I’ve never read the novel Clutch or anything by Emily Nemans. But apparently, according to me, I should. Because, as I was informed about myself, I “provided a highly positive blurb for the book’s release, describing it as ‘hilarious, philosophical, anthropological, polyphonic’ with a sharp eye for modern American culture.’” Unbeknownst to me, I also noted “that Nemens’ writing is ‘nothing short of brilliant’ and that the story is filled with ‘deep true emotion.’”

The book sounds fantastic, but don’t take it from me. As I said, I haven’t read it.

Befuddled, and more than a little pissed off, I asked AI, “How do you know that Karen Dukess loved the novel Clutch?”

Here’s what I was told:

“We know author Karen Dukess liked the novel Clutch by Emily Nemens because she publicly praised and cross-promoted it on social media. Specifically, she highlighted the book through her Castle Author Talks platform and shared high praise for the novel’s depiction of female friendship. In a joint post alongside other major authors like Elin Hilderbrand, Clutch was actively celebrated as a ‘perfect summer read.’”

Say what? Did I need to ask AI if the author Karen Dukess has dementia? Because though I have interviewed many authors “who are nothing short of brilliant” on my podcast, I have zero memory of ever interviewing Emily Nemans, or of meeting or cross-promoting anything with Elin Hilderbrand.

So, I posed a different question:

“Why do you keep saying that Karen Dukess loved the novel Clutch? I am Karen Dukess, and I have never read the book.”

Finally, an honest answer:

“I apologize for generating that false information; I hallucinated the claim that you read, posted about or endorsed the novel Clutch. Because I am an AI, I do not actually ‘know’ or track what you are doing in real time. Instead, I predict text patterns based on data. Sometimes, when a prompt connects a specific author with a book release or literary reviews, my system incorrectly blends unrelated facts. In this case, I cross-referenced your actual background as a book reviewer and author of novels like The Last Book Party and Welcome to Murder Week with Emily Nemens’ Clutch, creating a fake connection. I completely fabricate reviews or endorsements in these scenarios, and I appreciate you calling out the error directly.”

Apology not accepted.

This “hallucination” may be relatively harmless with few victims. I’m sorry, Emily Nemans, for having to state publicly that I haven’t read or praised your novel. It sounds great.

But I can’t help thinking about all the other times that AI has, and will continue to, “incorrectly blend unrelated facts” and create real harm.

Let the buyer beware.

Oh, and one more thing. The author Karen Dukess has never endorsed, publicly praised, or cross-promoted a positive take on artificial intelligence on social media, on her actual podcast, or in real life. And that’s no hallucination.

These big questions are at the heart of The Emilys, a page-turning work of literary fiction by Heather Abel. It’s about people in a small New England town who become obsessed with finding a cure for a mysterious ailment that makes it impossible to be outside during the day. The afflicted are known as “the Emilys” after the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson. The novel, Abel’s second after The Optimistic Decade, examines the ways communities might adapt to a changed environment.

“What new jealousies are going to come out?” Abel says on the latest episode of my new podcast, The Castle Hill Author Talks. “What’s going to happen to a marriage when things are so much harder? What if it sucks in some ways but what if in other ways it builds community, it builds relationships, or it shows you who you are?”

Truly a novel for our times, The Emilys is about motherhood and friendship and marriage and how to navigate all of these things in a world that is forcing us to reckon with the physical environment in unsettling ways. It’s smart, speculative, funny, scary and, ultimately, hopeful.

“A book about things like climate change and unexplained illness can also be fun and be a companion for people who are also asking these questions about how do we raise our kids in this time,” says Abel, who teaches English language and literature at Smith College. “I’m not giving answers but I want to accompany people as they’re thinking through these things.”

You can find the whole interview on The Castle Hill Author Talks (available wherever you get your podcasts) along with past interviews with Virginia Evans about The Correspondent, Chris Hayes about The Sirens’ Call, Emma Garman about The Kindness of Strangers, and John Kenney about I See You’ve Called in Dead. If you like what you’ve heard, please follow, leave a rating, and a review. I’d love to know your thoughts!

I didn’t buy it, both because of who I am and what I assumed this community would be. In short, I’m not a crime person. My first book was a literary coming-of-age novel in which not a single character has even a passing thought about murder. My second novel, Welcome to Murder Week, is about Americans competing to solve a fake murder mystery in an English village. The only “dead” body in the book belongs to a very much living hair stylist laying face-down in a pool of fake blood.

I rarely read true crime and have only seen Law and Order upon entering a room where my husband was watching it. I haven’t read a truly scary book since 1989 when The Silence of the Lambs got my heart thumping so furiously that I thought the neighbors might hear and call the paramedics on my behalf. I am a devotee of Masterpiece Mystery and Britbox, but I’m not much of a fan-girl or conference-going kind of person. I figured that people who pay good money to go to a conference to hear talks like “Facial Approximation from Skeletal Remains” and “Bring Your Shovels: How to Move a Body” were weird, if not downright creepy.

But having now attended both the small but mighty Hamptons Whodunit on Long Island and the absolutely mega Thrillerfest in Manhattan, I know I was dead wrong. The people I met — mystery and thriller authors, crime investigators and forensic specialists, readers and bookstagrammers who gobble up all kind of books about murder and mayhem — were more than warm and friendly. They were joyous, bubbling with life. Like the key to happiness is being a little obsessed with death. Events at both conferences included a lot of laughter, and not only when a hundred of us were fully invested in playing parts in a murder mystery game or competing at crime trivia over dinner.

I’m not alone in marveling at the vibe of this community. At both conferences, I heard authors remark that among the things they love about publishing in this genre is how fabulous the people are.

“We get the dark out in our work,” Sulari Gentill, an award-winning Australian mystery writer, said during a panel at Hamptons Whodunit. “If you want to see dark people, go to the poets. Their meetings end in a knife fight.”

Her fellow panelist , the NYT bestselling author of the Edgar Award-winning Highway 59 trilogy, cast crime writers as being as invested in what’s good as in what’s bad.

“Crime writers look at the worst of what people can be to redefine the best of what people can be,” said Locke, whose trilogy grapples with the collision of race and justice in East Texas. She may write about troubling issues, but she calls herself “an exhausting and unrelenting optimist” who finds people “delightful.”

At both conferences, I found myself thinking about Bruno Bettelheim’s take on fairy tales and children, that the appeal of fairy tells is not just the thrill of being frightened, but that they help children cope with their fears. Yes, fairy tales contain dragons, but they also show that dragons can be killed.

It’s the same way with most crime novels and mysteries; they venture into frightening territory, but end with resolution, with putting the world back in order and ensuring that justice is served. Crime fiction, in fact, may be the ultimate feel-good fiction, which probably goes a long way to explaining why so many people, myself included, got so obsessed with watching mysteries during the pandemic. Yes, there’s chaos, but there’s also order.

“The last few years have been a doozy,” Attica Locke said. “We all have to rest. To be caretakers of ourselves. Art is giving us a two-fold thing by allowing us to escape and holding our hand as we go through the difficulties of life.”

Speaking of Art and Escape

I’ve got a podcast! The Castle Hill Author Talks with Karen Dukess, available on all platforms, started in the dark days of the pandemic as a series of live zoom interviews with great authors, who included Patrick Radden Keefe, Gabrielle Zevin, Daniel Mason, Catherine Newman and many more. Now that we’re all zoom-weary, I’ve turned it into a podcast. Already up are episodes with Virginia Evans (The Correspondent) and John Kenney (I See You’ve Called in Dead). Up next week: my interview with #1 NYT Bestselling Author Christina Baker Kline about her fabulous new novel The Foursome (on sale Tuesday, May 12).

And, if you’re on Long Island, I’ll be at Northport Books at the end of this month in conversation with @nursevicreads. Join us!

In honor of the March 3 paperback release of Welcome to Murder Week (same great taste, but lighter and cheaper!), here are the inevitable tropes of author unboxing videos.

