I’ve been thinking a lot about how we talk about books. I’ve also been thinking a lot about how we talk about books on social media then how we really talk about books in the group chat.

Speaking as someone who’s just DNF-ed two of autumn’s biggest books - Sophie, Standing There by Meg Mason (paid link) after one chapter and a book I was longing to love, Audrey Niffenegger’s Life Out Of Order, (paid link) which took me a week to read 250 pages before I realised that I just didn’t care about any of the characters - I think there should be space for conversations about the books we didn’t love.

As a book reviewer for Red Magazine for ten years, I only reviewed books that I enjoyed/and or thought that our readers would enjoy. Print space is limited so why waste that valuable real estate on a book that I hated? However, when I first started reviewing for Red I wanted to set my stall out and begin proceedings with a bit of a bang. I also had the freedom of writing two book related pieces of content each month for Red Online so I wrote a blistering review of A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (paid link,) because it was already a massive bestseller and Booker longlisted so I figured my review wasn’t going to matter one way or another.

Much as I’d hate read the book but couldn’t put it down, it was also so much fun to really drill down on why I detested it so much. (Not so much fun when I had a meeting with the PanMac publicity department a week later, let me tell you.)

Other books that I’ve read all the way through and really hated? Take a bow, Tolstoy’s classic of Russian literature, Anna Karenina (paid link.) It took me 364 days - an actual year! - to read as I used the very handy but now defunct Daily Lit to send me a 1000 word chunk every morning.

This meant that as I munched on my toast, I read my daily instalment of Anna Karenina and ensured I’d start the day in a bad mood. Because, I feel this so strongly, in my very marrow, Anna Karenina is just not a good book. Not objectively. Not subjectively.

I won’t summarise the whole plot for you (we’d be here for another 364 days) but it’s about a married woman, Anna Karenina, who has an affair with a younger man called Vronsky. Then there’s a young woman called Kitty, who was in love with Vronsky and when she realises that he doesn’t love her, she goes into such a decline that she nearly dies. She doesn’t die though, instead she marries this insufferable bore called Levin, who the majority of the novel is really about. All four of these characters (and pretty much the other 900 characters in the book) are utter idiots who make terrible life decisions simply from misinterpreting another character’s facial expressions.

There is so much waffle. Before I even started it, people warned me to “skip the farming bits.” Then there were the bits about how the peasants were lumbering beasts who didn’t deserve to be elevated to a higher status. Then they were the bits about religion that were worse than all the other bits.

I tweeted (remember the halcyon days of Twitter) a lot as I read it (I liked to share the misery) and, without fail, there’d always be someone to tell me that the waffly bits were the best bits and that they shouldn’t be skipped. Or that they’d read Anna Karenina when they were eighteen and it was still their favourite novel, which has to be a lie and a waste of being eighteen.

Why did I persist for a whole year with a book that drove me to teeth-grinding frustration? Well, three reasons. Firstly, it was my fourth attempt to read Anna Karenina (those Russian names got the better of my every time) and I hate to be a quitter. Secondly, I foolishly announced my decision to finally read Anna Karenina when I appeared as a guest on the much loved and sadly missed Backlisted podcast and again, I’m not a quitter and thirdly, I kept waiting for Anna Karenina to reveal its magic to me because there had to be reason why it was a classic and why so many people claim that it’s their favourite book ever. Instead, I spent a whole year reading a book which I didn’t enjoy and I certainly didn’t become a better person for reading it.

This is why I am a great believer in and advocate for reading for pleasure. People should enjoy reading rather than feeling that reading is a chore or an obligation or should be an improving occupation. Like so many of us, I get apoplectic when the serious newspapers post their One Hundred Books That Everyone Should Read lists (always full of the pale, male and stale.) Or those We Asked Ten Up Themselves Cultural Trendsetters What Book They’re Taking On Holiday and it’s always some really pretentious novel or nonfiction polemic and never “You know what? I fancied rereading Rivals (paid link),” or “I can’t wait to read the latest Robert Harris.” I also get very cross but mostly sad when people confess to me that they’re embarrassed that they’ve never read the Classics or refer to the books they love to read as “guilty pleasures.”

There should never be anything guilty about something that brings you pleasure (unless you are literally breaking the law.) People think I’m very well read because I read really quickly and I’ve been around the sun many times, which means I’ve read A LOT OF BOOKS. I’m also extremely knowledgeable about my particular area of expertise; novels written during and about 1918 to 1945 by or about ladies of a certain age. Angela Thirkell, Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth J Howard, Dodie Smith et al. I sometimes think that I’m single-handedly keeping Persephone Books and Virago Modern Classics afloat.

We all talk a really good game about the books we loved or the books we pretend that we’ve loved but are very quiet about the other books. The books we really don’t want to read or really didn’t love. I don’t mind going first. I haven’t read Charles Dickens, apart from an unfortunate experience with Great Expectations (paid link) at school that put me off him for life. I’ve plodded through the greatest hits of Jane Eyre (paid link) and Wuthering Heights (paid link) but I haven’t read anything else by the Brontës, because I much prefer the elegant wit and repressed yearning of Jane Austen.

I refuse to read, on principle, writers who don’t use speechmarks – don’t even get me started on that one. I would rather have a root canal without an anaesthetic than read sci-fi and/or horror. I’ve read none of the Booker longlist. I will read The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley (paid link) when it comes out in paperback but I won’t read any of the others and yes, I know that May We Feed The King (paid link) is meant to be transcendental and life-changing but my life is fine just as it is. And while we’re on the topic of things I haven’t read, I did fifty pages of Yesteryear (paid link) and then asked a friend who’d finished it to hit me with the headlines.

There are so many books I haven’t read though BookStack and Bookstagram and the serious papers’ reviews pages tell me I should. Why? Because I just don’t want to. But if you want to read any or all of these books, then you won’t hear me complaining. You do you.

I’ll tell you what I do read. Yes, there are all those between the wars novels from lady novelists and yes I’ve read and enjoyed (who knew that George Eliot was so funny?) Middlemarch (paid link) but you can’t have the yin without the yang. The rainbow without the rain. I’m also someone who’s been radicalised by Kindle Unlimited and see trigger warnings as a shopping list of kinks that I might well enjoy. When I die, one of my friends is under strict instructions to break into my house and burn my Kindle.

I devour Regency romances, the smuttier the better (paid link.) I’ve read Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild so many times, easily two hundred, that when I reread it, it’s more like I’m reciting it from memory. A week without a romcom is a week wasted - I’m currently reading this (paid link) - and there’s few things I love more than a really juicy, really scandalous celebrity biography (paid link).

I figure that I have between thirty to forty good reading years still ahead of me. I read about two books a week. There’s fifty two weeks in a year. Which means, I’ll only get to read approximately another 3,700 books (including rereads.) I’m no longer going to waste valuable reading time on books that don’t spark joy.

So, read what you want to read and not what you feel that you should read. DNF at will. It’s OK if you don’t like the book that everyone else is raving about. It’s also OK to read a book that is only lowkey enjoyable and leaves no lasting impression and a few weeks later, you’d be hard pressed to even remember the title.

Read for pleasure, read for enjoyment and, above all, read like there’s no one else watching.

My latest novel, The Love Library, an enemies-to-lovers literary romcom, shows just how well read I am but also how many spicy books I’ve devoured and is out now. (paid link)

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In an ideal world, writing and publishing schedules would be arranged so that novels are always written during the corresponding season. Alas, the world is not ideal.

It is currently mid-August in London, there’s an Amber extreme heat warning in place, the temperature is edging towards thirty eight degrees and I am not having fun. In fact, I’m questioning my life choices as I have spent the better part of the day hunched over my laptop which is protesting loudly, sweat stinging my eyes despite the fan aimed right at my face as I write the second book in my new spy romcom series (paid link,) which is set in February in the northern most part of Norway. My heroine Kylie is so cold that she can’t feel her toes and like the Inuits of the Canadian Arctic, I have had to come up with many different variations on the word snow.

In an even more ideal world, a writer would earn enough money that they could simply decamp to colder or warmer climes as the muse dictates. But grim reality and my bank account begs to differ so in order to write seasonally accurate novels, I’ve learned how to fake it.

Just as I’m currently writing a winter-set novel during a heatwave, I’ve also had to do it the other way round. My previous novel but one, The Last Days Of Summer (paid link), is set, not surprisingly, during the summer season. It begins in June in London, when the city’s inhabitants swelter and sweat in old, badly ventilated buildings and no one has air conditioning. It is not for the fainthearted. The largest part of the novel takes place during the August Bank Holiday weekend, which falls on the last weekend in August, in a big house on the Sussex coast in South England, near Brighton.

I started my first draft on the 10^th of September, when I could remember all too clearly the very recent bank holiday weekend. I finished that draft on the 18^th December, cuddled up to the radiator, in a gigantic fleece hoodie and celebrated with a mince pie. Summer was but a dim and distant memory and I wondered if I’d ever see the sun again.

This is how I did it.

1. Think of the season as a plot device

The Last Days Of Summer isn’t just a novel set during summer; it’s a novel about the summer. Starting in June when the potential and promise of the season to come stretches temptingly in the distance and finishing on the last Monday in August, “when birds are ready to fly south for the winter and the new school uniform hangs on the wardrobe door.” The ephemeral nature of the summer, moving from bright, sunny days to chilly mornings and the dying of the light, underpins the entire premise of The Last Days Of Summer. I let the season dictate and drive both plot and pace and really leaned into any symbolism I could. Dreamy, romantic scenes happen in the soft, hazy heat. There are steamy encounters on sticky, sultry nights and a furious, world-tilting, third act argument on a windswept, rain soaked beach.

2. Be a time traveller

So much of being a writer for me is being able to access not just superficial, surface memories but to burrow down and mine those memories which feel very specific to me. I spent a lot of time thinking about the many summers of my life. Of childhood daytrips to Southend On Sea; sandwiches brought from home, crunchy after being clutched in sand-encrusted hands, and my mother slathering me with suntan lotion like she was buttering up a chicken for Sunday lunch. I remembered my student years in Brighton when I lived just around the corner from the seafront with its railings painted a soft pastel blue and the delicious wafting aroma of fresh doughnuts from the stall on the Palace Pier. And of course, no memories of a British summer are complete without remembering the many hours spent shivering in a Victorian era shelter (a ubiquitous feature on most UK seafronts) while the rain came down and the wind howled. These might be my memories but I hope there is a universality to them that will spark recognition in a reader.

3. Fool the senses

Without going totally method and gorging on ice cream and zingy fresh salads when all I wanted to eat was a thick, hearty soup then cake, there were other ways to channel sunny, summery thoughts. A summer playlist to listen to when I wasn’t writing (the writing occurs in deathly silence) was a no brainer. Yes, of course it had Taylor Swift’s “August” on it but it was First Aid Kit’s poignant, evocative “Stay Gold” which became the novel’s unofficial theme tune.

I think smell is always the most powerful tool to summon a mood. I never open my laptop until I’ve spritzed myself with a fancy fragrance from my current perfume rotation. While I was writing The Last Days Of Summer, I almost exclusively wore Annick Goutal’s iconic citrussy Eau D’Hadrien, which is essentially a Sicilian lemon grove in a bottle. I also always have a scented candle burning (I am so bougie) and again, went for summery scents that invoked meadow flowers and English country gardens. There was also a bottle of Ambre Solaire suncream on my desk to whiff when I needed an instant hit of inspiration.

4. It’s OK to use Google

I am great at writing big, sexy, messy emotional romances. I expect readers to cry at least once while reading any book I’ve written. I live for snappy banter. I pride myself on my spicy scenes. For everything else, there’s google. The thing I find most difficult as a writer is what I call “the nature stuff.” I’m not a botanist, so I will absolutely put the words “flowers native to Sussex late August” in the search box. As we all know, British days also lengthen and shorten dramatically depending on the season. Again, I’m a writer, not a meteorologist, so I will happily G

oogle sunrise and sunset times, average amount of rainfall and daily temperature, and will absolutely not feel guilty about it. (Also, just to add, when I say Google, I mean Google. Apart from Google’s infernal AI review, AI does not feature in my writing, in any way, shape or form. I can not stress that enough.)

5. Don’t sweat the sweaty stuff

I never send off a manuscript until I have a competent third draft, at the very least. My first draft is concerned with getting the story down and hitting all the emotional beats. The second draft involves a lot of heavy lifting as I figure out everything that’s wrong with plot, structure, and characterisation. Then I always describe the third draft as sprinkling on the magic dust. As well as making each line sing to the best of my ability, this is also where I add texture and patina and all the little details that really capture time, place and feeling. So it was on the third draft of The Last Days Of Summer where I did most of the work to transform it into not just a summer-set novel but a novel where the summer sun was baked into every page.

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My latest novel, The Love Library, an enemies-to-lovers literary romcom, isn’t very seasonal but it is out now and is also an excellent summer read. (paid link)

I read these books a month or so ago before succumbing to a reading slump, the likes of which I have rarely known. I haven’t been able to settle to anything other than torrid and problematic Mills&Boons from the early 80’s and now I’m bored with them too. I’ve started and discarded so many books and largely, it was me and not them. (Though sometimes it was very much them and not me.) Even a backlist Annabel Monaghan title couldn’t pull me out. I don’t even want to read any dark mafia romance and I can’t wait for this slump to be gone. In the meantime…

A Fatal Legacy by Charlotte Vassell

The fourth book in this brilliant police procedural series (paid link,) which far too many people are sleeping on. DI Caius Beauchamp, of Irish Jamaican descent, is on the hunt for the killer of a fusty academic in his fusty and macabre museum in Camden. This isn’t just a very deft, very twisty crime novel, these books use the whodunnit to ask the why and the why is about the state of the nation; class, politics, society. Which sounds very grandiose but never fear, this book, and the whole series, is exquisitely funny and keenly observed, I love the piss-takey vibe between Caius and his team, Matt and Amy, and even with his girlfriend, Callie who he clearly adores. If you’re looking for a little reading project this summer, then this (so far) four book series is the perfect candidate. Also you will fall in love with Caius, who is second only to Josh Derwent when it comes to my detective book boyfriends. (I think they’d respect each other but not like each other.)

