ones that I have read have been ok.
In other authors I like, Anthony Horowitz’s With a Mind to a Kill, which is one of his James Bond novel is on offer for 99p, as is PG Woodhouse’s Summer Lightning which is one of the Blandings series,
I already mentioned on Friday that the Lady Julia Grey series are on offer – but it bears repeating. Going further back in history, there’s PD James’s Death Comes to Pemberley at £1.79, the seventh and it looks like final Shardlake mystery Tombland is back on offer at 99p as is Philippa Gregory‘s The Constant Princess about Catherine of Aragon ahead of another joining the series in the autumn (The Boleyn Traitor about Jane Boleyn).
There’s a bunch of TV-tie in, or TV related books on offer this month too. There’s Gill Hornby’s Miss Austen which has just been turned into a TV series, as well as the first Hawthorn and Horowitz The Word Is Murder, not long after the adaptation of Horowitz’s Moonflower Murders (and not long now before the third book in that series arrives). THere’s also Enola Holmes and there are a few Julia Quinns on offer, including the final Bridgerton book, Gregory’s story On the Way to the Wedding and Mr Cavendish, I Presume,
On the non-fiction front, there are actually quite a lot of celebrity memoirs on offer too – I haven’t read these, but they all had good reviews when they came out: Pamela Anderson’s Love, Pamela, Britney Spears’s The Woman in Me, Viola Davis’s Finding Me and Lauren Graham’s Have I Told You This Already. Not quite a celebrity in the traditional sense but Anne Glenconnor’s Lady in Waiting is on offer too as is Susannah Constantine’s Ready for Absolutely Nothing.
There are also some pretty good history books on offer, like Dan Jones’s The Hollow Crown, Lucy Worsley’s Queen Victoria, and although I haven’t read this one, the Elizabeth I book in the Penguin Monarchs series – these are really good short surveys of monarch’s lives written by notable historians, in the case of Elizabeth I it’s Helen Castor.
It’s the second Wednesday of the month, so it’s time for some more Kindle offers. And I’m not going to lie, given that it’s Valentine’s Day this month, I was expecting more romances on offer than I actually found. But hey, maybe this is counter programming?
There are a few intriguing looking new releases on offer – like Frances White’s Voyage of the Damned, which claims “if Agatha Christie wrote fantasy, this would be it” which is quite the claim and almost enough to get me to buy it without reading a sample for 99p. But not quite enough because I’m working on that impulse control, so I have the sample on the Kindle now.
If you want to start the Rivers of London series ahead of the next book this summer, the first book is 99p this month. There are a couple of Agatha Christies on offer too – Sparkling Cyanide and Nemesis. Also in old favourites there’s Memoirs of a Geisha, which I first read at uni and is way better than the movie of it is.
In stuff I have but haven’t read yet, there’s T J Klune’s retelling of Pinoccio In the Lives of Puppets and Stephanie Garber’s Caravel.
It’s January. It’s incredibly cold. So you should buy books. And there are some kindle bargains to help you with that!
Let’s start with two authors who I mentioned in my anticipated books post at the weekend. Firstly Taylor Jenkins Reid whose tennis comeback storyCarrie Soto is Back is 99p this month just in time for the Australian Open. Then there is Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five – also 99p and really worth reading – especially given how much it upset a lot of the so-called “Ripperologists”. If you’re interested in social history and the lives that women lead in the past (and that don’t often get covered) you will find it really interesting, even if (like me) you don’t usually do Jack the Ripper content.
We’re under a week away from another Presidential inauguration (and we just had the funeral of another former president), and Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife is on offer – this is her book that’s inspired by Laura Bush. I like it (but not as much as I like Romantic Comedy) and I am looking forward to her collection of short stories that is coming out next month.Ready Player One is back on offer – I like the book way more than the film, and I say that as someone who likes the film, although I still haven’t managed to bring myself to read the sequel.
On the non-fiction front, there is Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking – which I actually listened to on audiobook (read by Carrie herself) a few years ago (while painting the spare room at the old house), but as a tale of growing up in Hollywood it’s incredible – and really funny and well written: after all Fisher was a script doctor who punched up the scripts of movies including favourites of mine like Sister Act and The Wedding Singer. On the history front, we have Alison Weir’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII which is a good starting point if you’re interested in the wives and want to know more. Also in the historical overview section of reading is Ian Mortimer’s The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England, which is some of the most fun you can have reading about an era where the Plague could get you if the dysentery didn’t and if a woman made it to my age she was doing well. Talking about fun historical reads: Greg Jenner‘s Ask a Historian is also on offer, I’m guessing because there’s about to be a new series of You’re Dead To Me.