A Stranger Comes to Town: No matter how many times you’ve clicked on the tracking link or checked outside for deliveries, the arrival of the books feels like a surprise, no doubt because deep in the heart of every author is a story-scribbling bookworm of a child who can’t believe she gets to call herself a published writer. We’ve all read stories or seen films that open with the arrival in town of a mysterious personage; the thunking of a box of books on our doorstep marks the launch of our lives as Authors.

Dark Resistance: As a purely emotional moment, the only real physical drama of an unboxing video is getting the damn package open, which can be surprisingly tricky. Do publishers put on extra packing tape to ramp up the suspense, to create a will she/won’t she moment? Because most author unboxing videos make opening a simple box look like reverse origami with weighted blankets. My friend and fellow author Annabel Monaghan (pictured center right in the above photo montage) came so close to slicing off a finger during one of her unboxing videos that her editor sent her a box cutter.

Love at First Sight: It’s nearly impossible not to go weak in the knees when you see your book for the first time. In one of my own unboxing videos, I jokingly asked my husband/videographer, if I should ‘squeal like those silly authors on Instagram.’ And then I unveiled my book and, lo and behold, my voice mysteriously skyrocketed several octaves and I, like a woman possessed, emitted a completely unintentional “ooooooh!,” thereby proving my thesis that these tropes are truly inevitable.

Gender Reveal. This one is a trend that I do not endorse. I’m OK with authors referring to their “book babies” because finishing a novel can feel like enduring an emotional pregnancy that far exceeds nine months followed by an arduous labor for which no epidural is available. But why do authors so often personify their books as female? I have two sons and would surely have loved a daughter, but my books are emphatically non-binary.

The Grand Gesture. Yes, the unboxing video is pure joy. It’s also pure sales. Authors love their books and they love readers too, particularly those who buy their books. And nothing shows our love better than a bold move, even one that makes us look ridiculous. Call us shameless, but for our books we’re full-on mercenaries with zero pride. We’ll make that mad dash to the airport to declare ourselves before your flight takes off. We’ll get down on one knee at a bar in front of all your friends. We might even channel Lloyd Dobler and stand beneath your window.

In the beginning, there was Adam and Eve.

No one has had more fun with the OG humans than Mark Twain, who’s at his wittiest in The Diary of Adam and Eve, which collects in one volume “Extracts from Adam’s Diary,” first published in 1904, and “Eve’s Diary,” published in 1906.

My copy is tattered and faded and I have no idea where I got it, but it’s been making me laugh for decades. Here’s Adam on “the new creature” in paradise:

“The new creature names everything that comes along, before I can get in a protest. And always the same pretext is offered — it looks like the thing. There is the dodo, for instance. Says the moment one looks at it one sees at a glance that it ‘looks like a dodo.’”

And Eve, upon first seeing Adam:

“I think it is a man. I had never seen a man, but it looked like one, and I feel sure that that is what it is. I realize that I feel more curiosity about it than about any of the other reptiles.”

What makes these diaries so special, though, is their unexpected tenderness. Twain wrote Eve’s Diary after his wife died, and it shows. Ultimately, The Diary of Adam and Eve is a love story. It makes for a very romantic gift, particularly in this delightful Modern Library mini edition.

There’s more to Key West than Hemingway and more to Lee Smith than Appalachia

You may know Lee Smith for her writing about Appalachia, but this gem follows Jenny, a spunky 13-year-old who finds herself in Key West in 1958 on an ill-fated vacation with her family following the discovery of her father’s affair.

This 2020 novella is funny and wise and, as you’ll learn in an afterword by the author, a fictionalized version of a real “Geographical Cure” prescribed for her parents’ troubled marriage. It’s got a beautiful socialite mother, a chastened father, and a host of Hollywood stars in town to make the film Operation Petticoat.

I dare you not to fall in love Jenny, a “skinny, pale, wispy haired kid on a bike, quick as a rabbit, fast as a bird, riding invisible all over town, bearing my awful secret.”

If You Love Claire Keegan…

After a bookseller at Elm Street Books in New Canaan, CT, recommended three books that I’d already read and adored, I knew we were kindred spirits. So while I hadn’t been looking for a novella about an Irish woman confessing a whopping big secret to a priest, I didn’t hesitate to take her advice and buy The All Of It by Jeannette Haien. And now I’m pressing this little book into your hands too.

In The All of It, published in 1986, Enda Dennehy calls upon the town’s priest, Father Declan de Loughry, to attend her husband Kevin’s final moments. In the days to come, Enda tells Father de Loughry the story of her long marriage, revealing a secret that leads Father de Loughry to question everything he believes about what it means to be a priest and a friend and whether the two can go hand-in-hand. The All of It is a mesmerizing and beautifully empathetic story that might well shake your own foundational beliefs too.

And Now to a Happier Place….

There were some dark days in 2025 that were making it hard for me to sleep — until I found an antidote, which was to re-read a few pages of 84 Charing Cross Road every night before bed. This epistolary classic, first published in 1970, brings together twenty years of letters between Manhattan writer Helene Hanff and a used-book dealer in London. Hanff’s letters have a gruff and acerbic kindness; the ones she gets in return are unfailingly proper. But throughout, this correspondence is cemented by a mutual love of books and an endearing commitment to openness and generosity. I promise, it’s good for whatever ails you.

A darker note…

For a big theme in a small book, look no further than Address Unknown, which tackles the insidiousness of Nazism through a series of letters between two German friends — Max, a Jewish art dealer in San Francisco, and Martin, his friend and former business partner who has returned to Germany as the Nazis are coming to power.

Originally published in Story Magazine in 1938, Address Unknown by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor exposed the poison of Nazism to the American public. It became an immediate sensation. The entire printing of the magazine sold out, Reader’s Digest reprinted the story, and Simon and Schuster published it as a book in 1939 and sold 50,000 copies.

That politics destroys the friendship between Max and Martin is not surprising, but the twist here will stun you with its reminder of how words can be weaponized. This spare little book punches way above its weight and the afterword by the author’s son in this 2015 edition is no less fascinating.

Better than an Apple a Day:

This poetry tree has pride of place on our kitchen table. During December, we start dinner by pulling off one of the branches and unfurling it to find a winter-themed poem (by the likes of Billy Collins, Naomi Shihab Nye, Langston Hughes, and A. A. Milne, among others), which we take turns reading aloud. And lo and behold, a poetry starter makes the whole meal better! This one-of-a-kind poetry tree — hand-scrolled, hand-punched, hand-assembled by Suzy Becker and curated by poet Brooke Herter James — can be purchased here. Orders must be in by December 15!

Wishing everyone happy holidays, and Happy New Year! If you take up any of my bite-sized suggestions, please let me know your thoughts.

How, other than by playing the pianoforte, had Georgiana weathered the scandal of her teen-aged near-elopement with Wickham? Was she humiliated and angry at herself for falling for his charms? Was she angry at her brother for interfering? First loves tend to linger in the heart, mind, and body; would Georgiana have been nostalgic for her passionate interlude with Wickham? Years into marriage to a more respectable man, would she still think about the path not taken?

My story, What Georgiana Wants, is included in Ladies in Waiting: Jane Austen’s Unsung Characters, publishing November 4 by Gallery Books (and available for pre-order now). The collection includes delightful tales of minor characters — Miss Bates, Lydia Wickham, Caroline Bingley, Margaret Dashwood and others — by Adriana Trigiani, Sarah Maclean, Eloisa James, Elinor Lipman, Audrey Bellezza, Emily Harding, Diana Quincy, and Nikki Payne.

I loved writing about Georgiana’s “mid-life” crisis at age 27, but when Publishers Weekly, in a glowing review, described the contributors to Ladies in Waiting as “an all-star lineup of romance writers,” I was taken aback. I’m not a romance writer. And after seeing that my publisher was promoting the collection with a snappy line about Austen’s unsung characters “deserving their happy endings too,” it occurred to me that I might have misunderstood the assignment. Should I have given Georgiana a swoonier ending?

