As you may have realised, May has been a really busy month – and I’ve already written about a lot of the new-to-me stuff that I’ve read this month, so only two books here this month in the quick reviews.
Lips Like Sugar by Jess K Hardy
This didn’t make it in to the Summer of Sequels post, because it actually came out in February and it just took me a while to get to it. Also it’s not really a sequel because it’s a romance series so it’s a fresh couple that are linked to the one in Come As You Are. Anyway, we’re back in the same town in Montana – but this time our heroine is Mira, bakery owner and mum to a teenage boy. Our hero is Cole, grunge-band-drummer turned music-studio-owner. It starts as a fake date to Madigan and Ashley’s wedding, but obviously it turns into something more. It’s lots of fun and really easy to read – and hopefully setting up for a third because there’s a big old loose end dangling I think – although it’s would be a bit of a pivot for the series.
Cut and Thirst by Margaret Atwood
Every now and again, Amazon pops up with a new short story from Margaret Atwood and I rush out to read it. I have a somewhat mixed record with her novels but I really like her short stories. This one is about three older women who are plotting to take revenge on the men who did one of their friends wrong years ago. It’s just dark, and funny and delightful. If you’ve got Kindle Unlimited, then this is really worth a read.
And that’s it – like I said, only two reviews this month but hey, what can I do. There have been some other great books in May that I’ve already written about – so if you’re not caught up on my reviews of Happy Medium, Mona of the Manor, You Should Be So Lucky and The Reunion, go check them out as well as my Recommendsday post about Books with Ghosts.
As if you didn’t know this was coming from my post on Thursday. I mean. Unless the sample was a total swizz this was odds on for the pick today. And here we are, and I feel fully justified in my decision to impulse purchase this in paperback after reading the aforementioned sample, which turns out to be up until page 47 of the paperback.
It’s the summer of 1999 and Sawyer is living in New York with her fiancé Charles. They’re getting married in the autumn and Sawyer is working in publishing, he’s got a job at a law firm – but he’s working ever longer hours, which he says is on a big case, but which Sawyer suspects may be linked to his co-worker Kendra. When Kendra’s boyfriend Nick reaches out to her about his suspicions, they meet up – and don’t get on. But when he finds her online to apologise, the two start to develop a friendship – as they spend their summer Friday afternoons together while their partners are working. They’re just friends – but what happens at the end of the summer.
I think this book is possibly one which should have “A Novel” on the front of it – because the signalling I get from the cover is that it’s a romance and I described it as such in my post on Thursday, but I think this is going to be a divisive one in terms of genre. And that’s because as you can tell from that plot write up, our central characters are in a relationship with other people at the start, and that is a state of affairs that does continue for a while (I can’t tell you more than that without spoilers) and that is going to violate some people’s no cheating rule. Now given that it is right there in the blurb that this is the case, you should be going in forewarned, but I’m mentioning it anyway.
For my part, I couldn’t put this down. I thought it was incredibly well written and really evoked a specific time period – pre-mobile phones, dial up internet – and place. I could have spent another 100 pages with Nick and Sawyer wandering around New York, and I thought the way that their relationship developed was nuanced and at times messy in a way that real life can be – especially when you’re in your early 20s and figuring yourself out but also have big life events hurtling towards you. I thought it was brilliant – and I hope Suzanne Rindell writes more in this sort of area, because I liked The Other Typist, but I loved this. And now I want to buy Three Martini Lunch and see where that fits into to the spectrum between the two!
Summer Fridays is out now. It’s 99p on Kindle today – which is a massive drop from when I read that sample on release day last week and I would absolutely have bought the ebook if it had been that at the time I read the sample – so this sounds like your sort of thing (and bearing in mind that warning) then it’s totally worth that. It’s £3.99 on Kobo and it’s also in paperback as you know. I couldn’t spot any physical copies in Foyles when I was in there yesterday, and Waterstones isn’t claiming ot have Click and collect copies, so you’re probably going to have to order it.
