I said yesterday that I didn’t know what I was going to write about today, and it took a lot of thinking about because there wasn’t a lot of options on the life without breaking some of my own rules, but when it comes down to it, I had the most to say about this one, because I have Thoughts. Lots of thoughts!
Helen is a successful young adult author whose trilogy is about to be turned into a TV series. She’s negotiated herself a place in the writers room, but it turns out that also in the room is Grant. Grant went to high school with Helen and they are bound together by a “tragic accident” – that’s the blurb’s choice of words, not mine. But as they work together, sparks start to fly between them and maybe they might be the key to each others future?
I said on Thursday when I wrote about this for release week that I wasn’t sure if Helen and Grant’s shared past was some thing that they would – or should- be able to get past, and I absolutely stand by that. If the event in their past was almost anything else, I think it would be ok, but this specific issue felt unfixable. And I’ll put the issue at the bottom if you really want the spoiler. Now that aside, it’s a great read – Grant is a charismatic leading man who stays charming without veering into insufferable. It’s also fun watching Helen find her feet in Los Angeles and build a life for herself. They are a good couple in every way, except for that one thing. And other people’s views on that may vary.
This is Yulin Kuang’s debut and there is lots about it that I did like, so I will be looking out for whatever she writes next, as well as those Emily Henry adaptations that she is working on.
My copy of How to End a Love Story came from Netgalley but it’s available now on Kindle, Kobo and as an actual book.
Happy Reading!
The tragic past is that Helen’s sister killed herself by stepping in front of Grant’s car.
It appears that reading the Lucy Worsley Agatha Christie biography has started me on a Christie re-read/listen. And then having read one of the Ann Grangers I had in hand the other week, I then promptly mainlined the other two – there is another one coming out this year – but not until the autumn so now I have to wait. I did however make some excellent progress on reducing the long runner list – more than you would guess from the list too. I will get there in the end! Interestingly though, I still don’t know what I’m going to write about tomorrow. We’ll see what happens…
Here we are, another Sunday and I have a podcast recommendation for you this week.
I’ve mentioned Karina Longworth before – her book was a BotW pick back in 2019 and I mentioned this podcast in passing then as well as in my post about Glass Onion. But the podcast has just turned ten and so I thought it deserves a proper post. Over the course of the last ten years Longworth has worked her way through what she calls the “secret and/or forgotten histories of Hollywood’s first century”.
In practice what that means is seasons about the Blacklist, Joan Crawford, the rise and fall of Louis B Mayer and the portrayal of sex in movies in the 80s and 90s and many more. I think I have now listened to every episode except this remastered first episode. It’s one of the podcasts that I used to save for when I was out running, except that I played Him Indoors one of the Erotic 80s episodes on holidays and suddenly it was our holiday podcast. Karina has a very deliberate style of delivery, which is based on radio announcers and voice overs from that Hollywood golden era which can grate a bit for some people – and in the early episodes she’s editing her own voice which is hard and she does too much. So it’s not a podcast I would say to start from the beginning – but pick a series that interests you and go from there. That’s what I did – I actually left the series about Charles Manson til quite late on because I wasn’t sure I’d be able to cope with the murdery aspect of it – and when I did it certainly made me run faster!
If you’re interested in classic Hollywood (which you know I am) it’s a really good listen. You can find You Must Rmemver this wherever you get your podcasts. And if you have any other podcasts in a similar area of interest please do hit me up in the comments.
I’m back with another stack of books that I’ve managed to acquire some how. There’s two pre-orders here – the new Vinyl Detective and Steven Rowley’s The Celebrants, which has been out in the US for ages but has only just got here. Then there’s my two purchases on the way to Portugal – which were When Grumpy Met Sunshine and Death at the Chateau. Then there’s the books I brought back from Portugal. Seven Scamps was a belated birthday gift and the two Julia books are loans (I think!) from the same friend. The Patricia Wentworth, Susan Elizabeth Philips and Jenny Colgan were acquisitions from the book exchange in Portugal. And then at the very back is Delayed Rays of a Star which was an impulse purchase second hand. So just a few then…
In a touch of serendipity given this week’s BotW pick, I saw two Kate Clayborn books in the wild in the works last week, so as they’re now even easier to get hold of, I wanted to remind you all of Clayborn’s Chance of a Lifetime series – which are more straight romance or at least feature less complicated lives than The Other Side of Disappearing is. So head on over to my post from last year to find out more.