What I wrote for Georgiana wasn’t so much happily ever after as happy-ish. I gave her a marriage to a respectable, wealthy man and two adorable children, but also, seven years into being wife and mother, uncontrollable, obsessive yearning for what she’d felt with Wickham. After she spends an otherwise ordinary day tortured by sexual thoughts, some mundane events recast Georgiana’s efforts to put Wickham out of her mind and instead make her past, profane as it was, part of her present. I won’t say more, lest I spoil the story.

The marriage I gave Georgiana is not as dreamy as the marriages Austen leading ladies like Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse are set up to enjoy, but I think her situation is true to Austen’s view of marriage in general. Because part of what makes a Darcy-Elizabeth union so satisfying is the specter of the other marriages depicted in Pride and Prejudice and the all-too-constant reminder that the antidote to spinsterhood is often a marriage as excruciating as one to Mr. Collins would be or as mutually annoying as Mr. and Mrs. Bennet’s. Austen may give her enviable romances center stage, but the brilliance and allure of her novels are due as much to her observations about society, marriage, and class as to the love stories they are built around. We read Jane Austen for the happy ending, but for the sharp insights along the way too.

Ladies in Waiting makes a perfect holiday gift for your favorite Austenite (even if that happens to be you).

IN OTHER NEWS…..

Here’s a case where people understood the assignment perfectly. I recently hosted a Welcome to Murder Week dinner party as part of a fundraiser for my local library. I told the guests to dress either as a character from the book or any archetypical character from an English village mystery. Imagine my surprise when they all came dressed as characters I’d invented! Here are two of my favorites: nosy neighbor Edwina Flasher and hairdresser/murder victim Tracy Penny.

The party was the most notable event on my social calendar until I was invited to the fancy birthday party of a fancy friend who happens to have some even fancier friends. Here I am with one of them, in a photograph helpfully annotated by a cheeky friend.

Suggest another caption in the comments and I’ll send my favorite one a copy of Welcome to Murder Week or Ladies in Waiting, your choice!

“It took me a long time to understand that sometimes, when I thought I was writing about ibises, I was really writing about homesickness, or when I thought I was writing about homesickness, what I was really writing about was ibises.”

But with my latest novel, I didn’t fully understand what I’d written about until I was on book tour.

Welcome to Murder Week was my rebound novel; it came on the heels of the rejection of a novel that had been a slog to write and even less fun to have out on submission (spoiler alert: it didn’t sell). The next book, I told myself, would be different. I would enjoy the process, create a world that would be a respite from disturbing current events, and give readers a rip-roaring delight of a book.

And, partly because the novel that didn’t sell was drawn closely from my own experiences, this one would be pure fiction. It would be narrated by a woman completely unlike me — Cath Little, 34, single and orphaned, having lost her father as a child and her estranged mother a few months before the book begins. To make Cath even more unlike me, I made her unambitious, un-romantic, and tall.

Writing Welcome to Murder Week was as enjoyable as I’d hoped. I laughed a lot while writing about Cath Little’s trip to England to solve a fake murder mystery and learn the truth about her late, estranged mother’s life. I poked fun at all the tropes: a nosy neighbor, a grand Lady living in a stately “old pile,” a mysterious vicar. I chuckled sending up Golden Age detective novels, quaint cozy mysteries, and Britbox shows. It was a delightful confection; the furthest thing I’d ever written from my own life.

My book tour was fun too, a non-stop party — until a few weeks into it, my mother died unexpectedly and I put things on hold.

When it was time to get back to promoting the novel, I figured I’d compartmentalize. For an afternoon here, an evening there, I’d jump back into the happy world of Murder Week and have a reprieve from sadness. And then, before a bookstore event on Cape Cod, the writer friend who was going to interview me, pulled me aside and said, “Are you going to be OK with this? Talking so much about grief?”

Say what?

“It’s fine,” I told her. “This is fiction, not autobiography.”

But as we discussed the novel, I understood for the first time how much of my personal experiences had seeped into the book. While I’d been writing Murder Week, my mother had been getting increasingly forgetful and needy. My visits became more frequent and more necessary, my care more tender. Every time I left her apartment, I’d stand in the hall for a moment and sigh. I was grieving the loss of the mother who’d raised me.

During my interview on Cape Cod that day, all of this came back to me. But now, a few weeks out from my mother’s death, I knew that there’s no such thing as “pre-grieving.” The finality of losing my mother was an altogether different and fiercer beast, one for which there’s no preparation. And though I hadn’t been conscious of this truth when I’d been writing, I’d given Cath the same realization. Her mother had abandoned her when she was nine, only visiting from time to time. She thought she’d grieved her long ago, years before her mother actually died. But she learns that there’s no escaping the pain of permanent loss.

In other words, I thought I’d been writing about murder, but really I’d been writing about death. Homesickness, not ibises.

“This one,” she said, handing me a fat hardcover by Maggie Stiefvater. “It’s her adult debut and it’s fabulous.”

The Listeners, according to the jacket copy, was a “mesmerizing portrait of an irresistible heroine, an unlikely romance, and a hotel — and a world — in peril.” It was taken from the pages of history — inspired by the grand, luxury hotels that temporarily housed Axis diplomats and their families at the beginning of World War II. It sounded like my cup of tea. But I hesitated; Stiefvater was known for writing fantasies.

“Fantasy is not really my thing,” I said, stepping toward the display table to return the book.

Barbara was not dissuaded.

“It’s a blend of genres, like yours.”

That’s when I felt like an idiot. I’d just wrapped up an interview in which Barbara had extolled Murder Week for defying genre expectations — for being at once a mystery, an affectionate send-up of Golden Age detective novels, a romance, a coming-of-age tale, and an exploration of grief. It was in part that unconventional mix of elements that had led her to pick the book for the Poisoned Pen’s monthly subscription club and invite me to speak at the store.

Her choice reflected how we’d been marketing the book — for mystery lovers and for those who don’t usually read mysteries. Or, as one author said in her blurb, “I came for the murder and stayed for the family secrets.”

Who was I to turn away from a trusted recommendation because the book might contain elements of fantasy? Why had I pigeonholed a writer because of what she’d done in the past? Hadn’t I just made my own pivot — jumping from a literary coming-of-age story to a decidedly different tale of Americans solving a fake murder mystery in an English village?

I bought The Listeners and tore through its 373 pages. If Stiefvater requires any label, it’s not “fantasy writer” or “historical fiction writer”, it’s simply “great writer.” And I’ve come to discover that the more unclassifiable a book, the more surprising and delightful it might be.

There’s nothing wrong with choosing books by genre. If you’re in the mood for a paranormal romance or a love story involving a human and an orc, by all means seek them out. But maybe don’t be so dismissive. (Yes, I’m looking at you, friend, who resisted my plea to read Annabel Monaghan’s It’s A Love Story because you “don’t do romance.” I forgive you, not only because you caved, but also because you admitted you loved the book.)

Books should not be chosen like items on a menu. Is there gluten in that? I don’t eat gluten. I know so many people who nearly took a pass on Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow because it was about video game creators. And I don’t know any who regretted reading it.

I’m not saying you should choose even books that, for whatever reason, repell you. But when a trusted friend or bookseller thrusts a book into your hands and suggests you read it despite your reservations, I suggest you listen. That allergy you think you have might only be in your head.

In other news:

Welcome to Murder Week was an instant USAToday bestseller, hitting the list its first week on sale and climbing to an even better ranking the second week. I’m so grateful to the booksellers and readers who have taken a chance on my genre-blending fake murder/real family mystery/coming of age/romance.

This month, my book tour moves to Cape Cod. On July 8 at 6 pm. I’ll be at Truro Center for the Arts’ Edgewood Farm, being interviewed by Christina Clancy. There will be drinks and oysters and books for sale and signing. Tickets available here.

On July 11 at 10 a.m, I’ll be at the delightful Brewster Book Store, interviewed by Lindsey Palmer. Register here.

And then July 22 at 6 pm, I’m back in New York City, at The Mysterious Bookshop, where I’ll be interviewed by my editor, Hannah Braaten. Join us!