After last week’s post with the notable sequels this summer, it seems only fair to also do the other books I’m looking forward to this summer – or expecting to see all over the place – because it’s nearly June and a lot of them are about to appear.
Let’s start with Welcome to Glorious Tuga by Francesca Segal, which is out on June 6, has a tortoise on the cover and is about a zoologist who takes up a fellowship on a remote island ostensibly to study an endangered species, but actually also because she has a secret that connects her to the island. It has blurbs from Marian Keynes, Nick Hornby, Jessie Burton, Naomi Alderman and more so I feel confident in predicting you’ll be seeing this around a lot this summer.
Another book I’m confident to predict is going to be all over the place is the new novel from Kevin Kwan, the author of Crazy Rich Asians. Lies and Weddings follows a former model and future earl with a cash flow problem and on the hunt for a rich woman to seduce at his sister’s wedding to solve it. But nothing goes to plan and the write up promises money, murder, sex and lies in locations like Hawaii, Marrakesh and Beverley Hills. Expect to see this on a lot of sun loungers from late June.
Heading into July, I think Chris Brookmyre’s The Cracked Mirror might be the poolside book for the crime readers. The blurb promises a mashup of Agatha Christie and something more hard boiled as an elderly lady who solves murders in her village crossed paths with an LAPD homicide detective who will do whatever it takes to get to the truth. I’m interested to see this – although given my reading preferences I’ll need it to be closer to the Marple end of the gruesome scale!
In August we have a new Rainbow Rowell novel which is always exciting. Slow Dance is the story of star crossed best friends who everyone thinks should be together except each other. Emma Straub and Gabrielle Zevin have blurbed this one if that helps you figure out where we’re at – but it feels like it’s been a while since a proper Rowell adult novel so I’m excited.
And finally jumping back to the near future and something that I’ve already started, there’s a new novel coming from Kirsty Greenwood in late June. I used to review (occasionally) for Kirsty’s old site Novelicious in the early days of this blog, and she writes romantic novels that are also very funny. The Love of My Afterlife has a heroine who wakes up in the waiting room for the afterlife only to run into the most handsome man she’s ever met – and he seems to be into her. Then whoosh – he’s gone again and Delphie is offered a ten day return to earth to try and get him to fall in love with her and win a second chance at life. I’m about halfway through as I write this and it’s so much fun!
And that’s your lot – but I’m fairly confident that even if you don’t read them yourself, you’ll spot at least a couple of these four out in the wild over the next few months!
Something slightly different for this week’s recommendsday, because it’s a bit of a preview type thing. There are a lot of books coming out this summer that are sequels to books that I’ve really enjoyed, and per my rules, I probably won’t be able to review them, because: spoilers. So today I thought I’d flag them now – while I’m still excited about them and before any of them have the chance to disappoint me)!
First of all, and all ready in the shops, is Displeasure Island by Alice Bell, a follow up to last year’s Grave Expectations. I was hoping for a sequel to that – but for some reason this one had gone completely under my radar until I spotted it in the airport bookshop the other weekend! It came out at the start of May, and sees Claire and her friends off on holiday on a remote Irish island, where the hotel is double booked, there are fighting ghost pirates and – per the blurb – Claire is fighting off “anxious And Then There Were None vibes” even before a murder. This sounds like a lot of fun and I’m probably going to end up picking it up at some point.
Out yesterday in the US and who knows when in the UK is The Guncle Abroad, the sequel to Steven Rowley’s The Guncle, which I loved when I read it and started me off on buying all of Rowley’s books (except Lily and the Octopus because I think that’s going to be way too sad). The sequel finds us rejoining Patrick as he heads to a family wedding in Italy, in a very different place professionally from where he was at the start of the first book. He’s also nearly fifty, and out of favour with the kids, who a struggling to adapt to their new normal.