Buy A Fatal Legacy here (paid link)

Everything She Didn’t Say by Jane Casey

Talking of DI Josh Derwent (fans self,) his creator Jane Casey gives us, sadly, not another book featuring Maeve Kerrigan and Josh (paid link,) but a standalone, Everything She Didn’t Say, which happily, is the most fiendish of thrillers. Set mostly in rural Ireland, there is a bloody crime scene at a desolate house but no body and a traumatised woman, Ruth, who claims to have been staying there with her friend, Maura. Where is Maura? Who is Maura? Does Maura even exist? You’ll tear through this book, desperate to know the truth, and when the last almighty twist reveals itself, you’ll wish that you’d taken it more slowly and savoured every page. This is a writer at the peak of her powers.

Buy Everything She Didn’t Say here (paid link)

The Shampoo Effect by Jenny Jackson

I really loved Jenny Jackson’s debut Pineapple Street (paid link) and in this second novel, she continues with one of my favourite niche literary sub-genres, monied people behaving lowkey terribly in an East Coast setting. (I said it was niche!) The Shampoo Effect is set in a small New England town where literary nepo baby Caroline scores a writer in residence gig and falls in love with Van, a crunchy granola, outdoorsy dude, which means she has to hang out with his insufferable friend group, including the beautiful Bailey, Van’s FWB who just so happens to be PWHC, (pregnant with his child.) Told from the POV of the women, Bailey, Augusta and Fran who are both juggling children, family and husbands with secrets, plus Caroline, The Shampoo Effect details the splintering of this friend group, who are awful en masse but individually tug at your heart strings. If you like a beach read with edge, then this will be your vibe.

Buy The Shampoo Effect here (paid link)

Henrietta by Sophia Irwin

Well, I adore Georgette Heyer and I also think Sophie Irwin’s Regency romances are note perfect so I was delighted that Sophie was chosen by the Heyer estate to write a continuation novel. Using a couple of short stories from the Snowdrift (paid link) collection as inspiration, we have Henrietta, a charming and delicious adventure of missed chances and romantic scheming during the height of the London season. Hetty is the perfect heroine, full of depth and a charm that she’s unaware of, and Arthur, who she’s loved for as long as she can remember, is the quintessential Heyer hero; upstanding, dependable but swoonworthy. In fact, all of the characters, especially the incorrigible Allertons, were so deftly drawn that I’d have been happy if the book had been twice as long. Henrietta is an absolute balm for the soul and Georgette Heyer’s legacy is in safe hands with Sophie Irwin, who treats the responsibility with respect but her own considerable flair.

Preorder Henrietta here (paid link)

Claws Out! by Bella Mackie

Another darkly funny, crime caper set in a North London that I know very well and full of North London types that I also know very well. Diana Leyland is a merry widow with three husbands dead in mysterious circumstance, each one richer than the last. So when she sets her sights on David Farrand with his five storey Hampstead house and his considerable social cachet, Diana is determined to make him husband number four. But his daughter Cat is going to do everything in her power to ensure that doesn’t happen. Like, A Fatal Legacy, Claws Out! is as much a social document as it is a wicked romp where everyone is some shade of villain so you end up rooting for the most unlikely of ‘heroes’. Something else I really relished was the frequent breaking of the fourth wall, which made it feel like I was in on the joke even though I fear that I too am a North London type.

Preorder Claws! Out here. (Paid link)

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My latest novel, The Love Library, an enemies-to-lovers literary romcom, is out now and is also an excellent summer read. (paid link)

As a very young child, every morning I would barrel down the stairs shouting, “Is today my birthday?” On my third Christmas Day on this earth, my grandmother (who’d had five children herself plus countless grandchildren so knew what she was talking about) told my mum that she had never seen such a small person be quite as excited about the festivities.

Inevitably, every birthday and every Christmas day would end up with me inconsolable and in tears as it was impossible for the special day to live up to all my anticipation and expectation.

So it will come as no surprise to learn that I absolutely fucking hate Publication Day and I would love to spend the entire shebang in bed with the covers over my head.

My most recent Publication Day for The Love Library (paid link), which published a couple of weeks ago, saw my launch event in a small bookshop cancelled because of the heat dome and temperatures of 38 degrees. I spent the entire day on the sofa with an army of small fans (cooling fans, not vertically challenged admirers of my prose stylings) trained on me.

I think back to the lovely launch party that my friend Sarah organised for my debut novel, Guitar Girl and then I also recall the coughing fit I had as I gave a reading and nearly swallowed my own tongue as I choked.

Or the time that my then agent and then editor took me out for a very swank celebratory meal to the now defunct Mishkins in Covent Garden. I told the server I was allergic to mustard but halfway through the main course, my lips starting swelling up, my heart started racing and I ended up in the loos with my epipen. I was put in a taxi home, which had to stop mid route so I could projectile vomit. Ah, misty water coloured memories!

I’ve had Publication Days without even an email acknowledgement from my editor or a post on my publisher’s socials. Two concurrent Publications Days when the same editor, each time, forgot to order my author copies and so I didn’t even have a finished book in my hand.

But look, I have had wonderful Publication Days too. There have been flowers and fizzy wine, cupcakes with my book cover on them, long, treaty lunches (one even featured a candle made of butter to dip our artisanal bread into, which my agent and I still talk about some ten years later,) thoughtful gifts, messages and social media likes and all the validation that my hungry little heart craves.

But mostly, Publication Days fill me with dread for weeks beforehand and I’m relieved when they’re over. I think, like birthdays and Christmas day, Publication Day is a chance to take stock and see how far you’ve come and what you’ve achieved. Or rather it’s a day of reckoning when all your hopes and dreams for the book that you’ve spent so much time (sometimes even years) working on come to something – or nothing.

At most other times, I know that everyone is on very different journeys and that comparison is the thief of joy but publication day transforms me into a bitter little Betty with envy baked into her soul.

Back in the day, before social media, I published in a blissfully ignorant little bubble. But now, damn you Instagram, on those taunting little squares it looks like every other author’s Publication Day is crammed full of packed book launch events in huge venues with champagne towers and limited editions with spredges (I long for spredges!) and signing 3000 tip-ins (I also long for tip-ins!) and maybe even a basket of puppies from their grateful publisher (and there is no one on this earth who longs for a basket of puppies as much as me) and then Publication Day is over and I go outside and touch the grass and get over myself.

This is why the best piece of advice that I’ve ever been given is that publishing is what happens in between writing novels. And that is what I honestly believe. I just want to write. I love the writing. The writing defines me. Of course these days being a writer also means being a marketer, content creator, graphic designer and many other hyphenates. I’m happy to post on socials and knock up a few bits and bobs in Canva but the story is the thing for me. (I’m always reminded of this wonderful letter from Agatha Christie being quite cross that someone wanted to give her an honorary degree and that it would be good for publicity, “I don’t enjoy this sort of thing… I am most averse to the idea.”)

The other truth I wholeheartedly believe is that as writers we have no control over the publishing process that leads to publication day. The only thing we can really do is write the best, most beautiful story that we’re capable of writing.

I think that is the crux of the matter. With the exception of a couple of novels, I write my heart out each time. There is not a single line in any of my books that I haven’t agonised over. I live, breathe and dream these stories. So it hurts when Publication Day looms and you get your sub numbers (which tells you how many copies of your novel retailers and distributors have ordered) and publisher updates and have that sinking feeling that this book is going to have a hard time finding its readers.

(Also, can I say that with the exception of maybe actors, I’ve never known a profession to wang on about their jobs as much as writers do? Although, to be fair, I’ve never been privy to an architects’ or a plumbers’ Group Chat so maybe they do. Who knows?)

You have to be extraordinarily thick skinned to be a writer. Rejection is hard wired into every step of the path from page to publication. From querying to being out on submission, to getting past an acquisitions board to deal negotiations. Then there’s the editing process – I had a thirty three page editorial letter for Unsticky, which both destroyed me and made me a better writer. It’s being picked or not picked for promotions or for the supermarket shelves. That’s rejection before Publication Day even rolls around and then comes the reviews! It is a truth universally acknowledged that we never remember the good reviews, only the bad ones. I speak as someone who once had a one star review on Goodreads told through the medium of gifs.

Which is why I really try not to read my reviews anymore and why I also believe that tagging an author in anything less than a five star review (yes I said what I said!) is a hate crime.

But the paradox is that as writers we also have to be extraordinarily thin-skinned, in order to be able to access all that emotion and feeling. To look inwards to give our stories and our characters depth and authenticity. And to be thin-skinned really is to a be a sensitive snowflake who pretends to take it all on the chin, all the while dying a thousand deaths on the inside and bitching in the Group Chat. It was in the Group Chat this time around, that I confessed that the only thing that would really quiet the monster inside me, was a ticker tape parade down Oxford Street. This is why the best piece of writing advice I can give anyone is to be in a Group Chat with other writers. Also, much cheaper than therapy plus funny memes.

There is no answer to any of this. I know I’m lucky that this is how I get to make a living and when it’s not Publication Day, I can be grateful for all the opportunities that have come and continue to come my way, So yes, I’m being awfully self-indulgent, but the feelings they persist.

All that I can do is to throw myself head first into writing another story and hope that this one will be The One. This time it will be different.

Because as much as Publication Days and the publishing industry are dangerous beasts, it’s the hope that will kill you every single time.

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The Love Library, an enemies-to-lovers literary romcom, responsible for all the above angst, is out now. (paid link)

Holding out for a hero!

Forget Mr Right, I want a Mr Darcy, says Tess Hardy, The Sunday Sentinel’s resident single gal…

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of a good job, good friends and a wardrobe of really good frocks must be in want of a good man.

So, I ask you, nay, implore you, where have all the good men gone?

One thing’s for certain. They’re not in my local supermarket. I cruise the aisles hoping to meet eyes with a handsome stranger as he’s fondling avocados or selecting wine according to its vintage and taste notes rather than its alcohol content and because it’s on special offer. I dream of some sophisticated and flirtatious banter as we both reach for the last posh sourdough loaf and before you know it, we’re enjoying a Dine In For Two promotion. But my dreams never come true and I have to make do with a basket of picky bits commonly known as girl dinner.

The good men are also not to be found in my gym. Instead there are a lot of not that great men who hog the free weights, mansplain how to use the running machine that I’m already running on and make very unpleasant grunting sounds as they lift.

And the good men are most definitely not on the apps. The apps are full of very, very bad men who are always shorter, balder and a lot angrier than their profiles would suggest.

There was the man who fancied himself as a crypto trader. When I asked if I should be investing in bitcoin or NFT’s (because I give good date, I really do) it turned out he was talking about the Robux he earned from playing Roblox. I’ll spare you the details. When I politely declined a second date –the thought of more Roblox chat was giving me PTSD – he sent a very irate message asking for the money back he’d spent on treating me to a soy milk cappuccino and a brownie and threatening me with the small claims court.

Then there was the man I met for a Sunday afternoon stroll with his golden retriever Bertie. Bertie was delightful but his human, who was wearing red trousers, a red flag if ever there was one, didn’t pick up Bertie’s poo and when another dog tried to sniff Bertie’s bottom (which, quite frankly, might be a better way to meet someone than on Tinder,) he tried to kick the other dog.

Or what about the man I met for a quick after work drink who took one look at me and said, “I only date eights and above and you’re not even a six.” Yes, of course I went home and cried.

Let’s not forget the men who’ve told me to my face that I’m too fat, too old, too loud, too opinionated, too blonde (apparently he only dated redheads) and just generally too much. Then there are the men who tell me I’m not enough. Not sexy enough, not thin enough, not clever enough, not funny enough. Yet people, specifically my mother, insist that I’m the one who’s too picky.

Is it any wonder that I no longer feel like the vibrant young woman that I used to be before I ever downloaded the Bumble app? I like to think that I’m realistic. I know that Prince Charming doesn’t exist and if he did he wouldn’t fancy me, but I can’t cope with the never ending parade of frogs and I certainly don’t want to kiss any of them. No wonder that I am date-fatigued. So weary of wooing. Practically resigned to becoming a spinster of the parish.

Yes, yes, I know some women are happy to be single but I’m not one of them. I want the meet cute, I want the giddiness of falling in love and the rightness that you feel when you meet your person. Above all else, I want my happy ever after.

But it gets quite hard to keep the faith as I walk the Green Mile to another subpar date with a man that the algorithm has deemed worthy. However, all is not lost!

I’ve recently stumbled upon an inexhaustible supply of eligible young to rendezvous with every night of the week. I snuggle with them on the sofa as they whisper sweet nothings in my ear. Shockingly, I even go to bed with them on a first date. But who can blame me when they make my heart beat faster, give me proper tingles and never bore me stupid as they bang on about counting macros?

The best thing is that I didn’t even need to download an app to access these hunky heirs to my heart. Unless we’re talking about my Waterstones app because I’ve recently rediscovered my love of classic literature.