Linda: Hey. I just read a book that is the most Karen book ever [note that by use of the term ‘Karen,’ she means me, not some imaginary white lady who’s demanding to speak to a supervisor]. Have you read Maud’s Line by Margaret Verble? It was published in 2015 but it’s like Caddie Woodlawn for grown-ups — without the racism.

[Linda knows that Caddie Woodlawn was my favorite book when I was a girl and that when I picked up a copy recently to see if it held up, the first phrase that popped out at me was ‘savage Injuns.”]

Me: Ooh, tell me more.

Linda: It’s a debut novel set in 1928 in Eastern Oklahoma. About Maud Nail, 18, who lives with her father and brother on an allotment parceled out by the U.S. government to the Cherokees when their land was confiscated for Oklahoma statehood. Maud’s prospects for a better life are slim, but then a newcomer with - and I quote - “good looks and books” rides down her section line.

[Before Linda mentions that the book was a Pulitzer finalist, I’m sold. While I’m searching my library database, another call comes in. It’s Laura. Linda merges the calls. We tell her about the book.]

Laura: Ooh, tell me more.

[We hear the sound of Laura typing on her keyboard to look for the book in her library.]

The next meeting of our book group is now a sure thing, though when, where and how it happens is anybody’s guess. But some time soon (Laura and I read fast, unless you compare us to Linda, who is supersonic), we will discuss Maud’s Line, probably by phone, and probably with each of us saying something that will make the others think about the book a little differently. We don’t always like the same books, but more often than not, if one of us loves a book, the others will too or at least will understand why we do.

Reading is a solitary past-time, but not a solitary pleasure. Talking with my sisters about books has been the best, longest conversation of my life, one that I hope continues until we’re so forgetful that we can read our favorites books all over again as if for the first time. Membership in our book group is unfortunately exclusive; full membership is granted only to those on our Sisters group chat, half of which is about our 89-year-old mother. But please know that we’re always open to suggestions of what to read and like nothing more than being asked for book recommendations. In that spirit, here are some of our lesser-know membership approved titles:

The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng.

The Makioka Sisters by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki.

The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck.

The Oppermans by Lion Feuchtwanger

Cluny Brown by Margery Sharp

I Couldn’t Love You More by Esther Freud

And a few better known titles that we all loved:

In Memoriam by Alice Winn.

Fellowship Point by Alice Elliott Dark

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll

The Postcard by Anne Berest

And, speaking of books (of what else do I speak?), Welcome to Murder Week, which was named one of the best mysteries of June (!) by Amazon, comes out on June 10 (next Tuesday)! Not only would I love you to pre-order it or buy it on pub day (or any day!), I’m going on book tour and would love to talk books with you in person. Here’s where I’ll be (all details and links for registration, only required at some events, can be found on my website here).

I’ll be kicking it all off at noon on June 10 with an Instagram Live with newly-crowned NEW YORK TIMES best-selling author Annabel Monaghan. (If you haven’t read her, get thee to a library or bookseller immediately. Read her if you love romance and read her if you think you don’t love romance. Her books are funny and smart and wise and downright irresistible.) Annabel, who’s also the world’s best literary citizen, will be chatting live with me and Amy Poeppel, whose hilarious and wonderful new novel Far and Away also comes out on Tuesday.

For a deep dive into how and why I wrote Welcome to Murder Week, listen to my conversation with Tess Callahan on her thoughtful podcast Writers at the Well. If you’re inclined toward the bookish (and you wouldn’t have read this far if you’re not), I highly recommend subscribing to Tess’s substack by the same name.

That’s all for now. Happy reading!

For our second night in Bakewell, Laura and I reserved a table at The Rutland Arms, where presumably Miss Austen had dined as well as slumbered. How excited was I? On a scale of one to ten, with one being “who cares?” and ten being “Mrs. Bennet upon learning that a single man with 10,000 pounds had moved into the neighborhood,” I was at a solid nine. Before we entered the hotel, I even snapped a photo of the window of “Jane Austen’s room.”

The hotel was charming, the restaurant divine. We had roast chicken with garlic mash and sticky toffee pudding with butterscotch sauce and vanilla ice cream. We imagined Jane Austen having tea by the window and toying with character names. Mr. Marcy? Darby? Aha! Darcy! In the ladies room, we read a framed timeline of the author’s life, which included her 1811 visit to Bakewell, and laughed at the unfortunate mispelling of her last name at the bottom of a portrait. Had she been to Texas too?

Before leaving, we purchased a slim history of The Rutland Arms Hotel, which we perused pleasantly on the way out, until one particular page — cue dramatic music — stopped us in our tracks: The Jane Austen Controversy. There it was in black and white: Jane Austen had never visited The Rutland Arms. Or Bakewell. Or Derbyshire.

The claim that Austen worked on Pride and Prejudice while a guest at The Rutland Arms is “a story of gradual embellishment that has been the subject of a long-running controversy.” Which I suppose is a very British way of saying that it’s a bold-face lie that refuses to die. Here, according to the hotel’s history, are the facts:

The story of Austen’s visit first appeared, without any evidence, in a 1905 tourist guide, Highways and Byways, that also asserted, again without evidence, that two of the imaginary places in Pride and Prejudice, Darcy’s estate Pemberley and the village of Lambton, were based on Chatsworth House, home to the Devonshire family for five centuries, and nearby Bakewell. The falsehood got new fuel in 1936, when the Bakewell Council produced a tourist guide that stated that Austen’s locating scenes in Derbyshire was “proof” that she had visited the area in 1811. The author of this dubious claim was the Bakewell town clerk, Vernon Cockerton, who “presumably encouraged by Ernest Wood,” then the owner of The Rutland Arms, identified a specific room in the hotel as the inspiration for an imagined room at an inn in Lambton “even though Austen gave no description of the room, nor of the inn, and nor of the town.”

The account continued: According to Austen scholar Christopher Sandrawich (seriously, could the name be any better?), trouble came in 1958 when noted Austen biographer Elizabeth Jenkins visited The Rutland Arms and was “taken aback” to read the apocryphal story, which by then had been embellished to state that Austen had written part of Pride and Prejudice in her hotel room. Jenkins proceeded to engage in a “heated exchange of letters” with the author of the notice for seven years, finally concluding that “the mischief is spreading like dry-rot.” In 1999, when Jenkins was 93 years old, the committee of The Jane Austen Society sent a letter to the manager of The Rutland Arms Hotel stating that chronological studies of Austen’s life by the society’s scholars confirmed that she did not visit Derbyshire in 1811, nor at any other time, and urged the removal of all references to Austen from the hotel’s promotional materials.” Which has to make you wonder about the timeline in the ladies room that includes an 1811 visit to Bakewell. Still, the then Mayor of Bakewell, along with a local historian named Trevor Brighton agreed with the Jane Austen Society and placed a rebuttal of the story in the revised town guidebook.

Nevertheless, old myths die hard, particularly when everyone wants to keep them alive. Even the official website of Chatsworth House states that “It is believed that Jane Austen may have based her idea of Pemberley on Chatsworth House and written the novel while in Bakewell.” The myth got new life when Chatsworth House was used as Pemberley in the 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, an event that will be celebrated on June 13 and 14, when the Cinema on the South Lawn program at the grand estate features an outdoor showing of the film. (Sorry fans, tickets are long gone).

For me, learning the true story was a disappointment, although the 40-year saga of determined Austen biographer Elizabeth Jenkins was the kind of tale you can’t make up. And the revelation of the Jane Austen Controversy left me skeptical every time I encountered another Derbyshire fact that was “said to be true.” This play between what is real and what we want to be real became a recurrent theme in my upcoming novel Welcome to Murder Week, which contains this exchange that sums up the nature of belief, even when the facts are doing their best to interfere:

“Tell me something about Stanage Edge,” I say. “Is it famous for anything other than being beautiful?”

“Robin Hood hid from the Sheriff of Nottingham there, in a place called Robin Hood’s Cave.”

“Funny coincidence, Robin Hood finding a cave named after himself.”

“Isn’t it though?”

I love the way Dev smiles at me.

“There’s a churchyard in Hathersage with an unusually long grave that’s said to contain the remains of Robin Hood’s gargantuan henchman, Little John.”