Yulin Kuang’s debut romance is an enemies to lovers trope about two writers linked by an incident in their past who end up working on the same TV show. I know you know I’m reading this at the moment, so I can’t give it a review yet but it’s a really interesting premise and without giving too much away, I’m really not sure if their shared past is overcome-able (is that even a word?) and any sensible person would have decided not to work together, but hey this is a romance novel and people don’t do sensible things in them always! Kuang is working on the adaptation of a couple of Emily Henry’s novels and I love them so I’m hoping optimistic.
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.
A new release pick this week and I think if you saw it on the list last week you might have predicted this because I do love Kate Clayborn.
The heroine of The Other Side of Disappearing is Jess. She’s been bringing up her half sister Tegan on her own for the last decade, since their mum ran off with a boyfriend she had only know for a few months. She’s also been keeping a secret – that her mum’s boyfriend was a con man who was the subject of a true crime podcast. At the start of the book she discovers that not only has Tegan worked out the secret, but she’s contacted the podcast’s producers and is planning to go and search for their mother. Jess isn’t going to let Tegan face whatever is out there without her, so she joins her on the road trip with the podcast host and her producer Adam. Adam is a former college football star and recent journalism graduate. He’s working on this podcast for reasons of his own, but when he meets Jess he has to rethink what he has planned.
This is a road trip book, but with a larger cast than you usually get on road trip romances. And it is still a romance, but this is probably edging closer to what you might call Women’s Fiction than Clayborn has before. Because as well as being the story of Jess and Adam it’s also about Jess and Tegan and their relationship, the way they have built their own sort of family together – and the damage that their mother’s disappearance has done to them. But now I’ve written that I realise that I’ve made it sound like it’s a sad and miserable book, but it’s not! It’s actually pretty uplifting and as well as the romance you’re dying to know what happened to the con man and if they’re going to find their mum. So that’s a romance, a mystery, a road trip and a side of self discovery. It’s a really lovely read.
My copy of The Other Side of Disappearing came from NetGalley, but it’s out now in Kindle and Kobo and I can see copies available for Click and Collect in most of the central London Waterstones stores too.
Well well well. I actually finished a non-fiction book in a reasonable time frame. Who knew I could do that? Certainly not the long runners list recently. Anyway, reading that and trying to make some more progress on that long running list along with a fun evening trip to a concert dominated my efforts this week. Let’s see if I can actually get the list shorter this week…
Well I wrote the Kindle offers post so there were a few…
Bonus picture: the clocks have changed, the evenings are lighter and hopefully soon the mornings will be too when I’m getting up for the train. It definitely feels less awful being up before 6am when it’s light already!
*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.
Just a quick one for this Sunday and I wasn’t actually going to write about this one because the tour is about to end, and I wasn’t sure whether there was any point in writing about it if you couldn’t go and see it – but in exciting news, it’s available on streaming, so I can write about it after all!
So this is a (self confessed) loose adaptation of HG Well’s sci fi classic The Time Machine. And in case you couldn’t tell from the trailer, it’s a comedy. And boy is it comic. It’s bonkers and really quite meta. And actually on the night that we saw it even more meta than usual with the addition of an understudy – complete with script in hand – that I still wasn’t sure if it was part of the plot until I went and googled at half time and found the reviews which clearly stated that it wasn’t normal! But it tells you a little bit about the nature of the thing that I wasn’t sure whether it was a fake-out or not*.
Anyway, if you like your casts small, your productions lo-fi and for both of those things to be a feature in the actual show, then this is great fun. I laughed a lot. Not Mischief Theatre or Spymonkey levels of laughter (where your sides actually ache), but quite a lot. Definitely more than I’ve laughed at a lot of other comedies over the last couple of years. Some of that is the writing, but a lot of it is the performers – who throw themselves at it body and soul – as I’ve mentioned, the line between reality and acting is very blurry here and that’s a good performance thing more than anything else I think.
And if still you don’t believe me that it’s good, it’s actually got an Olivier Award nomination for Outstanding Achievement in Affiliate theatre this year. I haven’t seen any of the other nominees, so I’m rooting for this one. And if it does win, maybe it’ll get some more tour dates. In the meantime, you can rent it via Original Theatre’s website and take a look for yourself. It took a bit of digging about on the website, but it’s £5.99 for a 48 rental, or £8.99 for a month’s access to all their shows, which includes the Adrian Lukis Being Mr Wickham which I keep hearing good things about, and several interesting looking plays.
Have a great Sunday everyone.
*Unlike at Spymonkey where I knew that Stephan was really dead, and Petra genuinely in Vegas, which the people around us weren’t convinced about at the interval and were hoping they’d turn up in the second half!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 