It all started when my book group, The Romance Girlies, decided to take a break from Spicy Romantasy to read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (paid link). Full disclosure, some of us may not have read the book but watched the TV adaptation instead featuring two very aesthetically pleasing actors. Either way, it made me remember my teenage days when I lived rurally with a weak WiFi signal and no satellite TV so had to make do with the works of the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen. Not that I minded back then or now as I once again lose myself in the pages of these favourite books and in the arms (sadly only metaphorical arms) of my favourite romantic heroes.

Let me live out my Gilded Age fantasies with Newland Archer, the tortured hero of The Age Of Innocence (paid link). Let me soothe the troubled and brooding brow of The Count Of Monte Cristo (paid link). And while Jane Austen has written many excellent and eligible bachelors, honourable mentions to Captain Wentworth from Persuasion and Mr Knightley the worthy suitor of Emma (paid link), let’s hear it for the one and only Fitzwilliam Darcy. With his ten thousand pounds a year and fine grounds at Pemberley, not to mention his handsome countenance, he is pretty much the perfect man.

I’m not completely delusional. I know a fictional hero can never love me back. But he’s also never going to expect sexual favours in return for treating me to the Prix Fixe menu at Côte, like certain real men I could mention.

So, until I meet a real life Mr Darcy, and there are days, lots of days, when I feel as if I’m more likely to meet an actual unicorn, let me have my book boyfriends. They might not be able to give me the happy ever after that I desperately long for but a happy for now will do.

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The Love Library, an enemies-to-lovers literary romcom, is out on June 25th and is available for preorder now. (paid link)

Annie Knows Everything by Rachel Wood

A recent weekend was made approximately a thousand times better by reading Annie Knows Everything, which is stuffed full of all the things I adore. A New York-set workplace romcom. A heroine with proper gumption. A hero able to match Annie’s elite level of banter. Yearning. A superb cast of supporting characters who all felt fully realised without being ridiculous. I’m finding it increasingly hard to source romcoms that really satisfy me but Annie Knows Everything pushed all my buttons and buttons I didn’t even know I had. Paradoxically, it felt refreshingly different while still hitting all the right beats. After finishing, I had to immediately email Melissa at Bonnier, who published it, to check that Rachel Wood was writing another novel. I could only unclench when I was informed that she’d just delivered her second novel and I am already impatient for it.

Buy Annie Knows Everything here (paid link)

American Fantasy by Emma Straub

I’m a huge Emma Straub fan and it’s always puzzled me that she’s not huge here in the UK (Modern Lovers (paid link) should be added to your tbr pile immediately.) American Fantasy very much follows the unofficial theme of these particular reviews as a book about proper grown ups but in this instance they’re not doing proper grown up things. Set on a cruise ship where a famous 1990’s boyband are entertaining their diehard fanbase, American Fantasy focuses on Annie, newly divorced, increasingly sidelined and not entirely sure what she’s doing there. As she begins to connect with a part of herself that she thought was lost forever, she also connects with Keith, one of the members of Boy Talk, who feels just as isolated as Annie. But on a cruise with three thousand mostly feral, mostly drunk middle aged women no one can hear you scream. This was such a funny, keenly observed book about how we often grow invisible as we grow old and what it means when someone actually sees you.

Buy American Fantasy here (paid link)

Our Deadly Summer by Emer McLysaght and Sarah Breen

I was and always will be a huge Aisling fan but I was really happy that Emer McLysaght and Sarah Breen did something completely different here in a standalone novel which covers very different ground but with stunning results. Full of early Noughties nostalgia, Our Deadly Summer showcases Emer and Sarah’s trademark humour then throws in a little murder as university students Laura and Dee think they’re leaving Ireland for a New York summer full of hot boys and wind up waitressing in a stuffy golf club in New Jersey and, um, killing someone. This is a thriller stuffed with all the twists and turns you could ever want and also a deep dive into the glorious and messy complexity of a real ride or die female friendship; when you would literally help your BFF bury a body. The perfect sun lounger read.

Buy Our Deadly Summer here (paid link)

Dolly All The Time by Annabel Monaghan

When I reviewed for Red Magazine, I would get a new Annabel Monaghan book in every summer. But every summer there was always so many romances to review and now I’m so mad about sleeping on her wonderful novels for so long. As I mentioned before, I am very fussy about my romcoms and on the surface Dolly All The Time is simply a fake dating billionaire romance. Oh my goodness, do you know how many fake dating billionaire romances I’ve read or DNF-ed? So many! But Dolly All The Time is not your little sister’s KU billionaire romance. It was also a relief to read about an older heroine that wasn’t a “hilarious” novel about a woman going through the menopause. Dolly is a very capable, very eldest daughter of thirty nine when she drifts into the orbit of Stewart Whitfield, whose richer than God family dominates the small Rhode Island town named after them. I really enjoyed that the seemingly improbable romance between Dolly and Stewart felt very realistic while brimful of yearning. So much yearning! (Also I’ve been to Rhode Island, even to the tiny outcrop of Point Judith mentioned in the novel so that added to my good cheer.) When I finished reading Dolly All The Time, before the afterglow could wear off, I then ordered every book that AM has written and I don’t regret this decision.

Buy Dolly All The Time here (paid link)

All In by Claire Powell

I absolutely loved Claire’s debut novel, At The Table (paid link), the story of a year in the life of one family told through a series of dinners, lunches and drinks. All In has a similar vibe. It’s told from the point of view of a couple, Jo and Dave, whose marriage has flatlined when they go to spend a few days at an all inclusive Mediterranean resort paid for by Dave’s flashy Dubai-dwelling brother. What Claire Powell does so beautifully is to write about the messy humanity of being a person just trying to exist in the world. You come to know and love Jo and Dave in their warts and all glory, their foibles, their failures, their desperate need for connection. In many ways, All In reminded me of that other book where famously nothing happens, but everything happens, RC Sherriff’s The Fortnight In September (paid link). I can’t think of higher praise, quite frankly.

Buy All In here (paid link)

Love Scene Anna Carey

Full disclosure: Anna and I have been friends since the early days of Twitter when we discovered that we both loved the incomparable and much missed Sassy magazine and traded our duplicate copies. We like all the same things in a way that is almost creepy so it’s no surprise that I’ve loved all her YA books and was delighted when she started writing romcoms for grown up ladies. I adored Our Song (paid link), her debut, and gobbled up Love Scene, a proper, no holds barred enemies to lovers romp set behind the scenes on a fictional much loved Irish soap opera, Northside, which has lost its way. Quite simply, Love Scene is just a really great, engaging romcom. Though there’s no ‘just’ about and it takes a lot of writing and rewriting and editing and sweating to achieve a story that reads so effortlessly, assuredly (is that the right word?) and easily. Like Laura in Our Song, Annie is another layered, sometimes prickly but relatable heroine and her struggles with anxiety are portrayed sensitively and perceptively. Art started off as a bit of a knobhead, albeit a devastatingly fanciable knobhead, but Anna is so good at unpeeling her characters’ layers; and everyone, even fictional everyones, are going through stuff that we might not know about on first acquaintance. Our Song was funny, sexy and tender and the Northside 50th anniversary jeopardy had me on tenterhooks.

Buy Love Scene here (paid link)

Retro by Jessica M Goldstein

Time travel novels are definitely having a moment but Yesteryear (paid link) was four chapters then DNF for me so I was wary about Retro but it is a perfect mash up of a sad girl novel AND a time travel novel. Like Fleabag (paid link) meets The Ministry Of Time (paid link), according to the press release, which I am absolutely here for.
Ash is a failed actress, disconnected from friends, family and life itself when she answers an ad for a Time Travel Agent, for a company called Retro and soon she’s shepherding rich tourists to 1920’s speakeasies, saloon bars during the Gold Rush and other trips “through history’s most Instragrammable eras.”
This started as a slowburn but then I rattled through it like I was on a Conveyor being transported to Studio 54. It’s a powerful, immersive read and the commodification, the relentless striving and artificiality of the present as seen through the lens of the past was really affecting. Blur were right; modern life IS rubbish! Ash is a skilfully drawn heartbreaker of a protagonist. Lost but trying to be found. Alone but wanting to be loved.
Then there’s the ending. Like the last few pages of Station Eleven (paid link), I will be thinking about Retro’s final devastating chapter every week for years to come. Ooof! I am not all right.

Buy Retro here (paid link)

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My new novel, The Love Library, about proper grown ups behaving very unseriously, is out on June 25th and is available for preorder now. (paid link)

1. There is literally no one who understands you. The real you, that is, and not the shiny, glittering you that you show the world. It saddens and disappoints you, quite frankly.

2. But there is a man. He’s tousle-haired, slumbrous of eye, smirky of lip, taut of forearms and lean of frame. He moves you in ways that would make other people write sonnets. You pretend to hate him.

3. You still say ‘whatever’ all the time. Even though it’s no longer 1994. It’s almost as if your entire being is controlled by a Gen X-er who used to write for teen mags

4. Although you try to listen to your head, your sensible, level head, your heart is a wild beast that can’t be tamed or hold its drink and it gets you in trouble time and time again. Your foolish heart wins out every single time.

5. In times of emotional turmoil, which typically amounts for a large part of your every waking hour, you take refuge in a family-sized bag of potato-based snacks. Also chocolate. Much chocolate. Something about the combination of sweet and salt speaks to the chaos in your soul. And wine. It’s always five o’clock somewhere.

6. There is a dress. A perfect dress. When you find and purchase this frock, amazing things happen to you.

7. The previously mentioned man is incapable of speaking. Instead he drawls. Occasionally he purrs. Usually while slouching nonchalantly against a doorjamb. He is so good at leaning.

8. There have been moments when your entire life has taken on an entirely new shape in the time it takes for someone to kiss you.

9. You live in London and you love the city’s frantic beating heart. You pretend to be accepting of people who don’t want to live in London, but it’s a lie. And people who actively choose to live in the countryside tens of miles away from the nearest little Tesco baffle you.

10. You also feel very strongly that while London is wonderful, north London is even better.

11. Let’s not even talk about the hair.

12. There are at least three polka-dot dresses, two of them vintage, hanging up in your wardrobe. You can never have too many polka-dot dresses. You can never have too many vintage dresses. A vintage polka-dot dress is fashion nirvana.

13. You could never settle for a man who lacked the ability to arch one eyebrow. Or smirk. Or, as previously mentioned, slouch nonchalantly against doorjambs.

14. The ability to apply liquid eyeliner is hardwired into your DNA.

15. You are a petty queen with a superhuman ability to hold a grudge but you know no other way to be.

16. You sometimes look younger than you are, but your soul is positively geriatric.

17. You cannot achieve orgasm without clitoral stimulation and you make no apologies for that. On the contrary, you can be quite vocal when that need isn’t met. (And even more vocal when it is.)

18. You are a great friend, a help-hide-a-body-no-questions-asked friend, an adequate sister and a difficult daughter.

19. You long for a happy ever after but it’s not the kind of happy ever after that necessarily includes florid declarations of love. That’s OK. You’re suspicious of anything as sentimental and cliched as a florid declaration of love. Your happy ever after is still a happy ever after.

My new novel, The Love Library, containing a heroine as described above, is out on June 25th and is available for preorder now. (paid link)

I love fashion. I love it as a means of expressing who I am and who I want to be.

I love it because I spent many years working on women’s magazines and quite a few of those years working specifically for fashion titles. I even edited two of them, both gone to the great newsagent in the sky. I’m also fascinated by the fashion industry both then and now and one of my shelves is full of prized, out of print titles about British fashion, I even have a signed Charles Creed memoir! It’s not the right time but I’ve been dreaming about writing a four book, fashion related Cazalets-style (paid link) series for over a decade. In the meantime, in all my novels clothes are loaded with deep symbolism and maybe even symbiosis.

And, of course, I love reading novels about clothes and the women who are obsessed with them so let’s get into it.

Unsticky by Sarra Manning

Tooting my own horn to kick things off. Unsticky was my grown up debut about Grace, a struggling fashion assistant drowning in debt and bad decisions who signs up to become the mistress of wealthy, arrogant and very rich art dealer, Vaughn. It’s a classic debut novel; everything chucked into it because you might never get another chance to tell more stories, but it’s also a novel that was heavily influenced by my time working on Elle. Which was a much kinder, less rarefied place than Skirt, the magazine in Unsticky, but I still saw a world where the haves and have nots were pitted against each other. Also, I remember as I wrote Unsticky, I would pore over the runway pictures from the now defunct Style.com and every fancy frock that Grace wore was based on real dresses. One day when Unsticky stops being a cult classic and finally gets its moment in the sun, I would be more than happy to write a sequel. God, I still love those two crazy kids.

Buy Unsticky here (paid link)

Fabulous Nobodies by Lee Tulloch

Criminally out of print, I first read Fabulous Nobodies in the weeks when I’d just returned to London from getting a degree and having some kind of nervous breakdown. I wore vintage dresses and had no fucking idea what was to become of me then I read this book and it changed something. Written by Lee Tulloch, an Australian editor who’d worked on US Vogue, its heroine Really (real name Reality Nirvana) is a door whore for an exclusive, fashionable club in downtown NYC and has a wardrobe full of vintage dresses, who all have names and talk to Really every day when she’s deciding what to wear. I’m not going to precis the whole novel but for me, it’s a soul book. I remember my first trip to New York in maybe 1996 when Really’s New York still existed and it made me love Fabulous Nobodies even more. I’ve gifted this book to so many people and I still buy copies on eBay, to give to new friends.