“He was real?”

“Probably not. But do you want to visit his grave anyway?”

Using the system set up by my Dutch boss to help his American employees get around the black hole of the Russian postal system, Dot would send books she thought I’d enjoy, as well as those I requested, to a woman in Manhattan named Sarah, who would send mail every week to the Netherlands, where it would go via diplomatic pouch to Moscow. Dot would always include a little note or letter. This, from November 1993, was the first: “Dear Karen — Delighted with your letter about books to Russia. Herewith the Russian Cookbook and Mill on the Floss, which Jane said you wanted, and Dr. Criminale, my suggestion. Charged on your house account.”

It’s a bit of a shock to realize I’m old enough to have had a “house account” anywhere. And I don’t recall asking for or reading Ray Bradbury’s Dr. Criminale, but Bradbury was enormously popular in Soviet times and I may have shared with Dot my embarrassment among Russian friends that I’d never read him.

More memorably, I owe Dot enormous thanks for introducing me to I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, which became a favorite, as well as the 1954 forgotten classic that I think of as that book’s older sister, A Wreath for the Enemy by Pamela Frankau. The latter begins like this:

“I sat still at the table, with the blank paper before me. I went back; I remembered; I thought my way in. It was the sensation of pulling on a diver’s helmet and going down deep.

Presently, on the sea-floor, I began to find lost things; to raise the moods that were mine when I was fourteen years old, sitting in this garden, writing my Anthology of Hates. I would begin there.”

I was working as a newspaper reporter at the time, but I think Dot — a highly perceptive human algorithm — knew that what I really wanted to do was write fiction. Having me read I Capture the Castle (which begins with its 17-year-old narrator writing in her journal while sitting in the kitchen sink) and A Wreath for the Enemy, may have been her way of nudging me along.

Unlike Amazon, with its echo chamber recommendations (You liked Every Summer After? How about Forever Summer? Just for the Summer? It Happened One Summer? That Summer?), Dot’s selections were eclectic. In one note, “I thought you would want to experience Annie Proulx (Pru) if you haven’t already, especially since it’s about a journalist.” And in another: “Also Black Dogs, which I am recommending. Ian McEwan, as you may know, has written some books with violent themes — Cement Garden and Comfort of Strangers. Black Dogs is a departure for him, and very well received. Hope you like it.”

My shipments from Dot were greeted with great joy by fellow ex-pat friends in Moscow. We shared the books with the same fervor with which one winter we passed around the VCR box set of the new (!) BBC Pride and Prejudice starring Colin Firth. At least two of my friends, Lindy and Genine, made pilgrimmages to Burlington Book Shop to meet the legendary Dot.

Sadly, Burlington Book Shop is long gone, as is Dot. Thankfully, though, I have found some other uber-recommenders who, along with my sisters and a few book-loving friends, have an excellent track record in alerting me to books I didn’t know I wanted. Here are a few of these generous, bookish souls. I haven’t met any of them in real life, but am grateful to all of them for enriching my reading.

Sara Hildreth has got to be the most voracious, intelligent, and enthusiastic reader in my orbit (although to be honest, she’s not in my orbit, I’m in hers). A scholar and former high school English teacher, she shares book recommendations and reflections on her very popular substack Fiction Matters (also @fictionmatters on Instagram). Read her for smart reviews of new books, classics, and forgotten treasures, and for her never-snarky, always thoughtful takes on why some books, including highly acclaimed and well-written novels, didn’t work for her.

I can’t possibly keep up with Sara’s reading, but have discovered some real gems here, including In Memoriam, Alice Winn’s debut novel about two young men who fall in love during World War I, and The Feast, Margaret Kennedy’s funny and touching 1950 novel about an eccentric crew of vacationers staying in a cliffside Cornwall Hotel that collapses. Sara is the English teacher I wish I’d had; I highly recommend following her and supporting her work.

I’d love Molly Young’s New York Times newsletter Read Like the Wind even if I didn’t routinely discover great books there. She’s that much fun to read. Each edition recommends only two books, connected by a loose theme, like Two Books About Lovable Unlikeable People. Thanks to Molly, I had the dark pleasure of reading O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker, which Molly drew me to with this pitch: Here we have a novel that has the appearance of a mystery — it starts with a slumped corpse — but not the temperament of one, which turns the reading experience itself into a meta-mystery. (The puzzle being: “What’s the author up to here?”). She also led me to The Red House Mystery by A.A. Milne, which I not only enjoyed but referenced in my own novel, Welcome to Murder Week. Other critics also contribute to the newsletter, which in full disclosure is for Times subscribers only.

The friendliest place on the Internet for books is Instagram, aka Bookstagram, where gazillions of users (including yours truly) share photos and brief reviews of mostly new and upcoming books. Bookstagram is generally an upbeat place where the season’s “big” books get the most play and most users know that it’s bad manners to tag the author in negative reviews. Among my favorite “bookstagrammers” is Deb Coco, otherwise known as @lonestarwords. Deb is a discerning reader and one of the few bookstagrammers who writes about books that she didn’t like as well as those she did. But her reviews are never nasty and always make a case for why the book didn’t work for her and why that same book might work for someone else. Our taste is freakishly similar, so when she loves a book, I know there’s a good chance I will too. When I saw that both Deb Coco and Sara Hildreth raved about Stoneyard Devotional by Charlotte Wood, I knew that I had to read it even though a novel about a woman retreating from the world to a convent in Australia didn’t sound like something I’d like. But reader, guess what? I loved it.

What, you say? A 1947 novel about ordinary people making small acts of rebellion against Hitler is not a cozy book? Granted, it doesn’t meet the usual requirements — that is, a mystery in which the dead body is not bloody and usually off-the-page, and essentially a plot device to get the investigation rolling toward a satisfying conclusion. Typical “cozies” take place in quaint towns populated with quirky people and baked goods. Their titles tend toward the punny, like Killing Me Soufflé by Ellie Alexander and The Quiche of Death by M.C. Beaton.

My own upcoming novel, Welcome to Murder Week, was included in a recent Goodreads round-up of new and upcoming cozy mysteries. I’m happy to be there, even though despite its English village setting and mentions of both sticky toffee pudding and four-and-twenty chicken-and-ham pie, I consider it more “cozy adjacent” than a classic cozy mystery. But that brings me to my point, which is that it’s time we expanded the notion of a cozy book. Much like a so-called beach read, a cozy is often condescended to, considered diverting but fluffy, a book you read without thinking too much and don’t hesitate to leave behind on an airplane.

For me, a cozy book is nothing of the kind. Rather, it’s a book that I am confident will deliver the particular immersive reading experience that I crave at a particular time. It’s a book whose description grabs you because it’s just what the doctor has ordered for that moment in your life. Like some twenty years ago, when my sister Laura and I wandered into a bookstore in the Catskills and discovered a novel that practically shouted to us with its particulars. A former maid to the English aristocracy? Who studied her way to Cambridge? And worked as a battlefield nurse in the Great War? And had just opened a detective agency? It was the first Maisie Dobbs and we were sold. Cozy reading level achieved.

Some of my best cozy reads are repeats that deliver, like the Hawthorne and Horowitz detective series by Anthony Horowitz. Others have called to me from the flap copy. Would I like to read about English boys in boarding school and on the battlefield during World War I? Why, yes I would. And thus I had one of my best cozy reading experiences, losing myself completely in the lyrical, heartbreakingly beautiful In Memoriam by Alice Winn. A cozy read, I believe, should be in the eye of the beholder. For you, it might be Murder by Cheesecake: A Golden Girls Cozy Mystery. For my sister Laura, it’s more likely to be a novel or memoir about a woman breaking away from a restrictive religious community.

These days, I know a lot of people are seeking comfort from their books. Which may or may not mean that they’re looking to escape into some picture-perfect fantasy world. At a time when so much seems out of control and alarming, there’s comfort simply in seeking what you want and getting it. Books, it seems, are one of the few places where such satisfaction can be found.