Excellent news on the Terry Pratchett front: Men at Arms is £1.99 this month. It’s the second in the Watch sequence, but it’s still early enough in the series that you can read it standalone without missing too many jokes. This one is playing with all the tropes about secret kings as well as a band of misfits finding home in the city police force. Also on offer is the graphic novel The Last Hero, which was a BotW a couple of years ago. This month’s Georgette Heyer is Black Sheep, there are Agatha Raisins and Hamish MacBeth’s on offer in the form of Down the Hatch and Death of a Spy. Josephine Tey’s The Man in the Queue which is the first in the Alan Grant series is 99p
In stuff I have waiting on the tbr pile (virtual or otherwise) that is on offer, we have Beth O’Leary’s The Road Trip (now in a tie-in edition because of the Paramount+ adaptation), Frank and Red by Matt Coyne, which is about an unlikely friendship between a curmudgeonly old man and the six year old who moves in next door to him. The Socialites was my Amazon Prime reads pick last month – and is now out and 99p. It says it’s for fans of Taylor Jenkins Reid (tick), Katherine Tessaro (tick) and Fiona Davis (tick) and follows three girls from their convent school in the 1920s to their lives as actresses and writers and similar. This definitely falls into the fictionalised real people area of my reading wheelhouse.
And finally, in other stuff worth mentioning, Elusive, the second in Genevieve Cogman’s French Revolution series is on offer, ahead of the release of the third in the series later this year.
Also with a few on sale, it’s the new adaptations. Anthony Horowitz‘s Moonflower Murders is 99p – the TV version is on at the moment (as well as a new one coming next year) and Frederick Forsythe’s Day of the Jackal is on offer too as the new Eddie Redmayne series is going out on Sky at the moment too. I’m still not over the 1970s movie version, and I’m not sure I can bring myself to read the book.
And finally I don’t often recommend coookery books in ebook form but Diana Henry’s From the Oven to the Tableis one of my favourites and has some really excellent recipes for chicken thighs.
It’s the second Wednesday in November, so I’m back with another round of Kindle offers, and as we’re coming up to Christmas it’s a real bumper month – with relatively recent releases as well as Christmas themed reading. So lets get down to it…
Lets start with recent BotW The Darkest Sin by D V Bishop from his Cesare Aldo series. Also in historical mystery, the fourth in C J Sansom’s Shardlake series, Revelation is 99p – this is the next one I need to read in the series so I bought it, because it’s a total bargain for 600+ pages and it’s easier to read on Kindle when they’re that big! Just a mystery, not a historical mystery is C L Miller‘s The Antique Hunter’s Guide to Murder, as is the second Canon Clement, A Death in the Parish. More expensive, at £2.89 is last year’s Josephine Tey Mystery by Nicola Upson – the Daphne Du Maurier-y Shot with Crimson.
The 99p Georgette Heyer is A Civil Contract, which is possibly my least favourite of her Regency novels, but your mileage may vary. The Terry Pratchett is Thud at £1.99 which is one of the Watch stories – but is particularly Sam Vimes focused. On the classic front Carry on, Jeeves is 99p and Hercule Poirot’s Christmas is 99p and in KU as well if you’re in that.
On the non-fiction front, there’s another recent BotWThe Formula and also Laurence Leamer‘s Capote’s Women. And finally in things I haven’t read – there’s Rachel Lacey’s Stars Collide – and age gap romance with two pop stars at different points in their careers find they have more in common than music after they perform together 99p – also in KU – andCasey McQuiston, of Red, White and Royal Blue fame’s latest novel The Pairing is 99p
That your lot – Happy Reading and try not to spend too much…
Oh it’s such a good month for offers. Honestly, I would say this post was expensive to write, except for the fact that everything was on offer so it was more quantity rather than cost… Anyway – to the books.
Lets start with the Halloween related special offers. Recent release Haunted Ever After by Jen DeLuca is 99p (which was one of my purchases!), as is Ali Hazelwood’s The Bride. There’s an Agatha Christie short short story collection called Autumn Chills as well as the Poirot mystery Hallowe’en Party and Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
I re-read Nora Ephron‘s Heartburn the other week, and her memoir of sorts I Feel Bad About My Neck is on offer this month – I read it years ago and enjoyed it. Also on offer that I read years ago is Anthony Quinn’s Curtain Call – which apparently is the basis for the new Ian McKellan movie The Critic – which I would never have guessed from the trailer!
Also in adaptations but this time in things I haven’t read is Firebrand by Elizabeth Freemantle, which was previously called Queen’s Gambit and was presumably retitled because of the Chess book and movie and is actually about Catherine Parr. Also in books I haven’t read there’s The Art of Catching Feelings by Alicia Thompson is also 99p – I’ve got her Love in the Time of Serial Killers on the Kindle and I really need to read that and see if I like it before I buy anything else of hers. In things I haven’t read and probably aren’t my thing, but that I know are really popular, there’s R F Kuang’s Babel for 99p, the latest Nora Roberts romantic suspense Mind Games, Alix E Harrow’s Starling House, Coleen Hoover’s Reminders of Him and Maybe Not, Sarah Adams’s The Match
There’s also a pretty good selection of translated fiction on offer this month like Before the Coffee Gets Cold, Dallergut Dream Department Store and Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, some of which I’ve read, others that I haven’t. And there’s Katherine Heiny‘s Games and Rituals on offer too and Brit Bennett‘s The Mothers, as well as Tales of the City which is the first in Armistad Maupin‘s series that I have written about more than once. The discounted Terry Pratchetts this month are Wee Free Men at 99p and Witches Abroad for £1.99 and the Georgette Heyers are Devil’s Cub, Infamous Army, Beauvallet and Pistols for Two which are all £1.99 so will probably come around cheaper at some point if you’re not in a rush. With the Heyers and the Peter Wimseys (although there aren’t any Wimseys on a good deal this month), there are more and more going out of copyright and so very cheap editions continue to pop up, but I have no idea how good a quality product they are – my history with them is that they can be not great at all.