Next up, and out in a couple of weeks is How to Solve Murders Like a Lady by Hannah Dolby. This is a second book featuring Violet Hamilton, after last summer’s No Life for a Lady. This finds Violet hard at work as a lady detective, but when the body of a woman is found on the beach, her efforts to investigate are thwarted at every turn for some reason. The first in this series has been consistently in Kindle Unlimited for the last few months, so it may be that this one is too at some point in the near future.
And of course there are lots of longer running series that have fresh books out this summer, but I’m sticking to the actual sequels today, so that’s your lot.
When the month starts on a Wednesday it does mean the Kindle offer post comes around very quickly doesn’t it? Anyway, we did Quick Reviews last week, so it is time – and here are are this month’s offers. And it’s a real bumper month – so it’s been a lot of fun to pull it all together.
First of all, I mentionedTo Woo and to Wed when it came out back in February, I’ve got the paperback sitting on my shelf waiting for me, but the Kindle price has done a big old drop to 99p at the moment. Also 99p is Katherine Center’s The Bodyguard, which is one of the celebrity and normal person romances that seemed to be everywhere last year! Ali Hazelwood’s Love, Theoretically is also 99p this month – I’m a little bit over Giant Men and Tiny Women, but this does have a good grovel in it if you want one of those at the moment. Side note: We’re just over a month away from this year’s Ali Hazelwood contemporary romance, Not In Love, which is out in mid June. It’s only a week or two since my post about the Bright Falls series, so it’s a good time to mention that Astrid Parker Doesn’t Fail is 99p at the moment. Well Matched from the Willow Creek series is also on offer
I feel like I mention Curtis Sittenfeld’s Eligible every time it’s on offer, but I love it so much I’m not even sorry. I read The Other Side of Mrs Wood last year – if you like novels about mediums and spiritualism in the Victorian era, this might be 99p you want to spend. Also on the historical fiction front, there is Elizabeth Macneal’s Circus of Wonders, which was a Book of the Week back in 2021. Slightly more expensive, but there are quite a few of Susan Elizabeth Philips’s Chicago Stars series on offer at £1.99 at the moment – including the newest one Simply the Best which I really enjoyed.
On the mystery front, the second in Richard Coles’ Canon Clement series, A Death in the Parish is 99p, presumably because we’re less than a month out from the release of book three now. If you’re a Kindle Unlimited member, The Ashes of London and The Fire Court, the first two books in Andrew Taylor’s Marwood and Lovett series is in KU at the moment – I reviewed Ashes a year or two back.
On the non fiction front, The Radium Girls is 99p – it’s hard to read because of what happened to the women but it is a really interesting and readable book about a forgotten bit of history. Lucy Worsley’s Agatha Christie biography was in the Quick reviews last week and while that’s not on offer at the moment, a couple of her other books are 99p: Queen Victoria which I’ve mentioned before and A Very British Murder, which I haven’t read but I did watch the TV series that goes with it back when it came out. The Missing Cryptoqueen is 99p at the moment – I haven’t read the book but I’ve listened to the podcast series so if it’s anywhere near as good as that it’ll be a great read.
Last week we said goodbye to one of my aunties. She spent her whole life living on farms and in the countryside, so it got me thinking about books set in farms or in the countryside, so that’s what I’m theming today’s Recommendsday around.
Firstly I’m going to mention an Enid Blyton book, The Children of Willow Farm, because when I read this as a child, it was how I imagined life on the farm my aunties lived on was like when they were little. I’m going to admit I haven’t read it as an adult, and I know that a lot of people say Blyton doesn’t stand up when you go back to it as an adult, but I don’t care.
Also in the same sort of era in terms of when they were written are the James Heriot books – that’s spawned the tv series All Creatures Great and Small. I’ve read or listened to a few of them and they are a glimpse into a Yorkshire of times gone by. Do note if you’ve seen the most recent TV series that it’s based on the characters not the plots once you get past the first couple of seasons.
