Another Thursday, another new book to highlight. This time it’s the new Adele Buck book, The Anti-social Season, which is the second in her first responders series and came out today in the UK – and on Tuesday in the US. The first in the series was Fake Flame which I reviewed back when in May when it came out here. That was about a fake relationship between a university professor and a firefighter after her ex tried to win her back with a public proposal which she tried to set on fire. This time it is Christmas themed and has a female firefighter who is about to hang up her active duty hose and a male librarian who is tasked with teaching her about her new job as the squad’s social media manager. I love the fact that the genders are the reverse of what you normally find in a firefighter romance – or a romance involving a librarian – so I can’t wait to read it – I have it on pre-order so it should have dropped onto my Kindle by the time you read this!
If you want to buy it, it’s available now on Kindle and Kobo. And as a bonus, Fake Flame is 99p on Kindle and Kobo at the moment too.
It’s not that long since I wrote about Ashley Herring Blake’s Bright Falls series, so I wanted to mention that her new book (not set in Bright Falls) Make the Season Bright came out on Tuesday. This one features two exes who discover they are going to be forced to spend Christmas together after they are invited to spend it with a friend (the friends are sisters, the blurb isn’t clear on whether the sisters know that their friends are exes). I’m intrigued to see how this works out because the blurb says that Charlotte was left at the altar by Brighton and I’m not sure how you redeem that in romance terms.
Make the Season Bright now is out now on Kindle and Kobo and also in paperback- and all the Waterstones near me seem to have copies available.
As I said yesterday, it was a pretty easy choice this week. And this was actually the first book I finished last week – I didn’t manage to get it finished in time for the previous week’s list, and it would probably have been BotW last week instead of The Man Who Didn’t Fly (because there’s always a BLCC post in progress somewhere where I could write about that. But actually this works better in a way as this js somewhat Truman Capote adjacent and he would have been 100 yesterday, so sort of points to me on the timing of this review!
Pamela Harriman has crossed my reading path a couple of times in the past – most often as one of Truman Capote’s slightly more tangential Swans – namely the one who came and stole Slim Keith’s Husband and whose amorous exploits were among those featured in Capote’s notorious La Cote Basque 1965. Anway, Pamela’s reputation was as a modern courtesan, but in this book, Sonia Purnell sets out to re-examine Harriman’s life and legacy and position her as a secret political power player who learnt how to exercise soft power as Winston Churchill’s daughter-in-law and took those lessons on to the rest of her life – to help Gianni Agnelli while they were lovers and then later to help the Democratic Party back to life in the late 1980s and early 1990s, culminating in her appointment as Ambassador to Paris by Bill Clinton and a role in American involvement in the Balkan conflict.
Considering that Harriman is most often referred to as a courtesan, or as someone who made a study of rich men’s ceilings, this is quite a reappraisal. But Purnell makes a strong case for Pamela as a woman who used the skills and talents that she had in the ways that were permitted as a woman at whatever the given time was, and then seeking to improve and better herself and her education throughout her life. I look forward to what I’m sure will be a number of articles in response to this to see what the response is but Purnell has had access to a wealth of papers and interviews to write the book and in her telling the story of Harriman’s life is remarkable and compelling – and hard to find parallels to.
My copy of Kingmaker came via NetGalley, but it came out in hardback about two weeks ago and so hopefully should be in the bookshops now. And of course it’s also on Kindle and Kobo.
This really is the weirdest time of year for book releases. We’re not past Halloween yet, but the we’re already into the Christmas-themed book releases. And yes, I’ve picked on today, I can’t help myself, because its the new book from Sarah Morgenthaler – after a four year gap since the end of her Moose Springs series.
The blurb for The Christmas You Found Me has a single dad answering an advert that was meant to be a joke and a fake marriage plot with a recently divorced ranch owner, so that he can prove that he has the money for the mediations his daughter will need after a potential kidney transplant. Which sounds like a lot, and a bit of a turn from the Moose Springs books which were unabashedly Grumpy-Sunshine romances, but I really liked Enjoy the View (it was a BotW after all) so I will keep my eye open for it for that, but also because it’s set in Idaho, which is traditionally one of the harder states to cover in the 50 States challenge! Morgenthaler in fact was my regular solution to Alaska, so I’ve had that as an issue the last couple of years. And this year in fact…
The Thursday Murder Club series has featured a fair bit on this blog, but after the last one came out Richard Osman said he was taking a break from writing the series to write something different – and today is the day that that something different comes out. It’s called We Solve Murders and it’s got a detective duo who are father-in-law and daughter-in-law. He’s retired, she’s a private security officer and from the blub it sounds like an adventure caper with murders. So I’m hoping for something that’s a bit early Steph Plum maybe, because Osman does humour in his mysteries. I’m hoping to pick up a copy of this at the airport next time we go on holiday, because once again it’s a hardback first release, and I’m bad at waiting. So watch this space!