In things I bought, there’s D is for Death by Harriet F Townson, which is the crime pen name of Harriet Evans, the Jen De Luca that I already mentioned (and started) and got samples of The Golden Spoon and a few others.
Back once again to tempt you into opening your wallet/breaking your book purchasing rules, here I am with the Kindle post. t’s actually a really good month for offers – and given the positive orgy of book acquisition I’ve been on over the last few weeks, the very act of writing this was a little bit risky. How much more will I have spent by the end of this post? Who can tell, and you’ll have to read to the end to see if I’m prepared to admit to it…
Lets start with a book whose sample I loved so much that I bought the paperback straightaway – because the kindle edition was too expensive – because now that Kindle version is only 99p! Yes Summer Fridays is on offer, and it’s really good – although read my review for the caveats about why some romance readers may have an issue with it. Also a bargain and really good is last year’s Christina LaurenThe True Love Experiment. I really enjoyed Kirsty Greenwood‘s The Love of My Afterlife when it came out a few months back, and it’s got loads of buzz and great reviews too – so it’s a total bargain for 99p at the moment. More expensive at £2.29 but worth mentioning because it’s also in Kindle Unlimited now is Annabel Monaghan’s latest book Summer Romance which was BotW just a couple of months ago. A little bit older, but still a BotW is Rachel Lynn Solomon’s Business or Pleasure.
Emily Henry’s Book Lovers, is 99p, as is one of the earlier Katie Ffordes Life Skills, which is one of her books that features canal boats (yes there are more than one of them). The fourth in Jenny Colgan’s Little Beach Street Bakery series Sunrise by the Sea is 99p at the moment. I’ve only read the first in the Lovelight Farms series, but I keep seeing them everywhere in the bookshops, so it’s only fair to mention that the final instalment Business Casual is 99p at the moment.
I’m a big fan of Curtis Sittenfeld as regular readers will know, and Rodham, her alternative story of what might have happened to Hillary if she hadn’t married Bill Clinton is 99p at the moment. I really like Barbara Pym and should probably mention her more often, so you should definitely take a look at Jane and Prudence which is 99p at the moment if you’re interested in witty British authors from the mid-twentieth century. Also in this category is Elizabeth Taylor – I bought one of hers that I haven’t read (yet) in Paris, but one of my favourites of hers is Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont – I have a lovely Virago Designer hardback copy, but you don’t have to have such a pretty one when the ebook is 99p! Another book that I should probably have mentioned more, and which has a spot on the downstairs bookshelf is Mary McCartney’s The Group – if you haven’t read her novel about a group of young female Vassar graduates in the 1920s, where have you been?
I’m slowly working my way through the Matthew Shardlake books when I get a chance, and the second one of them, Dark Fire is £1.49 at the moment. I’ve got the TV adaptation on my list of things to watch next time I get a Disney+ subscription (which may be sooner rather than later given the arrival of the latest series of Only Murders in the Building). Also in historical mysteries is Umberto Eco’s In The Name of the Rose which I have recommended more thanonce and is really worth reading – there’s also a recent TV adaptation of it to add to the movie (which has Sean Connery!).
This month’s Discworld is Jingo at £1.99 – it’s the fourth in the City Watch sub-series, and it’s a good one, as a new island appears in the sea between Ankh Morpork and Klatch and causes no end of trouble. The Georgette Heyer is The Nonesuch, which I actually listened to (again) last week on Kindle and always think is underrated. Summer Lightning, which is one of my favourite of P G Wodehouse’s Blandings series is on offer too
Frank and Red by Matt Coyne is on my Kindle waiting to be read, but it’s also 99p at the moment. And I read a lot of Jenn McKinlay’s cozy mysteries but her latest non-cosy Love at First Book is 99p at the moment. On the non-fiction front, still on the pile after I bought an airport paperback copy when we went on holiday but now out in actual paperback and on offer for £1.99 is David Mitchell’s Unruly.
What did I buy while writing this? Well Patrick Stewart’s memoir Making It So, Hema Sukumar’s Minor Disturbances at Grand Life Apartments which I’ve had my eye on for a while and is finally on offer and Nisha Sharma’s Marriage & Masti which is the third book in her series which started with Dating Dr Dil and is a Twelfth Night* retelling.
And that is surely enough books to tempt anyone – I hope you’re not leaving me to spend alone…
Happy Humpday everyone!
*my favourite Shakespeare play, forever and always.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 