You could also have Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm from this era – I really loved it – and it’s got a great TV movie adaptation featuring young Rufus Sewell in it that’s just been repeated on BBC Four and should be on the iPlayer if you want a dose of Sexy Seth. Even older is Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, which has as its heroine a lady farmer. I read it back in my school days when I was assigned extra reading by by English teacher and I found it much less annoying than a lot of the rest of that list.
A few years before that particular bout of assigned reading I read Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford trilogy which are all about country life at the end of the nineteenth century – and set not that far away from where the actual bits of my family who were farmers really were.
If you want countryside-set murder mysteries, then I’ve written a whole post about the Lady Hardcastle series – and I think we’re due another one in the not too distant future too. If you want romance, there are a good few of the older Katie Fforde’s and Trisha Ashley’s set in various parts of the English countryside – Ashley is usually Lancashire and Fforde the Cotswolds.
And that’s all I’ve got. But I’ve enjoyed thinking about options for this and it made me smile too which I needed
It’s the second Wednesday of the month, and you know what that means, it’s time for me to tempt you to spend a whole bunch of money on cheap Kindle books!
In relatively recent picks, Come as You Are is 99p – this one was a BotW pick last year – and I think the price is down now because a second book in the series has just come out – and although that one is more expensive to buy Lips Like Sugar is also in Kindle Unlimited! Also 99p is Delilah Green Doesn’t Care, which is the first in Ashley Herring Blake’s Bright Falls series. As you know I’m currently reading the last one (when I can find the paperback, which I keep misplacing!) in this trio of romances featuring a friendship group in a small town. Alexandria Bellefleur also has a new book coming out this month and I think that’s why all three of her Written in the Stars series are £1.99 at the moment.
I’ve written whole posts about how much I love A J Pearce’s books about Emmy Lake, so it’s only right that I flag to you that the second in the trilogy (so far) Yours, Cheerfully is 99p this month – and the first one is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment as well. Double bonus. I read Alexander McCall Smith from time to time – and I think The 44 Scotland Street series is my favourite of his – and the first one of those is 99p at the moment. He’s definitely an author to read in order and if you binge too many in a row (like MC Beaton) you may notice patterns and trends and enjoy them less so pace yourself for best effect.
In older favourites, Jenny Colgan’s Little Beach Street Bakery is 99p. The heroine escapes a horrible relationship and does some healing through bakery, way before sourdough was the craze of the early pandemic. I have a special place in my heart for this book, because I won a competition when this came out and the prize was a new oven. I think enough time has passed now that I can admit that what I actually got was a stack of John Lewis vouchers to buy the oven – and as I didn’t need a new oven at the time, I held on to them and they bought new pillows and a new washer dryer when the one that I inherited from my grandpa gave up the ghost! Thank you lovely competition.
Another old favourite is Trisha Ashley – and her Wedding Tiers is 99p this month if you want to visit her Lancashire universe. We’re only a just over a month away from the first part of the third series of Bridgerton dropping on Netflix, but if you can’t wait (and bearing in mind everything I’ve said about the difference between the books and the series) then The Further Observations of Lady Whistledown is 99p – this is a collaborative effort with Julia Quinn and two other authors each telling a story in the Whistledown world.
This month’s bargain Georgette Heyer is Bath Tangle, which isn’t one of my favourites, but which I probably should re-read again to see if I’ve changed my mind on it, as can sometimes happen as I get older and wiser. This has a formerly engaged couple coming back into contact with each other when he is appointed her trustee after the death of her father. Devil’s Cub and An Infamous Army are among the ones at £1.99, There’s also a PG Wodehouse omnibus on offer for 99p if you want some Jeeves and Wooster.
I should probably mention some non-fiction too right? The Dress Diary of Miss Anne Sykes is 99p. I don’t recommend a lot of cook books, but when I do it tends to be Rukmini Iyer – I love her Roasting Tin series, and The Green Roasting Tin is £1.99 if you are someone who can cope with cook books on tablets.
