bookshops, Trends

Books in the Wild: Trend Watch

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As we all know book trends swing back and forth – and things fall in and out of fashion, and wandering around bookshops you notice things changing. Over the last couple of years we’ve seen things like the change in romance covers to the illustrated ones that started with Leni Kauffman’s covers for people like Olivia Dade and Ashley Herring Blake, but now stretches to almost every romance. Some times it from reading the blurbs – and noticing that the age of the protagonists is going down and most of romance is essntially now what was New adult. Or that there are less and less historicals – even though Bridgerton is massive.

And that leads me to the point of this post: Foyles have swapped the Crime/mystery section and the sci fi fantasy section over – and now the crime is the smaller area. And yes I did count. Last time I was in here – and in fact as long as I can remember – this area above was the crime and mystery section.

It’s a straight switch – Crime is now wrapping around the outside. What’s made the difference here? Romantasy. It’s all the romantasy books I think. The romance section is still mostly contemporary and historical and they’ve put all the romantasy in here with the more traditional (so to speak) Fantasy. And there’s a really interesting article about Fantasy and Romantasy here from Reactor.

And I did have a root around and had my first sighting in the wild of the new Penguin Classic Edition of Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch. Which I nearly bought but managed to resist this time!

Have a great weekend!

series

Series Redux: Mitchell and Markby

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Given that I seem to be on a massive binge of Ann Granger’s Cotswold-set mystery series, it would be remiss of me not to do a quick reminder about them. This is a mystery series that started nearly 30 years ago, but are still a lot of fun. In fact sometimes I think I like the older series better because there is a lack of internet and mobile phones. Anyway, our duo are Meredith Mitchell and Alan Markby, who meet in the first book (which I own in paperback, hence it’s absence from the photo) when a death occurs at the house where Meredith is staying. She works for the Foreign Office and is on leave from a posting abroad, he is the policeman sent to investigate. And so it continues, with the two of them tangled up in crimes, usually fairly rural ones. I’ve got as far as the a point where Meredith is working in London but has finally bought a house in Bamford (the main town in the series) although in book seven the mystery is set away from there in a different part of the Cotswolds. The solutions are twisty and in rereading them I’m almost enjoying them more than first time because they hold up so well.

As you can see these are easy to get hold of on Kindle, although perhaps slightly harder in actual book form because it tends to be Granger’s more recent Campbell and Carter or her Victorian mysteries that you see in the shops. Have a great weekend everyone.

Book previews

Out Today: Mrs Spy

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Anyone fancy a Lady Spy novel set in the 1960s? Well this is out today and sounds intriguing. This from the blurb:

Maggie Flynn isn’t your typical 1960s mum.

She’s a spy, an unsuspecting operative for MI5, stalking London’s streets in myriad disguises. 

Widowed and balancing her clandestine career with raising a Beatles-mad teenage daughter, Maggie finds comfort and purpose in her profession – providing a connection to her late husband, whose own covert past only surfaced after his death.

It goes on to say that there’s a Russian agent and her husband’s death may have been because he was betrayed by someone on home soil. And as you can see from the cover above it’s got a “Thursday Murder Club for Spies” line on it. If I can just get over my need for comforting familiarity, this will be jumping right to the top of my list!

books on offer, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: May Kindle Offers

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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.

Have fun, don’t spend too much!

Book of the Week, detective, new releases, reviews

Book of the Week: Underscore

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For this week’s pick I’m reporting back in with some good news: the new Vinyl Detective is pretty good.

The set up is this: the granddaughter of an Italian film music composer is trying to reissue his music. But because he was suspected of carrying out a murder, some of his masters were destroyed and records themselves are somewhat hard to find. So she enlists the Vinyl Detective to try and track down the rarest of them all for her – the one for the movie where the murder happened. Oh and if he can clear her grandfathers name that would be great. But trying to stop her are the grandchildren of the murder victim…

You may remember that I was a little trepidatious about this one, because I didn’t love the last book in the series. But this was a really good read. It’s got a good mystery, a real sense of the musical genre it’s tackling and lots of food. Plus the extended gang is very much in evidence if you have read the other books in the series. Plus as a bonus for me, there’s lots of action in and around Barnes and Richmond, which are both places that I have stayed in a fair bit in my efforts to avoid the long commute back and forth to London at various points.

I’m going to say this will work best if you’ve read at least some of the others in the series, but it’s also an excuse to post the shot of them all here and to comment on the fact that this book’s cover animal is a dog. You’re welcome. I’ve already seen this in the shops so in should be relatively easy to get hold of in paperback as well as in all the usual digital formats.

Happy Reading

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: May 5 – May 11

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So here’s the thing, despite the fact that I have a tonne of books waiting to be read, at the start of last week all my brain wanted to do was re-read Mitchell and Markby books. Now this started because I bought the first one second hand a few weeks back as you know, and started reading it on Sunday night. And then I ended up buying the next few on kindle so I could read on because when I read them originally I had borrowed them from a friend and I gave them back like the good girl I am. And then I really struggled to get started on anything new to me and so moved on to more familiar old friends – with new books in series that I like and a dash of Terry Pratchett. We will see where this week takes us…

Read:

Say it With Poison by Ann Granger

A Season for Murder by Ann Granger

The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer

Cold in the Earth by Ann Granger

Murder Among Us by Ann Granger

Underscore by Andrew Cartmel

Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett

Started:

A Farewell to Yarns by Jill Churchill

The Beast of Littleton Woods by T E Kinsey

Still reading:

Curtain Call to Murder by Julian Clary

The Sweet Dove Died by Barbara Pym

Wish You Were Here by Jess K Hardy*

Abdication by Juliet Nicolson

Cher: The Memoir Part One by Cher

Four books bought and one pre-order made. And of course another preorder arrived.