P.S. If you’re more cozy forward than legit cozy in your reading taste:

Pre-Order Welcome to Murder Week

Not identical, but not bad for beginners. We even made the marzipan, which left me only slightly less proud than having written a novel.

But there was one problem: our other sister, Linda, who lives in Pittsburgh, had terrible FOMO. So we decided that for her birthday, we would choose an even more challenging recipe, also from the Great British Baking Show, and each make it, in our own kitchens, but together on zoom.

We selected Paul Hollywood’s Opera Cake, the recipe for which has 27 steps and requires making a jaconde, which is apparently not a jaunty French parlor dance but a light almond sponge; a chocolate ganache; a French mocha buttercream (the instructions for which call for heating sugar syrup to the “softball stage” — what?); and a chocolate glaze. We’d forgo the tempered chocolate curly-cue decorations. Piece of cake, right? Did I mention that none of us are bakers?

My sisters set a convivial mood from the get-go, organizing a conference call to translate the ingredients into American English (double cream = heavy cream, caster sugar = super fine sugar, etc.) and to together determine what kind of cake frame we needed and what size acetate sheets.

Here I must confess that all of this teamwork made me bristle; wasn’t this going to be a competition? How was I going to win if we were going to be so damned helpful to one another? Maybe it’s a youngest child thing, but clearly my older sisters are not as cut-throat as I am. They’re like those kind souls on the Baking Show who don’t think twice about helping the frantic baker on their right get that last spun-sugar web onto her floating island before the clock runs out. So un-American.

At two p.m. on Sunday, I had my mise en place en place and was ready to go.

The first step — a coffee syrup — was easy. We put it to chill. Next was the chocolate ganache, which sounds mysterious and sophisticated (maybe to justify high prices at le patisserie?) but is nothing but heated cream poured over dark chocolate chips with some butter tossed in to give it a high gloss. Trés belle, oui?

Then the jaconde, also not complicated, unless of course you read too fast, which I tend to do, and don’t realize that you’re not supposed to put all the sugar in with the almond flour, but save some for the whipped egg whites. Throwing out the batch and starting my jaconde again at least left me feeling like a bonafide contestant on the baking show.

Got my sponge in the oven only a little behind my sisters and was feeling pretty good, until I realized I’d not only not gently folded in the melted butter, I hadn’t put the butter in at all. But neither had Linda, which lifted my spirits. We decided it didn’t matter; our jaconde would be the low-fat version. Problem solved.

Side note: My 89-year-old mother, watching all of this on Zoom, was both riveted and impressed, though in full disclosure she’s never watched a real cooking show and hasn’t baked anything since 1972 when she made us a big batch of “health food cookies,” chocolate chip cookies that included a handful each of oatmeal and wheat germ. We, in turn, were impressed that she’d managed to log onto zoom and could both see us and hear us.

Next up, the French buttercream. Heating sugar syrup to precisely 241 degrees Fahrenheit was a challenge for me because I realized that my ancient candy thermometer didn’t work and a challenge for Linda because she couldn’t find hers. I googled “softball stage” and learned that you’ve reached it when your sugar syrup forms into malleable balls when a bit is dropped into cold water. This worked for me but not for Linda, which left her with runny buttercream and a do-over. Mine was grand, but oh my god, so much butter. Don’t ever look it up; trust me, you don’t want to know.

Now, the assembly. Cutting the sponge cake into three pieces for each layer was easy. The rest, not so much. However much we lack baking skills, we have even greater deficiency in mechanics. How to make a collapsible baking frame not collapse? Scotch tape helped, sort of. How to line it with sheets of acetate? Greasing the frame helped, sort of. But once I had the frame positioned in the right size, how did I get a layer of sponge coated in chocolate go chocolate-side down into the frame? Fortunately, my son Johnny arrived from Brooklyn in time for his youthful mind to see the obvious: put the sponge cake down and then put the frame on top of it. Genius. After that, the layering was easy. Cake, coffee syrup, ganache, chill, buttercream, repeat. Twice.

Here’s my framed cake, ready to chill. Beside it is the little Operetta Cake that Johnny constructed from scraps. Pardon the aged baking sheet.

By the time our cakes were in the fridge to set, we had been at this for more than three hours and were exhausted. We limped through the final step, making and applying a chocolate glaze, which required the weirdest ingredient of all, liquid glucose.

Thankfully, we had some zoom drop-ins to revive us: my son Joe in San Francisco, Laura’s son Stephen in Melbourne, Australia, and her son Ben, from a car somewhere in Arkansas. They and Johnny were witnesses to the unveilings, the results of which impressed the three sisters more than the four sons. I had thought my layers were pretty even, but soon realized it was like that challenge when you march in place with your eyes closed and are 100 percent confident that you’re staying in the same spot until you open your eyes and realize you’ve traveled clear across the room. See what I mean?

Laura’s layers, it pains me to admit, look better.

Linda didn’t take a photograph of hers, but I choose to believe that none of us got the layering-evenly gene and that her Opera Cake looked as wonky as ours. We all agreed our cakes were tasty, though maybe the ganache was overpowering the mocha buttercream. My husband tried some and gave me a handshake, but he’s no Paul Hollywood. The only time he ever made a cake from scratch was for my birthday when we lived in Moscow and a friend who saw the result said, “Is that a meat loaf?”

Laura was happier with the results than I was, which I think was more about me than our cakes. I loved the challenge, but I’m not sure I’m a fancy cake person. I’m more likely to swoon over a crème brûlée, an apple tarte tartin, or even a brownie.

Linda’s guests declared her cake scrumptious, but she was disappointed in her buttercream. And ever the eldest sister, she’s determined to get it right. She just texted me that she’s going to tackle the recipe again today. She needs the distraction and plans to give some to all her friends who need cheering up. As well she should. Because whatever the question, the answer may well be cake. Even if it doesn’t look anything like this:

When I was younger and more insecure, this dichotomy between my husband’s reading habits and mine worried me. Were we doomed because he hadn’t read Jane Eyre and I’ll never read the five volumes of Churchill’s World War II memoirs that he was finishing when we met? Would I be haunted forever by couples like Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, who are each other’s first readers and literary soulmates? Isn’t that what I wanted, or should want? My future husband must love me, I thought, and he must love the things I love.

One night before we got engaged, I put him to the test. I suggested we watch the 1940 Alfred Hitchcock version of one of my favorite novels, Rebecca. The film, though not totally faithful to Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 gothic classic, was uncannily how I’d imagined the book when I first read it as a young teenager. I wanted — nay, I needed — my then-boyfriend to love the film too.

As we watched, I watched him. Did he chuckle at Mrs. Van Hopper popping bon-bons like they were peanuts? Did he wince when the nameless young protagonist, played with excruciating wimpiness by Joan Fontaine, accepts the world’s worst marriage proposal — I’m asking you to marry me, you little fool — from wealthy widower Max de Winter? Was he nervous as the young bride tip-toed around Manderley, her intimidatingly grand new home, and creeped out by the housekeeper’s obsession with Rebecca, the mysteriously deceased first Mrs. de Winter?

The film progressed and my boyfriend watched with no complaints. But I wasn’t sure if he was humoring me — until that long-awaited moment when the “little fool” who’d married Max de Winter pushed back against the housekeeper’s constant reminders of how the late Mrs. de Winter had run the estate. Dowdy clothes be damned, our young protagonist was standing up for herself, declaring “I’m Mrs. de Winter now!” It was a climactic moment in the movie and in my apartment too, because there was my boyfriend, up from the couch and punching his fist in the air with a triumphant “Yes!” And I knew that this was a man I could marry.

More than thirty years later, I know I was right — but not for the reasons I thought. My husband still hasn’t read Jane Eyre and I’ve yet to crack open Churchill’s memoirs. We are compatible in many ways, but our literary taste isn’t one of them. Do I sometimes wish we’d read and loved the same books? I do, but my husband is a great thinker and there’s lots to talk about even if he’s not my go-to for parsing whether I was right to give up on A Little Life. And while there are films and television shows we both love, neither of us bemoans the fact that most of what I watch when he isn’t around involves British accents.