Buy Fabulous Nobodies here (paid link)

Clothes Pegs by Susan Scarlett

When she wasn’t writing delightful children’s stories and really dark adult novels (I mean, fuck, have you read Saplings? (paid link)) Noel Streatfeild was writing a series of lowkey torrid romances under the name Susan Scarlett. They’ve been reissued a couple of times, latterly by the wonderful Furrowed Middlebrow imprint of Dean Street Press and I think Clothes Pegs is probably my favourite because it’s about “glamorous models in a top London fashion store… sustained by glasses of port… and regarded as the equivalent of chorus-girls; good for a dinner date or weekend rendezvous but not for marriage.” If you don’t want to read Clothes Pegs after that blurb, then you need to give your head a serious wobble.

Buy Clothes Pegs here (paid link)

A Single Thread Of Moonlight by Laura Wood

I’m a huge Laura Wood fangirl. If she writes it, I’ll read it and then rave about it. A Single Thread Of Moonlight is set in Victorian times and is a riff on Cinderella as Iris, forced to be a drudge by her evil stepmother, runs away to London and finds work as a seamstress. She makes beautiful dresses for the belles of Society until she crosses paths with the handsome and cold (but totally hot) Nicolas Wynter and realises that she now has her chance to wreak revenge.

Buy A Single Thread Of Moonlight (paid link)

Workhorse by Caroline Palmer

I already reviewed Workhorse on a previous Substack so I will just say that there are much, much better books about working in the fashion industry and specifically on US Vogue, then The Devil Wears Prada (paid link) and this is one of them.

Buy Workhorse here (paid link)

Mrs Harris Goes To Paris by Paul Gallico

The most charming comfort read! I adore this tale of an indefatigable and kind hearted charwoman who saves up her hard-earned money so she can go to Paris and buy a Dior gown. And to Paris she goes where she has many adventures and does indeed purchase a Dior gown but when she and the dress get back to London, their happy ever is abruptly curtailed, but surely Mrs Harris and her irrepressible spirit will triumph in the end. The recent film starring Lesley Manville is also utterly charming.

Buy Mrs Harris Goes To Paris (paid link)

The Vintage Dress Shop In Primrose Hill by Annie Darling

The first book in a trilogy set in a fancy Primrose Hill vintage shop and written by Annie Darling, who is a pseudonym for… me. It’s me! If I was newly launching as Annie Darling, I would be very upfront about it but when I wrote AD’s first series, The Lonely Hearts Bookshop, (paid link) it wasn’t very politic to do so. Anyway, I always think of Annie Darling as diffusion line Sarra Manning (what Miu Miu is to Prada!) a bit sweeter, a bit lighter but I loved writing these books. So rest assured that The Vintage Dress Shop trilogy has been painstakingly researched and is stuffed full of gorgeous frock talk, plus the shop dog is a French Bulldog called Coco Chanel.

Buy The Vintage Dress Shop In Primrose Hill here (paid link)

The Pink Suit by Nicole Mary Kelby

I am currently obsessed with American Love Story and while attention has been on Carolyn Bessette’s very 90’s, very minimalist look, I’ve been thinking a lot about Jackie Kennedy and this great novel I read about ten years ago and the iconic pink suit Jackie wore on the day JFK was assassinated. Not a Chanel pink suit as many people assume and The Pink Suit tells the story of an Irish seamstress working at Chez Ninon, the NY atelier who made authorised copies of French couture. Kate’s roots in rural Ireland are not dissimilar to the origins of the Kennedy family and I love the way fashion ties these two women together and shows two very different sides to the American dream.

Buy The Pink Suit here (paid link)

The New Dress by Virginia Woolf

From the woman who famously wrote “it is clothes that wear us and not we them,” in Orlando, comes this modernist short story. Mabel Waring attends a party in a new pale yellow silk dress but when she catches a glimpse of it in a mirror, she comes to the realisation that it’s all wrong and gets sucked into a spiral of self-loathing and insecurity. Rarely have I related to a character and situation more.

Buy The New Dress here (paid link)

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My new novel, The Love Library, is out on June 25th and is available for preorder (paid link) now.

I first read Virginia Woolf’s A Room Of One’s Own (paid link) in my second year at University. I was nineteen and the first person in my family to do A-levels, never mind get a degree. My mother left school at fifteen as my grandfather didn’t believe girls needed an education and my father left school during his A-levels because his father had died and he needed to get a job, so my parents were determined that I should have all the opportunities that they’d been denied.

They were also determined that I was going to be a lawyer. Let’s be clear, I had absolutely no interest in being a lawyer but to my parents, being a lawyer was the pinnacle of everything they wanted for me. “Whoever heard of a poor lawyer?” my mother would exclaim when I expressed my doubts. Even when I left school to do a Journalism with A-levels course at the local college, she was extremely doubtful of what she considered to be my lofty ambitions. “You’ll never make a living as a writer,” she said not unkindly, but realistically. “Besides, people like us don’t become writers.”

This was the early 90’s. The Mesozoic Era, before The Spice Girls and girl power. I somehow found myself at a radical, left wing university and read set texts by second wave feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Shulamith Firestone, who were mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. I kept quiet in lectures because I didn’t know what Marxism or Post-Modernism were and was sure that everyone else did. I was also sure that this wasn’t the place for me.

I stumbled across A Room Of One’s Own for a Studies In Feminism module though what a book that had been written in 1928 was going to teach me I didn’t know until this line suddenly jumped out at me: “So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters.”

Yes!

Yes!

YES!

It was the literary equivalent of a lightbulb bursting into life above my head. Suddenly I understood who I was and who I desperately wanted to be. It really was that simple. It is still that simple. If I wanted to be a writer, then all I had to do was write.

To rewind a little, A Room Of One’s Own is an extended essay based on a series of lectures Virginia Woolf delivered at two women’s colleges at Cambridge University, Newnham and Girton, in October 1928. (It’s worth mentioning that women weren’t allowed full membership of Cambridge University until 1948.)

Fittingly, Woolf writes about women’s access to education and invents a fictional character, Judith, Shakespeare’s sister, to illustrate how if a woman had been born with Shakespeare’s talents, she’d never have had the opportunity or encouragement to develop them, to even go to school, but would be married off, frustrated and angry.

What really spoke to me though was Woolf describing how women had been erased from history and the written word had always been the domain of men. “When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to.”

She sums this up quite succinctly, when she goes on to add: “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was a woman.”

“People like us don’t become writers,” I’d been told but Virginia Woolf told me something else entirely. “I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast.” She also added, rather unhelpfully, that in order to write a woman needed a room of one’s own and £500 a year, about £25,000 in today’s money. In Woolf’s day this was enough to live independently, even comfortably, but without being able to afford luxuries, like, say a servant or two.

Now that Virginia Woolf had given me permission to be a writer, that was what I was going to be. The room of my own was an unheated bedsit in Archway once I left university and the £500 a year was the money I made from bar work, transcribing, a brief stint as a life model, anything to pay the rent as I wrote for anyone who would give me a byline. I got a freelance gig as a music journalist, then my first full-time writing job on the teen mag Just Seventeen (God bless all who sailed in her) and a little while after that I managed to persuade a publisher to let me write an actual novel.

Some thirty years later, as Virginia Woolf advised, I have written all kinds of books. I’m sitting writing this piece in a room of my own, my office; a room devoted only to writing and books, in a flat paid for by the money I’ve earned from my writing.

I’m a writer first and an everything else in my life second, but I wonder if I would ever have had the courage to take those first faltering steps if I hadn’t read A Room Of One’s Own.

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My new novel, The Love Library, is out on June 25th and is available for preorder (paid link) now.

My reading has been all over the place lately. I had a huge reading slump that I just couldn’t shake and all I wanted to do was reread Annika Martin’s Billionaires of Manhattan (paid link) series, which actually I can’t recommend enough. There were also a lot of books discarded after a couple of chapters. But these are the ones I read and loved and think that you will too.

The Infamous Gilberts by Angela Tomaski (paid link)

What is it about the lure of a big house and the posh yet dysfunctional families who live in them? The Infamous Gilberts follows these tropes but does something entirely unexpected with it as we follow The Gilberts through the decades, tracing their story in the dust and cobwebs and objects left scattered about the house, which awaits its new owners, a luxury hotel chain. Creepy, magical and utterly compelling, like The Cazalets Chronicles (paid link) and We Have Always Lived In The Castle (paid link) met and had a problem child, it’s impossible not to get sucked into this tragi-comic tour de force.

The Keeper by Tana French (paid link)

I’m a huge Tana French fan and I was hooked on the first two books in this trilogy (The Searcher (paid link) and The Hunter (paid link), both of which you MUST read. It was so immediately immersive to be back with retired Chicago cop Cal Hooper, in the small rural Irish town of Ardnakelty, a place I feel I know so well now along with its inhabitants. When a young woman is murdered, her death implicates a powerful local property developer, whose malevolent influence casts a wide net and when the final reckoning occurs, it feels like something has irrevocably broken in Ardnakelty. I had such a book hangover after finishing this one and without spoilers, Kojak the dog’s, reaction to redacted redacted redacted left me but a husk. No one writes literary crime quite like Tana French, a compelling mix of the lyrical and the menacing, and in The Keeper she absolutely nails the complexity of human nature but never sacrifices the tension and the twists.

200 Monas by Jan Saenz (paid link)

I always have time for a heist novel and 200 Monas did not disappoint. The Monas in question are an almost mythological drug, which promises to deliver a life-changing, world-altering orgasm. When Arvy finds a bag of them in her unexpectedly deceased mother’s closet, she’s forced to sell them or end up dead herself at the hands of a seriously unhinged gangster. Luckily, she teams up with a local, small-time drug dealer, Wolf (soon to be your next book boyfriend) and there follows a sexy, high octane adventure full of jeopardy and twists and turns but also a very poignant, moving exploration of loss and loneliness.

Cherry Baby by Rainbow Rowell (paid link)

A very special novel from a writer at the peak of her powers. I am so happy that Rainbow Rowell is writing grown up romcoms again. Because that is what they are; stories about proper grown ups and heroine, Cherry has flaws and foibles which will resonate with so many readers. I can’t remember the last time a fictional character made me feel so seen. Set as usual in Omaha, Nebraska, Cherry works for the railroad (OK, in the marketing department, but I love that she works for the railroad) and is recently estranged from her husband who’s in Hollywood making a film of his cult comic strip. A comic which features a character heavily based on Cherry. It’s quite hard to go into too much detail about Cherry Baby because something so unexpected but beautifully organic happens that I don’t want to spoil it for you, but you do need to know that this is a tender, heart-melting and very real second chance romance.

Whatever Happened to Madeline Stone? by Louise O’Neill (paid link)

Warning: while you’re reading the latest novel from the always perceptive Louise O’Neill, you will spend your days singing, “Where the fuck is Madeline?” That is, if you can bear to tear yourself away from the pages for long enough. Set between the early Noughties and present day, Chelsea and Madison Stone were identical twin child stars with their own sitcom. Even though Maddie is the twin with the real star power, when Chelsea lands a career defining role, it will set into motion a chain of events, which will result in Maddie vanishing off the face of the earth and Chelsea turning her back on fame to live the pampered life of a billionaire’s wife. Until Maddie’s old storage locker is discovered and secrets that Chelsea thought were long buried threaten to come to the service. Louise O’Neill takes a scalpel to celebrity culture then and now in this super smart, addictive story, which will hook you from the first page!

How Korean Corn Dogs Changed My Life by Alice Amelia (paid link)

Something about this memoir of a young woman who goes to live in Seoul spoke to me and I’m so glad it did. How Korean Corn Dogs Changed My Life is a fascinating deep dive into the world (and the seedy inner workings) of k-pop and k-drama, neither of which I knew anything about. It’s also an insider’s guide to the hidden heart of Seoul; the food, the different neighbourhoods, and culture, which made it so different to the many memoirs I’ve read of dream-chasers who head for Paris or New York or other more recognisable destinations. It’s also an honest account of the author’s turbulent twenties and affairs of the heart, which felt a lot closer to home for me!

Dogs, Boys And Other Things I’ve Cried About by Isabel Klee (paid link)

If you don’t follow Isabel Klee on Instagram (I came on board in the Poutine era #iykyk,) then what are you even doing with your life? Isabel lives in Brooklyn and along with her fiancé, Jacob (AKA Mr Isabel) and her dog Simon, she welcomes many a foster dog into her home and her heart, often with complex medical or behavioural needs who blossom under Isabel’s care. She is one of those people whose goodness shines through. This memoir is a love letter to all the dogs that Isabel has known who all fixed something in her even as they went on their own healing journeys. It’s also a love letter to New York and being young and making bad decisions and then being not so young and having to figure out what the hell you’re doing. This memoir will be one of the other things many readers will cry about, in a good, soul-nourishing kind of way.

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My new novel, The Love Library, is out on June 25th and is available for preorder (paid link) now.

Hello you

I’m going to start by telling you that I’m really proud of you.

You’re passionate about the things that you love (and also the things you hate.) You’re politically engaged enough that you’ll spend a Saturday afternoon marching for a good cause but also because you really enjoy shouting “Maggie! Maggie! Maggie! Out! Out! Out!” with your whole chest.

When you’re not trying to smash the system, you go to art exhibitions and see French films at The Metro on Rupert Street in Soho and you buy too many magazines and rererererereread the same books and you let the music devour you.

I’ll tell you now that the good causes and the art and the film and the dog-eared Penguin Classics and the needle dropping down on the vinyl and that static hiss before the beat kicks in saves you again and again, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

See, if I’m writing a letter to you, the me that was, I don’t want to give too much away. What if I reveal too much and you try to alter your destiny and some awful rift opens up in the time space continuum?