Bonus picture: we have a flower on the new(ish) arrival!

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

concerts, not a book, theatre

Not a Book: Typsy

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Back at the theatre this week – this time for a one man show. And if you want to see it you’ll have to be fast because it’s a one week run and it ends tonight. Also, it was mostly sold out, so you could be out of luck anyway. But still, here I am, being timely.

Typsy is Trevor Ashley’s latest cabaret show where he’s playing Liza Minelli – and also Judy Garland, sometimes in the same song. This isn’t limited to songs that you think of as being performed by Liza, it expands out to other musical theatre standards. There are witty lyric changes, chat at the audience between them and plenty of jokes. And I really liked that it’s not just relying on all the old Liza cliches – it’s referencing the newer stuff too – from the documentary, to the appearance on Drag Race to Michael Feinstein. It’s also got a wonderful seven piece band – including what may be the hardest working winds player I have recently seen – swapping between clarinet, two saxophones, flute and piccolo at a rate of knots.

Ashley was recently at the Menier playing Roger de Bris in their wonderful production of The Producers, and is transferring with the cast to the West End for the run this autumn (yes, I’m going again), but that was the first time I had seen him in anything. He’s an Australian and has a string of musical theatre an cabaret credits down there – and that experience really showed in this. I saw it on the first night of the one week run and it felt like he really knew what he was doing and what the plan was. There were a couple of rough edges, but they only made it feel spontaneous and unrehearsed. And the Menier is a really nice space for a show like this – intimate enough that you feel close to the action, but big enough that there’s space for a good sized band and still for a bit of dancing.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see this pop up again somewhere in London – it sold very quickly when it was announced, and Liza-related shows are always popular especially when they’re done well. And this is done well.

Typsy is at the Menier Chocolate Factory until tonight, The Producers is at the Garrick Theatre from September. You can find out more about Trevor Ashley on his website

The pile

Books Incoming: Early May edition

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This month’s Books Incoming comes slightly earlier than mid-month, but that’s because the arrival pile was getting a bit teetering and I wanted to sort it out. And some of these have already been read so they can go straight from the pile to the proper shelves, without adding to the pending pile(s).

Lets start with the ones I’ve already read, so that’s Death at the Playhouses which is the sequel to Death at the Dress Rehearsal, then there is A Case of Mice and Murder and The Witching Hour aka the most recent book in the Dandy Gilver series. Then we have a couple more in series that I read: the latest in Ann Granger’s Campbell and Carter series which came out in paperback this week and which I had preordered, likewise the eighth Vinyl Detective, then there are two Follet Valley books, one of Elly Griffiths’ Brighton series, another of the Edmund Crispins as I try and tick that series off, another in the Writers Apprentice series, and the next book in a historical mystery series that I had somewhat forgotten about.

And on the non-series front, there’s Beyond Belief which is non fiction about the Pentecostal church and which I bought after seeing the author pop up as a talking head on a documentary the other week and my two purchases from Market Harborough the other week – A Conflict of Interest which was the purchase in Quinns and the Rosemary Shrager which was the Oxfam bookshop one. That’s the lot, and it’s still too many – the pile next to the tbr shelf is teetering, so I really need to do something about it. And yet I keep getting distracted by re-reads and the NetGalley list. What can I say – I’m a law unto myself!

Have a great weekend everyone.

bingeable series, fiction, Series I love

Series Redux: Cazalet Chronicles

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We’ve had events marking the 80th anniversary of VE Day this week, and so I thought I would mention one of my favourite series that’s set at least partially during the Second World War today – and that’s Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet series. I wrote a full post about the books back in 2020 and you can read that here.

The end of the war comes during the third book and as I love the children’s stories (or at least they were children at the start) the third and the fourth books are my favourites of the series in many ways. Here’s a bit from Archie and Clary’s VE Day celebrations

Showers of golden stars from rockets occurred in the crocus-mauve sky and the Palace was floodlit, and round the statue of Queen Victoria an enormous snake of people were dancing the hokey-cokey, singing and stamping their feet, and beyond, near the railings, people were chanting, shouting for the King. There were thousands of them, so many indeed and sometimes so tightly packed that they had held hands all evening in order not to get parted, and sometimes they had to shout to each other to be heard, but sometimes they simply sang whatever everyone else round them was singing: ’Land of Hope and Glory’, ’God Save the King’ and bits of the hokey-cokey.

Confusion by Elizabeth Jane Howard

Anyway, I love them, they’re wonderful and if you haven’t read them, you should. They always seem to be in print and I own them in paperback, ebook and also some on audio. That should give a sense of how dear to me they are. And as they’re not short, if you like them you have about 2,000 pages of them to enjoy.

Have a wonderful weekend everyone.

Book previews

Out this week: New Rachel Lynn Solomon

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For this week’s new release it wanted to mention the new novel by Rachel Lynn Soloman. Her last book Business or Pleasure was a book of the week, but she can be a bit hit or miss for me or at least the books can sometimes not quite live up to the promise of the blurb. The blurb for What Happens in Amsterdam promises a second chance romance with a heroine who moves from California to Amsterdam after being dumped only to run into her first love, a Dutch exchange student who mysteriously ghosted her a decade earlier. I love a second chance romance – just as long as the reasons for the first time going wrong aren’t too, too awful – so I’m hopeful about this one.