I know Matt Haig is an autobuy for some people, so today I wanted to mention that he has a new book hitting the bookshops. It’s called The Life Impossible and it’s his first novel since the mega hit The Midnight Library, which I still need to get around to reading, especially given how much I enjoyed How to Stop Time. Anyway, this is about Grace, a retired maths teacher who is left a rundown house on Ibiza and sets out with a one way ticket and absolutely no plan about what to do about it. The blurb promises hope, adventure, wonder and the power of a new beginning. From which I deduce it may make you cry so maybe not one to read on the plane, but perhaps one for behind some big sunglasses on your late summer holiday!
Happy Wednesday everyone, and I’m taking the opportunity today to do a quick run through of some of the new books coming this autumn, as we’re about to hit the flood of books arriving in the shops in time for Christmas. The literary fiction headlines are the new novels from Sally Rooney, Elizabeth Strout, Olga Tokarczuk and Haruki Murakami, but we all know my tastes run slightly differently.
Lets start with the ones I’ve already got on the Kindle waiting for me, thanks to the joys of NetGalley. Firstly there’s the new book by Lissa Evans – A Small Bomb at Dimperley, which comes out next week, so I’m doing this just in time. This is set at the end of the Second World War, with a second son returning to his ancestral home – where he is now responsible for the whole kit and caboodle after the death of his older brother. Also waiting on the Kindle but not out until October is Miss Beeton’s Murder Agency by Josie Lloyd, a cosy crime which features a distant descendent of *the* Mrs Beeton who runs a household staff agency where one of her staff ends up dead over the festive period. This might be the first of the Christmas themed novels I’ll read this year – but it won’t be the only one…
And that’s because only a few months after the third instalment of the series, we have a fourth Three Dahlias book and as I mentioned in my post about the series, this next one is a Christmas one. I don’t have this on Netgalley so I will have to wait – or maybe put it on my Christmas list, but A Very Lively Midwinter Murder is out on November 5. Out the same day is The Author’s Guide to Murder by Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig and Karen White which appears to be a bit of a new direction for the trio – as the blurbs are promising a whodunnit with literary satire when a superstar author is found dead on a remote Scottish Island. I look forward to getting my hands on it.
A couple of memoirs to finish today – firstly Lisa Marie Presley’s, From Here to the Great Unknown, which has been completed after her death by her daughter Riley Keogh. I watched Priscilla on the plane to Manila, and I’ve watched most of Elvis (probably need to start again from the beginning at this point though) so I look forward to seeing where Lisa Marie’s story fits in on that spectrum given all the controversy about those two movies and the family splits they caused, not to mention all the fighting after Lisa Marie’s death early in 2023. That’s coming in early October. And then there’s Darren Hayes Unlovable (another one out on 5 November). You may remember Hayes as the lead singer of Savage Garden, and you may also remember that I went to see him in London the other year and was in floods of happy tears to hear all my favourite songs of his sounding amazing, more than 25 years on. Given that one of my favourite songs of his is the haunting Two Beds and a Coffee Machine, which is clearly about domestic violence, there’s obviously going to be some difficult stuff to read in here – even before you get to the attitudes of the music industry to his sexuality. But I’m looking forward to reading it – and to finding out more about what he was up to in his ten year hiatus – and what made him come back.
That’s your lot for today – I’m sure you’ll be hearing more about some of these in the next few months though. Happy Humpday everyone.
This week I wanted to highlight a book that might not be as obvious or prominent in the shops. Of course now I’ve said that, it’ll turn out to be everywhere but hey, here we are. I think you can tell from the cover but Sanaka Hiiragi’s The Lantern of Lost Memories is looking to appeal to people who have enjoyed Before the Coffee Gets Cold and its sequels. And I am one of those people, but I’m also someone who quite enjoys the fact that Japanese fiction is just so different from the rest of what I read so I’m prepared to risk tears and melancholy in it even when I’m not in anything else!
It’s about a magical photo studio where people go after they die to view key moments of their life and relieve one of them before they go on to the afterlife. You can see why I might be expecting some tears. Anyway, I’ll try and remember to report back when I read it…
You may recognise Jen DeLuca’s name from the Willow Creek Renaissance fair, but you can see from this cover that this is a new series and a bit of a new direction. The blurb seems to be promising ghosts (as is the cover if you look close enough) as our heroine, Cassie, moves to Boneyard Key and starts to investigate whether her new house is haunted with the help of local cafe owner Nick… I’m looking forward to getting my hands on this at some point when the pile isn’t quite as out of control as at the current moment!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 