What I will tell you is that there are good times ahead. There are also bad times. The bad times absolutely suck and you don’t always deal with them in the best way, but that’s why they’re called bad times.

But you get to do what you love. You write. I know how much that will blow your sixteen-year-old mind. Because when you were doing Journalism with A-levels at Barnet College and a guest lecturer told you that to be eligible to join the National Union of Journalists, half of your earnings had to come from journalism, you couldn’t imagine that such a thing would ever come to pass.

And when, a couple of years later, you read Virginia Woolf’s A Room Of One’s Own (paid link), and she posits that in order to write a woman needs five thousand pounds a year and a room of one’s own, again, you refuse to believe that this could ever happen for you. But it will. It does.

I also want to warn you that you might never lose the feeling that you don’t fit in; that you’re not cool enough for the cool kids, and everyone else thinks you’re kind of odd but somehow you manage to build a career, a whole life, on connecting with people who feel the exact same way.

I know! Who’d have thought it?

So, without giving the game away, let me tell you five things that aren’t going to tear a massive hole in the fabric of time or whatever, but will give you a leg up on life.

Stop dicking about with frosted lilac lipstick

Really, what are you thinking? Stick with the red. A bluey red. Clinique 100% Red, until MAC cosmetics are created and invent Ruby Woo. While we’re talking make-up, liquid eyeliner will go on much easier if you draw a line in eye pencil first, then the brush will glide over it. Also, foundation is meant to even out your skin tone, not completely cover it and give up on that green stick that’s meant to tone down your rosy cheeks. It makes you look like you’re from Mars.

Buy the cheap vintage while you can

You know that rail of 50’s summer dresses at Camden Lock market priced at a fiver each? Buy whichever ones you can get into. Buy the whole rail. Never take good cheap vintage clothes for granted. I can’t stress this enough.

The world won’t end if you live somewhere without a tube station

I know our adolescence was blighted by not living near enough to a tube station. There was a lot of leaving gigs early to get the last bus or missing the last bus and having to walk from Edgware or, worse, Hendon, but the crappiest places that you’ll live in are the places you choose because they’re near to a tube station. One day you might even actually choose to live somewhere that doesn’t have a tube station. Buses are cool. Eventually they run all through the night, but I can see that’s not very helpful to you right now. (Also, one day you might write a novel about how your entire personality was shaped by not living near a tube station. Although I’m probably not meant to let slip about that or the many, many novels you will write. (paid link))

Smoking is not cool

You currently think that smoking is absolutely the coolest thing but secretly you don’t understand what all the fuss is about because it doesn’t really do anything for you. Let’s try and keep it this way. You might as well stop your sporadic smoking now, before a man who you think you’re in love with (you’re not) teaches you to inhale and twenty years later, you’ll have spent THOUSANDS of English pounds on smokes. I’m not even going to try and tell you what damage you’re doing to your perfectly pink teenage lungs. THOUSANDS of pounds. Being cool is not worth that much.

Be courageous, even when it feels really hard

You have to be braver. Please stop being so scared. Don’t listen to people telling you that you can’t and that you never will, but especially don’t listen to that voice inside your head that shouts it out the loudest.

So, that’s it. That’s all I’ve got. You’ll be fine and when you’re not, as ever, the music and the books and all that beautiful stuff will pull you through. I promise.

Live on,

Sarra x

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My new novel, The Love Library, is out on June 25th and is available for preorder (paid link) now.

With International Women’s Day just gone and March being Women’s History Month, obviously my thoughts turn to the many books that have fuelled my feminist education. I pointedly took a copy of Fat Is A Feminist Issue (paid link)with me when, aged sixteen, my mother forced me to attend Weight Watchers. Our Bodies Ourselves (now shockingly out of print) was a staple of every student house-share I lived in. I even studied feminism at University and read everything from Vindication of The Rights Of Women (paid link) by Mary Wollstonecraft to Sexual Personae (paid link) Camille Paglia. There was also a heavy flirtation with French feminist theory and Lucy Irigaray’s Speculum Of The Other Women (paid link). Then fast forward a couple of decades to Caitlin Moran’s How To Be A Woman (paid link) and I can’t forget The Beauty Myth (paid link) by Naomi Wolf or the era-defining The Feminine Mystique (paid link) by Betty Friedan until I realise that none of these books actually made me a feminist.

In fact, as my frequent, pained cries of “but it’s not fair!” and “girls are just as good as boys!” would attest, I was a feminist from a very young age and the book that cemented my desire for gender equality was Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes. (paid link)

Of all the books I loved as a child, most of them revolving around boarding school, ballet and horses, Ballet Shoes (paid link) is the one I come back to. The one that I still reread. The one that is so hardwired into my DNA that every time I go to the V&A on Cromwell Road, I always think about the Fossil Sisters saving the penny and walking. How when I wish someone good luck I hold my thumbs as the Fossils did when any of them had an audition and how I used to call my dog Betsy Pretty Toes in honour of Posy Fossil.

Ballet Shoes (paid link)was also the first book I read that created a world that, as a reader, I wanted to live in, something that I’m always mindful of when I’m writing a novel. But more than anything, it was my feminist awakening. I was actually a third wave feminist before it was even a thing because I didn’t see that there was anything wrong or mutually exclusive with being a strong independent seven year old and also wanting to dance the lead in Swan Lake in a pretty, foofy tutu.

So, Ballet Shoes (paid link). This beloved book that I can pretty much recite from memory is the tale of the three Fossil sisters, Pauline, Petrova and Posy, who were all gathered up as babies by Great Uncle Matthew as he searched the world for fossils (hence their surname) and subsequently dumped on his great-niece Sylvie and the formidable Nana.

Then like a typical man, or indeed like a symbol of an uncaring patriarchy, GUM (as he’s known) buggers off on a big expedition for five years, promises to leave them enough money to live on and is never heard from again. It’s left to Sylvie and Nana to provide for themselves and their charges by taking in boarders, then putting the three Fossils on the stage so they can help earn their keep.

Pauline is a naturally talented actress while the youngest, Posy, is an exceptionally gifted ballet dancer. Petrova is neither of those things and is happiest when she’s tinkering around with cars. Like, all sisters, the Fossils clash, especially when the lure of the spotlight beckons. Pauline’s early success goes to her head and she has to learn a lesson in humility and Posy is so single minded in pursuit of her dreams to become a ballerina that she won’t let anything stand in her way. While Petrova hates acting and dancing but persists with her classes at the Children’s Academy Of Dancing And Stage Training in order to support her family.

There are wonderful lessons to be learned in Ballet Shoes (paid link). That it’s important to put in the work in to achieve your ambitions, even if you have a natural talent. Pauline, Posy and Petrova might all have different dreams but they share the same dogged drive to make them come true.

Also, to be financially independent as a woman is a good thing. There is a lot, a hell of a lot, of the book devoted to how to balance a household budget and not get into debt, especially when Pauline and Petrova need dresses for an audition.

Petrova put her arms around her neck. ‘Nana darling, could my birthday money make us organdie frocks like we used to have?’

‘What, those white dresses with the frills?... How much money have you got?’

Nana got a pencil and paper and made calculations. ‘We could get a nice organdie for two and eleven. Four and a half yards those dresses take – that’s nine yards.’ She passed the paper to Petrova. ‘You’re good at figures; how much is nine yards at two and eleven?’

Petrova worked it out in her head; it came to one pound six and threepence… Pauline and Petrova heaved sighs of relief; but Nana shook her head.

‘You’re going too fast. What about linings? See straight through you in organdie. You can wear the knickers of your practice dresses, but you must have slips even if it’s only jap… Get something good enough for one and six-three,’ Nana thought, but she’d need two yards for each of them.

To get the five pounds needed, lovely Mr Simpson, one of their lodgers, agrees to advance them the money. In return he is given the necklaces that GUM gifted each girl, with the understanding that they will buy them back with their earnings. All I can say is that in 1936, children’s books hit different.

Lovely Mr Simpson notwithstanding, Ballet Shoes (paid link)is a book largely about women who rescue themselves, from Sylvie who steps up admirably even though, to be fair, she’s a bit of a wet blanket and the marvellous, unflappable Nana. Then there are the women who come to the aid of the Fossils like their lodgers Dr Jakes and Dr Smith who tutor the girls and Miss Theo Dane, a dance teacher who starts them on their path to the stage, all of them a great support network of sisterly solidarity.

But when I think about Ballet Shoes (paid link) and what it means to me, why it’s stayed with me all these years, it’s because Petrova Fossil is the rebel girl hero of my heart. Petrova made it all right to not conform to the expectations of what a girl should be; that you could still be happy even if you weren’t conventionally beautiful or gifted in the feminine arts or able to execute a perfect arabesque. Petrova manages just fine without these attributes – and in the end, she gives up the stage so she can learn to fly planes. This is why Petrova is the preferred Fossil of women who’ve read Ballet Shoes, and I’d be hard pressed to find any women in my social circle who hasn’t read Ballet Shoes (paid link).

So, thank you Noel Streatfeild and the Fossils for my feminist awakening at an age when I was far too young to know what the patriarchy was even though I already wanted to smash it.

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My new novel, The Love Library, also has an important feminist message. Find out why heroine Tess “chooses the bear. I will always choose the bear”, by preordering it now. (paid link)

Like a lot of novelist parents, although I say I don’t have favourites, I will admit that there are certain novels of mine that years later still hold a special place in my heart. Either for what they represent or because of what they meant to me or, far more rarely, I feel like I wrote a really, really good story. Unsticky, (paid link) Let’s Get Lost (paid link) and London, With Love (paid link)are a good example of each.

And then there are the other novels. The novels that weren’t good stories. Or are overshadowed by what was happening behind the scenes. The ones that I wish could be expunged from the records. So when I noticed It Felt Like A Kiss,(paid link) my fourth grown up novel if we’re keeping track of these things (and yes, I’m always keeping track of these things) is 99p for Kindle this month, it threw up a lot of feelings. Big, messy, conflicted feelings because it very much does not hold a special place in my heart.

Let’s start with the premise, which I still think is pretty solid.

Ellie Cohen is living her dream. A great job at an exclusive Mayfair art gallery, loyal mates, loving family, and really, really good hair. Well, there’s the famous rock-star father who refuses to acknowledge her and a succession of ‘challenging’ boyfriends, but nobody’s perfect.

But when a vengeful ex sells Ellie out to the press, she suddenly finds herself fighting to keep her job, her reputation and her sanity. Then David Gold - handsome, charming but ruthlessly ambitious - is sent in to manage the media crisis . . . and Ellie.

David thinks she’s a gold-digger and Ellie thinks he’s a shark in a Savile Row suit, so it’s just as well that falling in love is the last thing on their minds . . .

Publishing is a game of variables. Success AKA selling a metric fuckton of books is dependent on so many things from a fully committed publisher, a great team, decent marketing spend and strategy, and a huge helping of luck. So many things that are beyond the control of the writer. In fact, the only element that we have any control over is writing the best book that we are capable of writing.

And sometimes…. that doesn’t happen. Or rather the best book that we’re capable of writing is just kind of mid. The story never quite comes together. That magic that occurs when you’re deep in writing and the story emerges as you hammer away at your keyboard is absent. In short, the vibes are off.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a bad book, but deep down, in your secret heart of hearts, you know it could be better. And It Felt Like A Kiss is one of those books for me.

In some ways, it’s quite hard to pinpoint exactly why it didn’t work. It was definitely too long. Probably too woolly. Definitely lacking in that aforementioned magic.

There were good bits. It was my first attempt at a dual timeline. I loved my heroine, Ellie and my hero, David, two type a’s, who were both equal parts grumpy/sunshine. I loved writing about the art world again and I really loved catching up with Grace and, in particular, Vaughn of Unsticky fame. Ellie works for Vaughn at his Mayfair gallery so he does feature quite a bit. In fact, my then agent made me cut down some of the Vaughn bits because he was just stealing the scene. (If Unsticky ever became a word of mouth bestseller after all this time, which is doubtful, I can’t wait to write a sequel.)

I also learned a lot. Every book, even after over twenty years as a novelist, is a learning experience. From some of the more constructive reviews, I realised that readers thought that the story took too long to get going. Or rather, in romance terms, the meet-cute between David and Ellie didn’t happen soon enough. This is something that I’ve taken on board ever since. It’s no hardship. Writing the meet-cute is one of my favourite things and I’m all for giving it its rightful place.

I also learned, in the hardest way, that you always do the extra edit, no matter if your life resembles a raging bin fire.

Let’s rewind back to 2012. It Felt Like A Kiss was meant to be published in May 2013. Proofs had gone out. I’d done some publicity but then it was delayed until January 2014 for reasons. So many reasons. Also, the cover was terrible.

There was a lot going on with the publishing side of things that I’m not going to reveal. For one, they’re very boring and not that important to anyone who isn’t me and for two, it’s never a great idea to air your dirty laundry in public. That’s a cliché for a very good reason.

Meanwhile, personally, I was a mess. My dad had died halfway through 2012 and when I look back now, I realise that for the next two years or so of my life, I was quite, quite mental. Sad and angry and anxious and preoccupied and really not my best self or doing my best work.

This was when the third (or was it the fourth?) editor came on board to get this ill-fated book published. They quite rightly suggested a title change and a series of rigorous edits. It was the one time in my publishing career, when instead of going the extra mile, doing the extra work, I didn’t have the bandwidth for either. Regrets, I have a few. By way of comparison, I’ve just delivered the ninth draft of a book, which hasn’t even known the touch of an editor yet but I felt like it needed nine drafts to make it everything I wanted it to be. And if my editor feels like it needs another nine drafts (dear God, please not, prayer hands emoji) then I’ll do them. But back then, I was just too heartsick and over it to even contemplate another round of edits.