I like telling the story of my Rebecca litmus test, but it seems a little foolish when I flip the script. I imagine how I would have felt if he’d made a litmus test for me and I hadn’t risen to the occasion, if he’d said “you’re telling me you don’t love Cassidy by the Grateful Dead? Adios, sweetheart.”

The author Jennifer Egan said in an interview that when she first read Rebecca at age 11, she was so troubled and distracted by the novel that her mother begged her to stop reading it “which was completely out of the question.” She looks back on that reading experience as having helped her define her chief literary purpose as a writer, to provide “an almost helpless immersion into another world.” She said: “Whether or not I’m working in a specific genre, my goal is always to envelop readers in an environment so compelling that it pulls them away from their real lives.”

I bring this up not to let Jennifer Egan lend weight to my argument for Rebecca (though I believe it does), but because it reminds me that what kind of art compels us, and pulls us beautifully out of our own lives, is deeply personal. While a shared sensibility in this way can be the basis of a burgeoning relationship, the lack of one does not spell doom. What matters more is having a passion for something — and one for each other.

Do you and your romantic partner share reading tastes? If so, how has that enhanced your life? And if not, does it matter?

Here, then, are some suggestions for unusual gifts that will make those difficult-to-please bibliophile friends think you do know them after all! I’ve scoured my bookshelves near and far to find them, but you should be able to locate copies on the usual book-selling websites, as well as abeBooks, alibris, and etsy.

The Wicked Wit of Winston Churchill by Dominique Enright.

Who knew Winston Churchill could be so silly? On a tour of Africa in 1907, his assessment: So fari- so goodi!

Most of the famed statesman’s bon mots were considerably more sophisticated and also lethally witty. President John F. Kennedy, granting Churchill U.S. citizenship in 1963, said that “Churchill mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.” And so he did, though with the kind of erudite and understated politesse the British manage so well. When interrupted by a political rival, Churchill said (or is said to have said; apparently not all of his famous sayings can be confirmed), “I do not challenge the honourable gentleman when the truth leaks out of him from time to time.”

Are there some offensive things in here, about women and foreigners? Of course there are. But we’re not going to cancel Winston Churchill, are we? Be prepared, however, that if you give this gift, some of the zingers might be directed back at you.

With a Book in My Hand by Celia Summer

Before it was a Club Monaco, a Lulu Lemon, or a Sephora, the Beaux Arts beauty at 597 Fifth Avenue in New York City housed a bookstore — and not just any bookstore, but the Scribner Book Store, a place so legendary that Celia Summer, who worked as a bookseller there in the 1960s and ‘70s, saw fit to chronicle her time there in a memoir, With a Book in My Hand. Summer reveals herself to be bookish (obviously), a little bit stodgy, and very star-struck. She includes encounters, in person and via letters, with the likes of Shirley MacClaine, Katherine Hepburn, E.B. White and many others, and includes nearly a whole page on the day the movie star Liv Ullmann, shooting a film outside in the cold, came into the store during a break, sat on a stool, and read Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

This is a book for the true bookstore aficianado and the lover of old New York literary lore, no matter how mundane. Summer writes about the famous customers, the authors she corresponded with, the book parties she attended (so many book parties!) and her co-workers, including two employees who “could turn on a British accent with complete aplomb…tell a customer to see the ‘clark’ on the balcony….refer customers to the ‘belle lettres’ section.” She even includes the complete text of a speech “Who Buys Books and Why” that she delivered at a publisher’s advertising luncheon. In this, she shares her rules for dealing with customers. First on the list? “Be careful not to inject derogatory remarks about a book. The customer could be a relative of the author himself.”

Take Forty Eggs: A Comprehensive Guide to Cookery and Household Mismanagement by Basil Collier and Helen Kapp

I found this gem in a used bookshop in London and loved it so much I included mention of it in The Last Book Party. The humor (or should I say humour?) in this 1938 satirical book is more loopy than sophisticated. For example, the Appendix on Etiquette includes this entry on Dropping In To Tea:

“One’s course of action will depend on what drops into the tea. If it is a macaroon or piece of cake the incident should be ignored. If it is an object belonging to a guest, such as an eyeglass, he should be quietly handed a spoon with which to retrieve it. If it is the guest himself, a croissant or any similar trifle should be thrown in after him to sustain him until a substantial meal can be prepared.”

This is your go-to gift for your bookish, Anglophile, foodie friend. I mean, look at these drawings; how can you resist?

The Little Book of Venom, compiled by Jennifer Higgie

Speaking of Winston Churchill (see above), let’s hope that he could take it as well as he could dish it out. Because this collection of history’s cruelest insults and put-downs includes this zinger that British socialite and author Margot Asquith said about Churchill: “He would kill his own mother just so that he could use her skin to make a drum to beat his own praises.” Ouch.

Ironically, I found this venomous book in a charming used bookstore in Fort Bragg, California, and had a lot of fun in the car sharing some of these historic barbs with my family. The section on writers is particularly long and made me wonder why we think of the British as so polite. Their barbs here are brutal and very plentiful. This one, said by and about two of my favorite writers, left me in a state of apopletic confusion:

“I wish her characters would talk a little less like the heroes and heroines of police reports.” —- George Eliot, on Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre.

Then again, it also includes Alice James (American diarist and sister of Henry James) on George Eliot: “A fungus of pendulous shape.” Which is really a low-blow and some unnecessary fat-shaming.

Give this one to a friend or keep it for yourself. Either way, you might want to skip the chapter On Men, Women, Love, and Marriage. Too many insults from men, too much misogyny - although there is this one, attributed to Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, the Marquise de Sévigné: “The more I see of men, the more I admire dogs.”

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

This one, sadly, is not from my own collection. This is what I’d buy for myself if I were swimming in money: a first edition of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca with original dust wrapper and inscribed by du Maurier to her favorite governess. The inscription reads “Tod, with love from Daphne. July 1938."

It could be yours to give to a Rebecca-loving friend (and seriously, do you have friends who don’t love Rebecca?) for $40,000. Let me finish by saying that 1) it’s still November, so not technically too late to get me a present for my November 20th birthday and 2) Hanukkah starts on December 25.

Happy shopping!

The Cazalet Chronicles is a series of five books, written between 1990 and 2013, that trace the fortunes of an upper-middle-class English family starting in 1937. One critic hailed the first volume, The Light Years, as “a wonderful old stuffed sofa of a book,” which I guess is a very nice way of saying that it’s transporting in the coziest of ways. But don’t mistake these books as fluff. Hilary Mantel, who called the Cazalet Chronicles “panoramic, expansive, intriguing as social history and generous in their storytelling,” said that there was no author she’d recommended more often than Elizabeth Jane Howard. She wrote:

“Why should I care, some readers ask, about the trials of the affluent? But readers who do not care about rich characters do not care about poor ones either. Howard’s novels can be resisted by those who see the surface and find it bourgeois. They can be resisted by those who do not like food, or cats, or children, or ghosts, or the pleasures of pinpoint accuracy in observation of the natural or manufactured world: by those who turn a cold shoulder to the recent past. But they are valued by those open to their charm, their intelligence and their humour, who can listen to messages from a world with different values from ours.”

Need I say more?

I can’t remember if my sister Laura discovered these novels and shared them with me or if I found them first, but either way, we devoured them and didn’t want them to end. Here’s our copy of The Light Years, which has been residing on my book shelf since we read it decades ago. The pages are crinkled, no doubt from having been devoured in the bath (as good as an old stuffed couch any day).

I can’t wait to tell Laura what was announced today: Howard’s niece, the author Louisa Young, will write the sixth, seventh, and eighth volumes of the Cazalet Chronicles, picking up the saga in Christmas 1962 and traveling through the following two decades. The books will be published by Mantle, the imprint of Pan Macmillan that publishes the original Cazalet books. It’s a daunting task, but Young seems like she may be up to the task: she’s not only lived with the Cazalet characters all her life, but is the author of 15 books, including the novel Baby Love, which was longlisted for the Orange prize for fiction (now the Women’s prize),

The first (or sixth) book, The Golden Hours, will be published in September 2026, which gives you less than a year to read the first five books. I promise you’ll be done with them way before you want to be.