And in books I bought while writing this post, there’s Genevieve Cogman’s Scarlet – I’ve read The Invisible Library and really liked it and this is French revolutionary vampires and comes with comparisons to Gail Carriger who you know I love. I’m excited to read it – and there is a sequel coming next month too. I also bought The Storied Life of A J Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin, which was her big book before Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow went mega-huge. And finally I bought The Partner Plot which is the new book from Kristina Forrest, who wrote The Neigbor Favor which was a book of the week last summer.
It’s Easter this weekend, and so I’m going with a slightly tangential theme for this week’s recommendsday – books set in Italy, as that’s where the Pope hangs out, and you know that’s enough for a link for me at the moment!
Let’s start with Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, which is about the childhood of two friends in Naples in the 1950s. The identity of the author is a mystery and many say that’s because the book seems so real it must be autobiographical. It’s the first of four books – I have the others still to read and I really must try to get to them soon. The Naples of this book is the opposite of the glamorous Italy you often see in films but it’s fascinating and engrossing.
Talking of the glamorous romantic view of Italy, that’s exactly why the women in The Enchanted April go to Italy in Elizabeth von Arnim’s 1920s novel. I’ve written about it before because it’s right in my wheelhouse, with a medieval castle and four very different women decamping from their normal lives looking for a change in a holiday to the Italian riviera.
Talking of medieval, and another book I’ve mentioned before – Umberto Eco’s In the Name of the Rose which is a murder mystery set in a monastery with a legendary library. I read it as part of my degree, and you should all be glad that I’m recommending this and not Machiavelli’s The Prince, which I also read as part of the same module! Catch-22 was assigned reading for another module but again I really liked it (I did not like the Seven Pillars of Wisdom which was another assigned book for that one) although Heller’s novel is more about the madness and tragedy of war and just happens to be taking place (mainly) in Italy.
I read this a very long time ago, and haven’t been back since, but I’m still going to mention Anthony Capella’s debut, The Food of Love, which is a Cyrano de Bergerac sort of twist about an American woman visiting Rome and falling in love with a man who cooks for her. Except who is really cooking the food?
I’ve been trying to think if I have read any romances set in Italy but my mind is inexplicably blank, so if that comes back to me, I’ll do a follow up I guess. I do have a bunch of books set in Italy on the tbr pile – including some murder mystery and a few historical fiction novels too.
Happy Wednesday everyone, I’m back with a few more book recommendations for you, and because it is starting to feel spring like, which means spring cleaning and clear outs, this week’s theme is books with people making fresh starts.
Obviously romance novels are full of these, with tonnes of heroines moving to small towns to start over, so that’s where I’m starting! there are a lot of small town romance series that have elements of this, but it’s not a given because lots of them feature people finding love with people they’ve known all their lives. So if small town fresh starts are what you’re after, try Jill Shalvis’s Simply Irresistible, the first in her Lucky Harbor series, which actually has a fair few escapes to a new place type plots. This one has a heroine who has left LA for a fresh start and to claim an inheritance. The hero is the contractor she hires to help fix up the inheritance. And Shalvis’s Animal Magnetism series also features some new starts, although I’ve only read the first one and found the hero a little too alpha-y for my taste. If you want something really gentle, Debbie Macomber’s Dakota series from the early 2000s is very low stakes from what I remember, and super easy to read.
If you want a historical romance with a fresh start, Beverly Jenkins’s Tempest features a heroine who moves across the country to marry a man she’s never met, on the strength of their correspondence with each other – I’m not sure starts get much fresher than that! Anyway, Regan is a fantastic heroine and I really enjoyed both the romance and the bits where she was establishing herself in the new town. Jenkins did this so well – earlier in the same series is Tempest, is Forbidden, whose hero is a little too alpha for me and heroine a little too sweet, but I know that is personal preference. And Jenkins of course wrote the Blessings series, where the heroine buys a whole town and brings it back to life.
There are also loads of cosy crime series that start with the sleuth moving to somewhere new – Jenn McKinley’s Library Lovers is one of these for a start, as is M C Beaton’s Agatha Raisin, although a warning on the latter, I can’t read too many (or even more than one now) in a row because the formula is very strong in these and you notice it a lot.