No wonder then that when I think of It Felt Like A Kiss I always get a panicky feeling like I can’t find my keys or I’ve forgotten to take my pills. It’s a book that could have, should have, would have been better if I’d done the work. But it also reminds me of a period of my life when the black dog had me in a chokehold. In short, a time I’d much rather forget.

Both this book and those horrible dark years around it changed me as a writer and as a person in so many (positive, I hope) ways, but I don’t think I could ever bear to go back and reread It Felt Like A Kiss. However, don’t let that stop you! Like I said, it’s currently 99p for Kindle and you may enjoy it. If you’ve read Unsticky, then you’ll definitely want to see where Grace and Vaughn are a couple of years down the line.

Now, don’t even get me started on Nine Uses For An Ex-Boyfriend, (paid link) my difficult third grown-up novel…

My new novel, The Love Library, which I’m happy to report was an utter joy to write, is available to preorder now. (paid link)

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The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (paid link)

If no one has ever travelled through time and matter to be with you, then can you truly say that you’ve ever really been loved? This is the only book that I’ve ever read, then immediately turned back to page one and read it all over again. And actually I’m going to reread it this year so I’m primed for the sort of sequel, Life Out Of Order (paid link), when it publishes in October. I’m giddy for it!

Pride And Prejudice by Jane Austen (paid link)

I do think with age, and the emotional maturity it brings, that Persuasion (paid link) is the better novel but Pride And Prejudice is still the Triple A-grade, gold standard by which all other romantic fiction must be judged. I first read it when I was thirteen and it still has a chokehold on my heart.

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept by Elizabeth Smart (paid link)

Just the title alone makes me shiver - this passionate prose poem chronicles the long love affair between Elizabeth Smart and the married poet, George Barker. She bore him four children but he never left his wife for her. By Grand Central Station… captures all the yearning, so much fucking yearning, and despair of a love betrayed.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (paid link)

Sometimes described as the first “sex and shopping” novel, I read this French classic at an impressionable age and fell madly in love with selfish, sensual, frustrated Emma Bovary who though married to a devoted but doughty husband longs for something more and finds it temporarily in (SPOILER ALERT) the arms of other men and ultimately a bottle of arsenic. Blues.

The Idea Of You by Robinne Lee (paid link)

I’m a sucker for an older man, younger woman pairing so I was surprised that I fell so hard for The Idea Of You. It helps that it’s really well written, sharply observed and super hot. Solene is clever, funny, beautifully dressed, deliciously aspirational and yet the kind of woman you’d want to be friends with. And Hayes Campbell, from her twelve year old daughter’s favourite band, August Moon, is um, Harry Styles by any other name. I went from thinking of Harry as a rather aesthetically pleasing young man to listening to Fine Line on repeat, poring over pics of his Vogue shoot and rereading The Idea Of You another three times. This book (and Harry) basically got me through the third (or was it the fourth?) lockdown.

I Capture The Castle by Dodie Smith (paid link)

“I love you. I love you. I love you.” Oh, those last lines! First love never hurt so good and that thud you can hear is my body dropping to the floor because I have cried myself into a stupor.

You Are Here by David Nicholls (paid link)

Is there anyone left in Britain who hasn’t read One Day (paid link) (and sobbed while doing so?) Again, it definitely is an age thing, but I think his latest novel, You Are Here, is his best one yet maybe because it really resonates with where I currently am in the map of life. (Did you see what I did there?) Marnie and Michael, two near strangers, set off to walk across Northumbria and as they navigate the rough terrain, unpredictable weather and their own loneliness, something rather magical happens between them.

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell (paid link)

Set in 1986, Eleanor is a bullied, red-haired, surly virago of a girl who makes an unexpected connection with a boy called Park on the bus to school. Eleanor & Park is a beautiful exploration of the intensity of young love; it’s cool, it’s funny and it will perhaps restore your faith in humanity for a little while.

The Girls Of Slender Means by Muriel Spark (paid link)

I think platonic love and the fierce togetherness of female friendship deserves a place on a list of books about love. If all you know of Muriel Spark is The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie (paid link), then I implore you to read this charming little novella. It’s 1945 and in Kensington a bevy of impoverished girls in a women’s only hostel live on their rations, their reduced incomes and their nerves. They also share a Schiaparelli taffeta evening gown. I mean, come on, is that not love?

Before My Actual Heart Breaks by Tish Delaney (paid link)

An exquisite slowburn of a love story with the most perfect title. Mary Rattigan lives on a farm in the middle of nowhere at the mercy of her tyrannical mother until she gets pregnant at sixteen and married off to the enigmatic John Johns from the farm down the road. Twenty five years later, she finds herself taking stock of a life and a love interrupted. This published five years ago and I think it needs to find more readers.

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My new novel, The Love Library, is out on June 25th and is available for preorder (paid link) now.

As a little girl I loved nothing more than taking all of my mother’s brightly-jacketed Georgette Heyer paperbacks off the shelf in the living room so I could spend hours poring over their covers and ranking them in order of prettiest girl or nicest dress.

When I reached my teens, my mother was desperate to persuade me to start reading Georgette Heyer, in the same way that my naughtiest friends tried to persuade me to smoke fags, drink alcohol and get off with horrible boys with dirty fingernails. “Just try one,” she’d beg. “Just one. How will you know whether you like her books or not, if you won’t even try one?”

Sadly, my friends had more success because I was a pretentious, sneering teenager who read J D Salinger, Sylvia Plath, William Burroughs, not that I understood a single word he was banging on about, plus Jilly Cooper and the smuttiest bonkbusters I could find when I thought no one was looking. “I hate romance novels!” I’d tell my mother with a ferocious eye roll thrown in for good measure. “I’d rather die than read a romance novel.”

Thankfully, I grew up over the next few years. My reading tastes diversified to include everything from Jane Austen and Sarah Waters to Marian Keyes and I was now out and proud as a fan of Jilly Cooper. However, my mother had stopped reading due to a botched cataract operation and a series of illnesses, which left her hospitalised and bed-ridden. The last thing she read, or had read out loud to her by my father, was my first novel, Guitar Girl. She lived long enough to see me finally get a book deal, but passed away before I was published.

The loss of her, so many things left unspoken and unknown, was a raw wound. I grieved hard and every now and again I’d say to my father, “I think I’ll take Mum’s Georgette Heyer novels.” And he’d always say, “You’d love them. You really would. She even made me read them; they’re fantastic,” and yet I didn’t take them and her complete collection of all of Georgette Heyer historical romances and a couple of her contemporary crime novels were consigned to the spare room where books were stacked three deep on shelves and you had to climb over broken TVs and cardboard boxes full of I don’t know what to get to them.

Then I had a book cull, (which is always traumatic, like losing a limb,) but also managed to find space for two more bookcases so I decided that it was time to claim the Georgette Heyers. I liked the idea of having the bright spines of those Pan paperbacks as a pop of colour against my dark green Viragos and my grey Persephones. Just like Johnny Cash, I’d take them one book at a time each week when I visited my Dad.

Once I had the first few novels home, it seemed rude not to read one, though generally the Regency wasn’t my period and I didn’t do florid romances. My first Georgette Heyer was Regency Buck, (paid link) I selected it with a sneer curling round my lips; the kind of sneer I could imagine the saturnine hero having as well as an obscenely tight pair of buckskins. The last thing I expected was to fall head over heels in love.

After Regency Buck, I gorged on Georgette Heyer books like they were an all-you-can-eat-buffet. The first ones I read, Regency Buck, The Convenient Marriage (paid link), Arabella (paid link), These Old Shades (paid link) spoke directly to my then most bulletproof fic kink, flighty younger girl meets sardonic older man. Look, I watched The Sound Of Music at a formative age, OK?

As I read on, it quickly became obvious that there was so much more to Georgette Heyer than just that. These were novels stuffed full of the most delicious, everyday historical detail. Heyer’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the Regency period has been much documented (she even bought one of the Duke of Wellington’s letters at an auction so she could accurately portray his speech patterns) but she brings more than an authentic eye; she brings the entire period to life in the reader’s mind. From lavish descriptions of bonnets and buttons and dresses to meals served at coaching inns and banquets. I’ve rubbed shoulders with the Prince Regent at parties in the Brighton Pavilion, raced curricles in Richmond and lost a fortune at the faro table. Bond Street is no longer home to Chanel and Prada and Louis Vuitton but Hookham’s Lending Library and The Western Exchange. The Pantheon isn’t where the other M&S is on Oxford Street but one of the sites of Almack’s Assembly Rooms, where at their St James site on King Street, one would be admitted under the sponsorship of a peeress to attend masquerades and masked balls.

I also love the language of Heyer’s books. Not as elegant and refined as Austen, but a slangy, colloquial flow of conversation that lifts her characters off the page. Of course I appropriated a “fit of the sullens” for everyday use and a haughty “It does not signify” quickly became my new “whatever.”

But for me, Heyer’s greatest talent is for writing diverse heroines who can be young or old, headstrong or measured, beautiful or plain but all come with hidden depths. This skill becomes more apparent in her later books where her heroines stop being impetuous young heiresses and develop into older women such as Henrietta Silverdale in Charity Girl (paid link), Abigail Wendover in Black Sheep (paid link) or Elinor Rochdale, in The Reluctant Widow (paid link). When I say older women generally I mean older than twenty five and younger than thirty, which would be a perfectly good age for a modern romantic heroine but in Regency times, it meant having “spinster of this parish” printed on your calling cards.

Heyer’s heroines are never passive and although she doesn’t write them as modern women, they have a modern sensibility. Annis Wychwood (paid link), Frederica Merriville (paid link), Mary Challoner (paid link) et al are independent, lively, questioning, never swoon and don’t have romances; they have relationships. I suspect that Heyer found the notion of romance a little unseemly, so these aren’t novels where there are heaving bosoms and impassioned declarations of love. These are stories about people getting to know each other, tolerating and accepting each other’s weaknesses, searching for and finding commonality and LIKING each other before they even dare to entertain the notion that they may be in love.

I also appreciate Heyer’s ability to stamp all over the tropes of Regency romance novels, a lot of which she invented only to have them blatantly plagiarised by the likes of Barbara Cartland. Just as you’re settling down for a variation on what seems like a well-worn theme, it turns out that the rake is beyond redemption and was never meant to be the hero. Or that our worldly, well-dressed viscount isn’t secretly enamoured of the coquettishly innocent runaway, in fact, he thinks she’s quite the brat compared to the quiet charms of his childhood confidante. In Cotillion (paid link), for instance, Kitty is under the thrall of the devilishly handsome Jack Westruther, but instead of transforming him from rakish to respectable, Kitty realises that he’s a fortune hunting ne’er do well. The story takes an unexpected turn as we’re drawn into the deepening relationship between naïve, ingenuous Kitty and her silly, dandified cousin Freddie and how it brings out the best in both of them. Freddie becomes a hero, albeit a very unlikely one, and Kitty grows up just enough that it changes the way they see each other and the way the rest of the world sees them.

Of course, there is a certain formula to Heyer’s novels. I think of it as a Heyer shorthand. Her heroes are always skilled horsemen, who usually have a set of matching greys that are the envy of all. They dress impeccably without being tulips and have many capes on their greatcoats. Her London novels must include at least one scene where they take a turn around Hyde Park (the Regency equivalent of being papped while doing a Starbucks run,) and a visit to Almack’s. And always but always there is period costume porn: “a gown of figured lace over a white satin robe, with short, full-plaited sleeves, fastened down the front with pearl buttons to match the edging of pearls to the overdress… a new pair of long white gloves, as well as new satin sandals, and a length of silver net to drape around her shoulders in the style known as à l’Ariane.”

There’s something wonderfully comforting about these familiar details, like a password to a secret society, and to out yourself as a Heyer fangirl is to be welcomed into the fold of a discerning group of women who aren’t at all precious or possessive of their beloved Georgette. Which makes a lovely and cyclical sense because I’m an unabashed devotee of Georgette Heyer now because of another discerning woman who would be overjoyed to know that her books found a good home.

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My new novel, The Love Library, is out on June 25th and is available for preorder (paid link) now.

It’s Blue Monday, allegedly the most depressing day of the year, when the last Christmas treat has been consumed (I finished the final mince pie on Sunday,) January has been happening for eleventy billion days, it’s cold, damp and grey, the tax bill wants paying at the end of the month and it feels like nothing good will ever happen again.

Or is it just any other day and unlike what people in the wellness space and brands trying to get you to buy stuff would have you believe, Blue Monday is just a fucking excellent song by New Order? Who knows?

What I do know is that January IS a slog and also it must be related that several people have asked me to recommend funny books to lift their moods. So I’ve put together a list of books that always improve my spirits and hope that they will hit you right in the serotonin receptors, if indeed serotonin receptors are even a thing.

Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding

I love Bridget Jones, unapologetically and unashamedly, and I still think the first book, despite all the talk of weight gained and lost, fags smoked and alcohol units consumed, holds up. It was the ‘90’s, things were different then. For me, Bridget Jones is one of the greatest comic characters in literature, which isn’t to say that these books don’t have real heart too. Also, marry Mark Darcy, shag Daniel Cleaver and kill Mr Tits Pervert obvs.

Buy Bridget Jones’s Diary here (paid link)

Welcome To Glorious Tuga by Francesca Segal

Dopamine in book form! How I long to visit Tuga for real, a fictional British outpost in a tropical setting, which is unreachable during the long months of storm season. We follow buttoned up vet Charlotte, desperate to escape London and her tyrannical mother, and see Tuga and its colourful and eccentric inhabitants through her eyes and feel the same sense of arriving home. I also tore through the sequel, Island Calling (paid link) and can’t believe I have to wait until 2027 for the final book in the trilogy.