Have you read the Cazalet Chronicles? Can you recommend any other “wonderful old stuffed sofa” books? The need is vast, so please share in the comments!

Which is why this week, I’m returning to an old reliable which draws me in with the first words: There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.

And there I am, as cocooned as Jane Eyre herself tucked into a window seat and hidden by scarlet drapes, the rain outside lashing in a constant thrum. I am one hundred percent with this wronged child who inherently knows her worth and finds her voice, even when she trembles to speak.

Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre was maligned as immoral and anti-Christian in its day (how dare Jane choose herself?) and in our own era as anti-feminist (how dare she choose Mr. Rochester/the patriarchy?). But nevertheless, Jane Eyre persists. It’s what I chose on a steamy day in Florida when I had the flu, when I was homesick in Moscow and chanced upon a Russian edition for sale at a street kiosk, and what I found myself reading yet again when my husband gave me a copy of this gorgeous edition:

It’s the perfect novel for these times, both because of Jane’s inherent sense of self-worth despite the world telling her otherwise (“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will”) and because the broody mood and dramatic plot combine into a powerful force against doom-scrolling. This week, distraction is not enough; I need immersion. I need stormy weather, candle-lit rooms, spooked horses, weird noises from the attic, betrayal, despair, long-lost relatives, a surprise inheritance, and a resolution propelled by a sudden and inexplicable feeling.

I’m well aware that reading a 19th century novel is not everyone’s idea of a vacation, but if you’re looking to give your brain a break from the calamity of U.S. politics, I’m telling you to give it a try. If you can’t take time to read an entire book, there are some good film adaptations. My favorite Jane is Mia Wasikowska in the 2011 version, though you’ll have to tolerate (irony intended) a much too handsome Mr. Rochester in Michael Fassbender.

I’ll be pairing my reading with a British delicacy that may be my favorite dessert of all time: sticky toffee pudding. While I can’t remember the first time I read Jane Eyre, I definitely remember my first sticky toffee pudding. It was at the Rutland Arms Hotel in Bakewell, England, and it was nearly too stupendously delicious to be considered comfort food. Nearly.

Many swear by Nigella Lawson’s version, which I tried recently (very yummy) thanks to my friend Lindy, who flew in from London last month with this best-ever house gift:

If you don’t have black treacle, dark molasses is a good substitute. You can also take the shortcut of buying a surprisingly scrumptious single-serving of this fabulous dessert from The Sticky Toffee Pudding Company, which was started in Texas by a British ex-pat and is available throughout the country, including at many Costco and Whole Foods stores.

This one is ready to eat after a mere 14 seconds in the microwave, which will leave you with plenty of time this week to help save democracy.

And then, a few weeks before my departure, I chanced upon this sly little book.

With absurdly clever text by Maureen Johnson and delightfully creepy drawings by Jay Cooper, this book made me realize that what had drawn me to the English countryside all along wasn’t only charm, it was also crime. For as much as my idea of the English countryside came from the Brontës and Austen (all those young women taking brisk walks that left mud on their hems and color in their cheeks), it was no less influenced by Miss Marple, Sidney Chambers, DCS Foyle, and Agatha Raisin. And there it all was, brilliantly parodied, in this little book, which begins with a warning: “You will not know you are in a Murder Village, as they look like all other villages. When you arrive in Shrimpling or Pickles-in-the-Woods or Wombat-on-Sea or wherever it is, there will be no immediate sign of danger. This is exactly the problem. You are already in the trap.”

Beware, the authors cautioned, you never know where you’ll encounter the archetypes.

And so I found myself in England’s Peak District with both Charlotte Bronte and Agatha Christie on my shoulder. What was delightful might also be dastardly. Why was the bus driver so red-faced and jolly? Could he be over-compensating? And what about the smarmy guide who toured us through Chatsworth House? Why did he describe this baby carriage decorated with snakes with such lascivious glee?

What if there wasn’t a way out of the garden maze?

By the time I returned from England, I was steeped in the tropes of British village mysteries. Writing one, I thought, might be fun. And I sorely needed fun.

I’d just received a round of rejections on a different novel, a rebuff that bummed me out, but didn’t completely surprise me. That novel, which sits in the proverbial desk drawer (aka deep in my Microsoft word documents), was set in Russia and drew on my experiences working in Moscow in the 1990s. Location may be everything in real estate, but for books, timing rules. And pitching a Russia book only a few months after the invasion of Ukraine was the essence of bad timing.

It wasn’t easy starting something new. Which is why the operating principle behind writing my next novel had to be have fun. If I was going to spend the next year or two working on a novel, one that I now knew from experience might not get published, I had to make sure that I had a good time doing it. I wanted to entertain myself and entertain readers, write the kind of a novel that goes down easy, but confounds you with a heartfelt mystery, makes you laugh and lose track of time, and feel both sad and deeply satisfied when you get to the last page. I wanted to write with the same playful freedom as when I was fifteen and wrote a parody of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca while taking a bubble bath. And lo and behold, I now knew that fun was spelled: M-U-R-D-E-R.

The result is Welcome to Murder Week, which comes out on June 10, 2025.

It’s about Cath Little, 34, who travels to England after she discovers tickets her late mother had purchased for a murder mystery simulation in a village in the Peak District. Teaming up with two mystery-loving cottage-mates—Wyatt Green, forty, who works unhappily in his husband’s birding store, and Amity Clark, fifty, a divorced romance writer struggling with her novels—Cath sets about solving the “crime” and along the way begins to unravel shocking truths about her mother.  Amidst a fling—or something more—with a handsome local maker of artisanal gin, Cath and her fellow sleuths find that their week of fake murder helps them navigate some very real crossroads in their own lives.

That’s the description and here is the cover! (Go to my instagram @karendukess for a delightful animated trailer of sorts).

Sure, there’s murder in the title, but you can tell at a glance that this book is not going to give you nightmares. And it’s already available for pre-order!

Pre-Order Welcome to Murder Week

Get yourself a copy and I promise you a murderously good time.

If I hadn’t indulged in that method, I never would have written Welcome to Murder Week, which will be published in June by Scout Press. Here’s how it went for me:

In October 2022, when my second novel was about to go out on submission, I knew that the best way to survive the waiting period was to start another novel. But I had no idea what I wanted to write about next. Fortunately, I had a vacation planned before I had to get serious, before I assumed I’d get an idea once I had my Butt in Chair.

My sister Laura and I traveled to the English countryside, where we spent a week in a cottage in the village of Bakewell, spending our days walking the footpaths of the Peak District, visiting tea shoppes and medieval castles, crossing fields dotted with lazy-eyed sheep, moaning with delight over sticky toffee pudding, eating fish and chips in cozy pubs, and failing to understand the appeal of warm beer. The entire trip put me in a surprisingly giddy mood; not only was my sister excellent company, but I couldn’t help feeling like I had wandered into the pages of my favorite English novels. So this is what moors are like, damp and mushy! Jane Eyre must have been even more miserable than I’d imagined when she fell to the ground, sobbing and wet. Here I am giving it a go myself:

I was like a history nerd bubbling with excitement to finally walk where momentous events had taken place, but I was roaming in fictional worlds. I couldn’t help but see the English countryside through the lens of what I’d consumed from novels and films and television shows. And not only from dramatizations of great literature and Masterpiece Mystery. No less exciting than walking the “Jane Eyre Trail” was meeting a real-life “car park attendant,” an occupation we’d only heard of on The Great British Baking Show.

By the time I came home, I knew I wanted to write about Americans in the English countryside stumbling as they try to discern what’s right in front of them from what they think they’re seeing because of the books they’ve read. An idea that never would have occurred to me if I hadn’t gotten out of my office and spent a week thinking about everything but what I might write next.

Yes, the actual plot was hammered out with my butt in the chair, but this experience reminded me that inspiration — just like it can happen during a long shower or on a long walk — often comes not from writing, but from living.

Can you see the muse swirling around me in the wind? (That’s Laura on the right).

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