There are a couple of former books of the week that fit here to – like Well Metby Jen DeLuca, the first in her Renaissance Faire series, The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho by Paterson Joseph – which is completely different to anything what I have mentioned in this part so far. And then there are a bunch of books that feature fresh starts that I still have on the to read pile, waiting for me to get around to – like Linda Holmes’s Flying Solo, Jasmine Guillory’s Party of Two,
It’s that time of the month again – where I buy even more books in the process of compiling the list of books on offer on Kindle this month. It is a slightly shorter list this month because there seem to be a lot of repeat offenders (so to speak) on offer this month, so I’ve tried not to duplicate too much this time. It wasn’t any less expensive a post for all that though!
So let’s start with one that I bought – and it’s The Excitements which is about two nonogenarian sisters who are World War Two veterans. On a trip to France to receive the Legion D’Honneur their nephew starts to suspect that they may be hiding some secrets about their past. This has a for fans of Richard Osman tag, but also blurbs from lots of authors that I like including Jenny Colgan and S J Bennett, so I’m looking forward to reading it. Talking of SJ Bennett, A Three Dog Problem, the second in the HM the Queen investigates series is also on offer this month.
Going back a long way to pre-BotW days, and Libby Page’s The Lidowas a holiday reading pick – a sequel has just come out which I suspect explains the offer at the moment. A little more recently, I reviewed Tom Hindle’s Fatal Crossing back in January 2022 – he has two more since then, both of which are on my tbr pile, but this first one is on offer at the moment. I read Emily Henry’s Beach Read a bit more recently than that and would recommend it – I’ve read a couple of warring writers books in the last couple of ears and I think this one is my favourite – so 99p is s steal. Coming even more recently in my reading and I read Days at the Morisaki Bookshop not that long ago, and really enjoyed it – it’s 99p so if you fancy a slice of Japanese bookshop fantasy, it’s a steal.
Mhairi McFarlane’s It’s Not Me, It’s You is a book I loved in the days before this blog – I haven’t been back to it since I first read it in 2014, but my Goodreads review is positively glowing and I’ve enjoyed many of her books since so I’m not too worried about recommending it despite that. In a complete tonal about turn, Emma Cline’s The Girlsis also on offer – it’s about a sort of Manson-y situation in the US in the 1960s and I enjoyed it but it was on the edge of what I can cope with – so I haven’t read her second novel, The Guest, which looked entirely too creepy for me on the basis of the blurb. Another book I enjoyed in the pre-pandemic days when I still read literary fiction is Brit Bennet‘s The Mothers.
And there is the usual offers on my favourite authors. The cheapest “proper” Georgette Heyer edition is Devil’s Cub at £1.99. And the 99p Julia Quinn is Just Like Heaven, the first of the Smythe-Smith series. This month’s Terry Pratchett is Making Money, the second Moist von Lipwig book and source of this genius quote:
‘Look, I can explain,’ he said. Lord Vetinari lifted an eyebrow with the care of one who, having found a piece of caterpillar in his salad, raises the rest of the lettuce. ‘Pray do,’ he said, leaning back. ‘We got a bit carried away,’ said Moist. ‘We were a bit too creative in our thinking. We encouraged mongooses to breed in the posting boxes to keep down the snakes …’ Lord Vetinari said nothing. ‘Er … which, admittedly, we introduced into the posting boxes to reduce the numbers of toads …’ Lord Vetinari repeated himself. ‘Er … which, it’s true, staff put in the posting boxes to keep down the snails …’ Lord Vetinari remained unvocal. ‘Er … These, I must in fairness point out, got into the boxes of their own accord, in order to eat the glue on the stamps,’ said Moist, aware that he was beginning to burble.
Making Money by Terry Pratchett
Oh and I also bought the latest Mary Balogh, Always Remember while I was writing this. Oops.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 