Buy Welcome To Glorious Tuga here (paid link)

Happy All The Time by Laurie Colwin

A cult classic recently and beautifully reissued, Happy All The Time is one of those novels beloved of a certain type of literary woman and they are not wrong. It tells the story of distant cousins and best friends Guido and Vincent who meet and fall in love with two women and go on to lead lives that eventually they must conclude are happy. Stuffed full of delicious detail and acutely observed little asides, this is a novel where not much happens but that is one of my favourite genres of novel.

Buy Happy All The Time here (paid link)

Mrs Harris Goes To Paris by Paul Gallico

Just the title alone is *chef’s kiss* but it’s impossible not to be charmed by char lady, the good-hearted Mrs Harris who scrimps and saves for years so that she can go all the way to Paris to buy a Dior gown. That would be delicious enough but of course once Mrs Harris gets to Paris, she has all sorts of adventures which are nothing to the adventures that continue when she gets back to London with her precious couture frock. Look, the world is an awful fascist binfire but Mrs Harris Goes To Paris is a beautiful reminder that good things can happen to good people.

Buy Mrs Harris Goes To Paris here (paid link)

The Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole Aged 13 and 3/4 by Sue Townsend

I can’t believe that there are people who haven’t read this book and if you’re one of them then I implore you to rectify that situation immediately. I have read this sublime exercise in teenage angst so many times that I could practically recite it from memory. Partly because I compulsively reread it as a teenager due to both economic reasons (couldn’t afford to be shelling out on books as much as I do now) and for reasons that even though I realised that Adrian was a ridiculous creature, I did kind of over identify with him. Let they who didn’t write terribly poetry when they were a teen, cast the first stone! All these decades later and the chapter where Adrian tries to paint over his Noddy wallpaper with black paint three times and then has to use a black felt tip on every bell on Noddy’s hat still makes me laugh just to think about it.

Buy The Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole here (paid link)

Diary Of A Provincial Lady by EM Delafield

The four books that make up the Diary Of A Provincial Lady series are my absolute all time comfort reads and a sure-fire antidote for a reading slump or bad case of the blues. Although there were written over seventy years ago, the travails of the Provincial Lady are as dryly funny as a vodka martini and it’s so easy to empathise with her problems; whether she dare wear her tired blue frock to another soiree, the nasty letters from the bank about her overdraft or her anxiety about having to have stern words with any of her domestic staff. (NB: I have no staff.)

Buy Diary Of A Provincial Lady here (paid link)

Man At The Helm by Nina Stibbe

The first book in the Lizzie Vogel trilogy is just as funny as Stibbe’s wonderful memoir, Love, Nina. Nine year old Lizzie, her two siblings plus Debbie the Labrador, decamp to rural Leicestershire with their newly divorced, glamorous but rickety mother who quite clearly, unbeknownst to her but according to her children, needs a man to stop her from going off the rails. A list is drawn up but none of the candidates prove themselves suitable after a series of mishaps and disasters. Hilarious but with a real tenderness, Man At The Helm, will transport you instantly to the 1970’s and make you glad that you don’t have to stay there very long.

Buy Man At The Helm here (paid link)

Standard Deviation by Katherine Heiny

You know how I said that Bridget Jones was one of the greatest comic characters in literature? Well, you can add Audra, second wife of the hapless Graham Cavanaugh in Standard Deviation, to that list. Not only is Audra a very specific type of woman that you can only find in New York, but think of every adjective that the nuns used to describe Maria in The Sound Of Music, then apply them with steroids to Audra who’s a relentless, inquisitive, unfiltered presence who leaps off the page. Would Graham have been better off staying with his quiet first wife Elspeth? That is something only he can decide.

Buy Standard Deviation here (paid link)

Gone With The Windsors by Laurie Graham

Laurie Graham is one of those writers who should be much better known and more widely read then she is. Gone With The Windsors is my favourite book of hers and is told from the POV and diary of the fictional Maybell Brumby, a wealthy American widow who rocks up in London in 1932 to discover that her old school friend Wallis Simpson is also in residence. Of course as Wallis sets her sights on the Duke Of Windsor, she’s aided by Maybell’s both huge wealth and her naivete as to what her old friend is really like, although Maybell has plenty to say about both England and English society as she bears witness to one of the greatest royal scandals of the 20^th century. (Until Diana and Fergie appeared some fifty years later.) Pro tip: I would get this as ebook or audiobook as the font is so tiny in my paperback it made my eyes twitch.

Buy Gone With The Windsors here (paid link)

The Love Library by Sarra Manning

OK, I am going to toot my own horn here because book promo and also as a romcom novelist, I believe that the com is as important as the rom. The Love Library which publishes at the end of June is the funniest book I’ve ever written. Our heroine Tess finds herself invited to a mysterious library where you can withdraw characters from the books and she goes on the two truly disastrous dates with Rochester and Heathcliff as she waits not so patiently for the chance of romance with Mr Darcy who, of course, has a waitlist longer than if he were a Hermés Birkin. And then there’s grumpy but hot Head Librarian Gabe who couldn’t disapprove more. Writing this book was a delight and gave me such joy, which I hope is apparent when you read it. I would love it if you’d consider sticking it on preorder.

Preorder The Love Library here (paid link)

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I’m no longer contractually obligated to review a huge stack of books each month. Hurrah! However, I did end up reading a lot of January proofs before the proof well ran dry and these are three titles that I loved, that I think a lot of other people will love and also filled me with a longing for the past that made me want to quote the entirety of “Being Boring,” (my second favourite Pet Shop Boys song) but especially, “My shoes were high and I had scored/I’d bolted through a closing door…”

Workhorse by Caroline Palmer (Fourth Estate, out January 15^th)

Think The Devil Wears Prada (paid link) meets The Talented Mr Ripley (paid link)in this doorstopper of a novel set in New York in the immediate post 9/11 era on a magazine that isn’t Vogue, but the author worked at Vogue, if you know what I mean. The protagonist, Clo, is determined to get on even though she’s a workhorse, there for the grunt work and trying to fathom out the multitude of rules, both spoken and unspoken, which guarantee success both at the magazine and in the upper echelons of New York society. Unlike the show ponies, those privileged girls with trust funds and good genes and heiress hair, who are there not to do the grunt work but to add some cachet to the masthead.

This is a dark book, full of jeopardy, as Clo reveals herself to be something more morally grey and devious than the put upon heroine we first believe her to be. I read with my heart in my mouth but also found myself awash with misty watercolour memories. Not of my time on Elle UK, which was a much jollier, far more ramshackle affair (we ate cake in the office! Features editor, the late, great Neil McLennan and I would sit at our desks belting out showtunes!) but my frequent trips to NYC in the immediate post 9/11 era when one of my dear friends was working on Harper’s Bazaar.

It was very much like the last days of the Roman Empire or rather the last days when editors were still treated like gods and a row of Lincoln Town Cars would be idling at the curb ready to whisk them away to somewhere fabulous. My dear friend had a very stressful time of it; there always seemed to be impossible quest and even more impossible side quests that she was expected to fulfil but for me, it all worked out well. She, or rather her assistant, could get us in wherever my little New York-obsessed heart desired.

Brunch at Balthazar. The launch party for a coffee table book about Edie Sedgwick at the newly-redesigned-by-Ian-Schrager Gramercy Park Hotel. And dinner at Bette, Amy Sacco’s restaurant (that is the same Amy Sacco who launched Bungalow 21, allegedly with mob money) where I dined on the dish du jour, truffle fries, and watched wide-eyed and open mouthed at the finance bros at the neighbouring tables all accompanied by the most beautiful (and very young) women I’d ever seen. A lot of that period of my life directly inspired Unsticky and certainly that evening at Bette was immortalised in a scene, which I had to cut quite early on. (Maybe I might publish it on Substack? Maybe!)

So, I ate Workhorse right up and yes, it could be two hundred pages shorter but I enjoyed ever sliver of detail from twenty years ago that now feels like an entirely different lifetime.

Buy Workhorse here (paid link)

Hot Desk by Laura Dickerman (Penguin, out January 22^nd)

Another New York-set novel this time in the literary world, which follows the adventures of Jane in 1982, an intern on East River Review (a literary magazine that absolutely isn’t a Gotham version of the Paris Review, of course not) created and published from the townhouse of its founder, the charismatic, much revered writer, Edward David Adams. Then in the present day, in the now very corporate publishing world, Edward David Adams has just died and Jane’s daughter, Rebecca a lowly and not entirely committed to her job editor wants his unpublished manuscript and to not have to share a desk with an annoying man from a rival publisher.

Which is why Hot Desk has been billed as a romcom (and there’s nothing I like more than a romcom) but it isn’t just the snapping and snarling of a courtship conducted by Post-It notes and psychological warfare with a cactus. It’s so much more than that, which makes it a hard book to sum up in a few pithy sentences. For me, the 1982 sections of the novel are the most poignant and affecting as Jane and her fellow intern, the impossibly glamorous Rose, are two confused planets spinning around the sun that is Edward David Adams. It’s obvious that things are not going to end well but, rather, catastrophically. The aftershocks of that catastrophe will echo down the years to the present day when Rebecca has her own crosses to bear as she tries to succeed in publishing.

So, Hot Desk is funny and sexy and everything you want in a romcom but it’s also a devastating read about powerful men behaving appallingly with the powerless young women sucked into their orbit. If you liked My Salinger Year,(paid link) Tom Lake (paid link) and also The Flatshare,(paid link) then I’m pretty sure you’ll like Hot Desk too. I’m just sad that it languished, unread, on my bedside table for so long.

Buy Hot Desk here(paid link)

Nothing Good Happens After 2am by Niamh Hargan (HarperCollins, out January 29^th)

We’ve left New York now and are in grimy old London Town in the 1990’s at Love and Death, an East End dive with Speakeasy vibes. This is where El Tippett and Robbie Saunders meet behind the bar as they make cocktails and a bitter rivalry begins with will take them across decades and continents. Sometimes they don’t speak for years and sometimes being rivals looks a lot like being in love and all the time there are different bars and different faces and mouthwatering (and sometimes eye watering) cocktail concoctions. What I really loved about Nothing Good Happens After 2am (and that title is just… bites fist) is how perfectly it captures the turbulent twenties, when you have some inkling of the person you want to be but becoming them still feels just out of reach. So, this isn’t just a love story but also a bildungsroman (of course, I had to google the spelling) even though strictly speaking it’s not about the transition from childhood to adulthood but it is still a coming of age novel.

This is also a book so much about time and place. And it’s an atmospheric book; the kind where you live in its pages. You don’t just hear the music or see each bar and each perfectly imagined cocktail right down to the twist of lemon adorning it, you can smell them, taste them, touch them.

I adored Niamh Hargan’s debut novel Twelve Days In May (paid link) and it’s great and also very inspiring to see her developing and deepening her craft as a writer.

Buy Nothing Good Happens After 2am here (paid link)

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It’s that time of the year when people compile their favourite books of the last twelve months. Well, I’ve already done that in a professional capacity. Because for over ten years, I was Literary Editor of Red Magazine (see my previous post: Why I Gave Up The Best Job In The World) and during that time I easily read about 1500 books. Easily. So I thought it would be fun and interesting and useful to whittle that number down to a mere ten. There might be some surprises here, or not, but if you haven’t read them all, then they come with my personal endorsement and much gushing.

So, in no particular order:

The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn

For me, The Whalebone Theatre is pretty much literary crack. It tells the story of Cristabel, a difficult wayward girl, my favourite kind of heroine! Add in a beautiful but selfish stepmother, a big crumbling country house, amateur theatricals, bright young things, the second world war shattering everything and some Cazalet vibes and job done. A beautifully immersive story that felt like a much-loved favourite book even when I was reading it for the first time.

Buy The Whalebone Theatre here (paid link)

The Ministry Of Time by Kaliane Bradley

I went into this book with zero expectations. It was one of those really buzzy books but I don’t do sci-fi or whatever so I thought I’d read a couple of pages to show willing but oh my God, this debut novel (how can it be a debut novel?) broke me in such a beautiful way. A junior civil servant is selected to be the “bridge” to Victorian Arctic explorer, Commander Graham Gore, one of several “expats” plucked from history by the government. As she helps him navigate the 21^st century, what unfolds is a tense, compelling thriller as the sinister truth about the project emerges, and a tender, doomed and very sexy love story. I still get the good shivers when I think about Graham Gore…

Buy The Ministry Of Time here (paid link)

Book Lovers by Emily Henry

My first EmHen and still my favourite novel of hers. The mark of a really good writer, especially in the romance genre, is when they can take a well worn trope and twist it 45 degrees or do something completely different with it. So we have Nora (love me a Nora!) a high powered literary agent who’s always the one before her boyfriends find The One. She leaves New York and her arch nemesis, editor Charles, for her sister’s small town of Sunshine Falls where she’s plans to hook up with a sexy lumberjack instead… she keeps bumping into Charles. I love a New York, publishing set novel and Book Lovers was exactly that but transported to a small town not unlike a certain Star’s Hollow, and an enemies to lovers plot that properly snapped and crackled.

