I’m going to start with the fact that I have no idea why this is coming out on a Friday, when Thursday is the usual book release day in the UK and Tuesday in the US. But that’s what the bookshop websites say, so I’m going with it as it enabled me to post about the new TJR yesterday, even if I then found copies on sale in Foyles yesterday evening on my way to the theatre. And yes. I checked the release date again and it still said preorder on the book sites.
Anyway, this is the sequel to Mi-ye Lee’s The DallerGut Dream Department Store, which came out this time last year (and which has been sitting on my tbr shelf for almost that long) and has been one of the translated fiction books you’ll have seen in the bookshops this year. In the first book we meet Penny, a new employee at the store which sells dreams, in book two she is continuing to learn about the dream industry – and discovers the people who make complaints about their dreams and tries to work out why some people never come back to the shop.
Will this be the push I need to read the first book, for the sake of my TBR pile we can only hope it is…
Now while I was writing yesterday’s Kindle offers post and discovering that there’s a Her Majesty the Queen investigates book on offer this month, I also discovered that there’s a fifth in the series coming! The Queen who came in from the Cold is out in the UK in hardback first (and Kindle) on Feb 6th. The blurb says the Queen is planning her trip to Italy on the Royal Yacht Britannia when someone claims to have seen a brutal murder on the Royal Train. The Queen and her private secretary get to work – and as the title suggests there are meant to be spies and Cold War skullduggery. I can’t wait!
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!
Our heroine is Brynn, newly divorced and with a new roommate, Josh, to help her pay the bills. On her birthday she makes a wish on a cake that mysteriously appears on their doorstep and the next morning she wakes up inside her favourite 90s soap Carson’s Cove – and Josh is there too – he’s the bad boy and she’s the sweetheart. The blurb is promising a rom com with 90s nostalgia – and this is one of those where I feel like it’s either really, really going to work for me – or somehow not. But I’m always an optimist in these preview posts, which is why I picked it out of the new releases this week to highlight! Prime Time Romance came out on Tuesday if you’re in the US or today (Thursday) if you’re in the UK and it’s a Penguin release so it should be available pretty widely.
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.
Role Playing was one of my favourite books of last summer, so I’m really looking forward to reading Cathy Yardley’s new book, which came out on Tuesday. Do Me a Favour’s blurb also sounds like absolutely my cup of tea. The heroine is Willa, a cookbook writer who has moved from California to the Pacific North West for a new start after the death of her husband. The hero is her new neighbour, Hudson, a handyman who lives on a farm with his parents and adult children. I am absolutely here for romances with older heroes and heroines with a bit of life experience, and I’m hoping that despite bereavement in the backstory this isn’t going to be too heavy or angsty.
I pre-ordered this one – because it helps authors – but it’s in Kindle Unlimited from the get go, so there’s no Kobo link for you, and it looks like the paperback is from an Amazon imprint too, so it may not be in the shops either.
It’s finally here – the fifth volume of Heartstopper is out today (in the UK) and I’m really looking forward to it. I’m hoping that the comic book shop will have it for me when I go in this weekend, because I only ordered it… well it feels like years ago but it might only be six months. And this is meant to be the final volume of Nick and Charlie’s story too so I’m hoping for a happy ending but with Nick due to go to university I’m not going to lie, I’m a little worried. But if this doesn’t all tie it up with a nice bow, then Alice Oseman has to come back and write us more then right? Right?
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 