Buy Book Lovers here (paid link)

Oh My God What A Complete Aisling! By Emer McLysaght and Sarah Breen

If I may toot my own horn, I was the first UK reviewer to review OMGAWACA before it even had a UK publisher, but when a book is heartily recommended by both Marian Keyes and Louise O’Neill, I pay attention and I’m glad I did because OMGWACA was (and still is) a comedic tour de force. Aisling is usually the side character in a novel, but here she steps into the spotlight and is validation for all those of us who never forget to renew our car insurance and always buy the bulk of our Christmas presents in the January sales. We laugh with her, never at her. We admire her for the same traits that we don’t necessarily value in ourselves. iI’s impossible not to love Aisling and root for her and I didn’t understand at least half of the Irish cultural references (What is the GAA? What are West Coast Coolers and would I like them? How do you pronounce Sadhbh?) it doesn’t matter a jot. This is still one of the funniest books I’ve ever read.

Buy OMG What A Complete Aisling here (paid link)

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

The book that spawned the now ubiquitous UpLit trend and a plethora of quirky main characters who exist to teach important life lessons to us all. So it’s easy to forget (or I’d forgotten) that Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is actually a very dark novel. Its heroine isn’t adorably quirky but sticks to a rigid routine (same meal deal every lunchtime, same cryptic crossword every day, same two bottles of vodka every weekend) to keep her life from sliding into chaos and deep, deep despair. This novel strikes such a beautiful and delicate balance between funny and heartbreaking and despite its many impersonators remains a truly original work.

Buy Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine here (paid link)

The Mermaid And Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar

A gloriously assured debut set in a beautifully drawn Georgian London. Jonah Hancock is a widowed ship merchant who comes into possession of a mermaid, which catapults him into the orbit of Angelica Neal, a celebrated courtesan. What follows is a story of obsession and destruction, hope and heart, which beguiles as much as the mermaid herself. There’s a scene in this book, which I still think about at least once a week and I also can’t believe that this still hasn’t been adapted for television.

Buy The Mermaid And Mrs Hancock here (paid link)

The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin

In New York in 1969, the four Gold siblings visit a mysterious fortune teller who gives them each the date that they’ll die. Each sibling is devastated in a different way and over the decades, from San Francisco to Las Vegas to a trailer in a secluded spot in Ohio, they come to terms with this prophetic time-bomb. The Immortalists is a stunning, immersive novel, which has echoes of Donna Tartt and Elizabeth Strout, but Benjamin’s gift for story-telling is all her own. This is a novel that you’ll lose yourself in and foist on all your friends and it still stands up all these years later.

Buy The Immortalists here (paid link)

The Wedding People by Alison Espach

I went into The Wedding People knowing only that it was acquired by Francesca Main who’s one of those publishers whose tastes usually align with mine but I wasn’t expecting to fall so completely and utterly in love with this book and its heroine. Reeling from divorce, a stagnant career and the death of her cat, Phoebe checks in to a fancy hotel in Rhode Island to kill herself. But she reckons without a week long wedding taking place at The Cornwall Inn and the attentions of bride and force of nature, Lila, who’s determined not to have her special day ruined by a suicidal stranger. Roped in as a last minute maid of honour, Phoebe slowly and reluctantly finds a way back to the person she used to be in the most satisfying and perfect way. As soon as I’d finished it, I wanted to read it all over again and also, reread Mrs Dalloway! (paid link)

Buy The Wedding People here (paid link)

Modern Lovers by Emma Straub

Comfortably discontent and on the wrong side of forty, Elizabeth, Andrew and Zoe are Brooklyn neighbours and veterans of an obscure indie rock band whose other member hit stardom, then committed suicide. Zoe has a daughter called Ruby Tuesday and Andrew and Elizabeth have a son and a cat named after Iggy Pop. Then over the space of a few months the antics of their children and the ghost of their former lives threaten to destroy their cosy little bubble. Funny yet tart, warm yet incisive, I adored everything about Modern Lovers, I can’t help thinking that it was ahead of its time, and since then I’ve read everything that Emma Straub has written and I’m really excited to read American Fantasy, which publishes next year.

Buy Modern Lovers here (paid link)

Business As Usual by Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford

I feel a little bit guilty including Business As Usual, as the small press which published it has shut up shop so you’ll have to go through second hand channels to get a copy, but! My goodness! All of my bookish buttons were pressed hard by this one. Written and set in the early 1930’s, check. An epistolary novel, told through letters, telegrams and even inter-departmental memos, check. A young and nervous librarian, check. Comes to London and finds a job in a department store, which is a lot like Selfridges, check. In the book department, check! Has a pompous surgeon fiancée, check. But maybe there might be someone else who is more simpatico, check. I really think this is my platonic ideal of a novel and it got me through those first horrible weeks of lockdown back in 2020.

Try and buy Business As Usual here (paid link)

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If you’d told the younger me, who’d go to the library every Saturday to take out the maximum six books and have them all read by Monday, that as a grown up, people would send me books for free and then I’d get paid to read them and review them, my tiny little brain wouldn’t have been able to compute.

But for the last ten and a bit years as Literary Editor of Red Magazine, that was my life. So why did I decide to step down from this hallowed and much-envied role this August? (Yes, I’ve been keeping the secret for that long.)

It wasn’t a decision that I came to lightly, but at the beginning of this year, one of my goals was to be in a position to hang up my reviewing hat.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m always going to enjoy sharing the love of a good book. Something I really prided myself on at Red was never reviewing a book that I didn’t truly enjoy or wouldn’t resonate with the Red reader. I wanted people to really trust that if I recommended a read, I did so because I genuinely enjoyed it. I poured so much into my book reviews and I really hope that came across.

But there’s that expression that you can’t pour from an empty cup and after ten years, I was feeling tapped out. I’ve always been a voracious, ravenous reader but reading to a tight schedule was something I began to resent. Reviewing ten books a month (not including the books I read, then decided not to review) meant that I had very little time for any other kind of reading, whether it was for book research or just sheer pleasure. Yes, it was a privilege to be able to read all the latest releases but sometimes I didn’t want to be reading three or four months ahead and only books that were publishing in a particular month. Sometimes I wanted to reread an old favourite. And other times, I just wanted to read some irredeemably filthy dark mafia romance.

Then there was the admin. My goodness, the admin! I spent more time on bookmin than I did on the actual reading and reviewing (though I’m sure there are many publicists reading this, who are like, lady, please! Trying to get you to reply to an email was the devil’s work.)

Let’s not forget the books. The proofs. The early proofs. The proper proofs. The finished copies. Then, a few months later, the paperback edition. I know it sounds like Cinderella wailing that her glass slippers are giving her blisters, but the sheer amount of books coming in but not going out (despite the frequent pick-ups courtesy of lovely Miranda from Oxfam Books Muswell Hill, who would take my proofs for recycling in exchange for having all my finished copies to sell in the shop) was increasingly a problem. Even though the largest room in my flat has floor to ceiling bookshelves and every other room, bar the bathroom, had a motley assortment of bookcases, still there were teetering piles of books everywhere. Yet, more kept arriving. My greatest source of comfort was also most likely to kill me if I slipped on the books on the stairs or one of the huge columns in my bedroom toppled over and smothered me as I slept.

Yes, there is Kindle and ebooks but I do prefer to read proper books. After a day staring at a laptop screen and a phone screen, my eyes long for the unglare of ink on paper.

There was another reason or two why I was hesitant to step away from a regular reviewing gig. As I hope you all know, my day job is novelist. Financially, a precarious profession. When I started reviewing for Red, it came at a time in my career when I couldn’t get arrested. Or rather my bad sales track meant I was writing books out of contract and then getting the tiniest of advances for them. As most authors will tell you, the advances they get smaller and smaller… The royalties can be, again, so tiny that they can hardly be seen by the naked eye.

Unless you’re lucky enough to write bestsellers, and luck does play a huge part, every writer I know has at least one other revenue stream. Becoming Literary Editor for Red meant that every month, I had regular money coming in. It also meant that every month when my reviews were in the print mag and posted online, I was visible. I wasn’t just a writer of novels that didn’t sell a lot, but someone who had a presence in the publishing industry.

I really loved being part of a wider book community in a different role to being a novelist, but still I continued to write two books a year. That hard work has meant that over the last decade, my career as an author has become a lot less precarious, thanks to also writing cosy romances under a pseudonym that do very well in Finland, Sweden and Brazil. Publishing is never not completely random!

I’ve mentioned that one of my goals for the year was to maybe be in a position to step away from reviewing but one of my other goals was around a book I wrote, out of contract, at the end of last year. Something utterly bonkers that came from a place of deep despair about how I was being published and also because the world felt and continues to feel a lot like a raging bin fire. Writing that novel made me find the joy again, reminded me of why I love telling stories and I had huge ambitions for it.

Ambitions that have largely come to pass and are beyond anything I could have imagined. (Sorry to be so annoyingly cryptic but there will be an announcement next year.) Then I got a deal for The Love Library and writing it was another joyful experience..

This all meant that, financially, I could afford to give up reviewing and concentrate on just writing two books a year. Which feels so indulgent! (I always say that I read really fast and I write really fast and everything else I do very, very slowly.)

I wanted to be vaguely but largely candid about money as I think it’s something we don’t talk about enough as authors. There is a sense that writing novels isn’t real work and because we’re ‘allowed’ to do it, that should be reward enough. I adore writing my little love stories, but also it’s my job. It pays the bills. It’s a business and I need to be commercially minded about how I best use my time. Hence writing cosy romances under a pseudonym, which are still very much passion projects but are definitely geared towards being more commercial than my sometimes spikier Sarra Manning works.

So in short, as a novelist, I’ve had a good couple of years. Things have come to pass that I’ve dreamt about for as long as I’ve been writing. In fact, for as long as I dreamed about being a writer one day.

So it was the right time to give up my beloved part time job; my life-saving and career-enhancing side hustle. I’m really sad not to be connecting with the Red readers every month but I will still be getting giddy about the books I’ve read, here on Substack and my Instagram. Though it will be more backlist and maybe even some of that dark romance stuff. (Friends fear that I’ve been desensitised and radicalised by the high levels of smut on Kindle Unlimited and… they’re not wrong.)

I have to confess that since I spent a week back in August emailing all the publicists that I worked with that I was retiring, the free books have slowed to a mere trickle. The FOMO is real, although my postman is delighted!

So, editors, publishers and authors, now I have freed up my reading time, if you have a book that you think I might enjoy, do get in touch. I’m looking forward to blurbing a little bit but mostly, I’m looking forward to being able to read what I want when I want, without worrying that an excess of books might lead to my untimely death.

I don’t have many practical skills in life. I can bang out a novel and if you give me a full freezer and a huge beef joint that you got half price, I will magically make room in the full freezer for it, and I can make chicken soup.

I’m not even going to be modest about it. My chicken soup is awesome. It cures colds, heals hurt hearts, I don’t doubt that it could bring about world peace. It really is that good. People who don’t even like me will vouch for it. Originally, it was my mother’s recipe and before that it was my grandmother’s recipe but I’ve honed it over the years, added to it, and taken away until I got it just right. Now I’m sharing it with you because it’s officially soup season.

Please note: this is quite labour intensive, not anything Heston Blumenthal would break a sweat about it, but it’s definitely a slow cook. Ideally, you want to make it a day in advance.

INGREDIENTS

One whole, skinned chicken, ideally a bowling fowl, but a roaster will do, or you can use chicken quarters/thighs, but it should be on the bone. Removing the skin is a faff, and don’t worry about doing it perfectly (the wings are a bugger) but it needs to come off, otherwise the soup is WAY too fatty and spoils the flavour. You also need to remove the fat around the top cavity.

One large red onion

Five good sized cloves of garlic

Leeks – 500 grammes

Four carrots

The inner stalks and heart of a celery bunch (DO NOT MISS THIS OUT!)

3 Telma Chicken Stock Cubes (available from the kosher section of the supermarket) or if you don’t have one of them, you can buy their chicken stock powder from Amazon and add three generous tablespoons

White wine

Two sachets of bouquet garni

Salt

Mixed herbs – dried is fine

Sugar

Chicken stock – optional (I always have chicken stock in the fridge or the freezer, but that’s me for you! It doesn’t matter if you don’t.)

And one really bigass saucepan!

METHOD

* Lightly sauté the onion and garlic in olive oil in your big, old pan.

• Then add the chicken, turning it so it browns.

• Meanwhile start chopping up all your veggies, adding them gradually so they have a chance to reduce down before you add some more.

* Then add some white wine, a good sized third of a bottle of whatever you have in the fridge! And chicken stock if you have it.

• Add boiling hot water, enough to completely cover everything. You must keep this water level topped up.

• Then add the bouquet garni (I put one inside the chicken too) and the crushed stock cubes.

• Add a teaspoon of sugar. Don’t ask why, just do it, then a good whack of salt.

* Leave the pan, lid on, on a slow simmer for two hours (you could use a pressure cooker but I think old skool is better,) making sure to skim the fat off the top every thirty minutes or so. (Some people simply put the finished soup in the fridge overnight so it’s easier to remove the fat in the morning, but I prefer to skim as I go, because the unctuous fat masks the flavour of the soup.)

* Keep adding water and salt as needed. You might need to add more wine, stock cubes or bouquet garni at your own discretion. You’re aiming for a salty, savoury, clear but quite dark broth. Umami, if you will!

* It’s done once the chicken starts sliding off the bones.

There’s enough here for at least ten bowls of soup that should be a full meal in themselves. Only decant exactly what you need each time and heat it up in a smaller pan with a bit of extra water and salt, if needed. And it freezes beautifully.

You can’t have proper chicken soup without noodles so when you can decant, add some vermicelli, or angel hair pasta. (Sometimes I prefer some already cooked but not quite al dente yet thick posh pasta.)

Now eat, enjoy! What do you mean, you’re not hungry? You must be hungry…