I got Jill Mansell’s Perfect Timing free with some magazine years ago and it remains one of my favourite uplifting books. Like Jilly Cooper, Mansell excels at capturing people, and makes implausible scenarios seem totally likely.
Take a Chance on Me
Jill MansellHeadline Review 2010, Paperback, 416 pages, £7.99
Take A Chance On Me is really enjoyable for about [...]
Reading Angela Carter’s lovely descriptions of south London earlier this year had made me realise how little I read about contemporary London, and this really fitted the bill nicely.
Shop Girl Diaries (Salt Modern Lives)
Emily BenetSalt Publishing 2009, Paperback, 256 pages, £9.99
Hurray for Twitter: I found out about this book, set in a shop close to where [...]
Hands up – I absolutely judged this book by its cover. I was hoping Jacqueline Winspear would be some soupy-eyed matron from the 1930s a la Agatha Christie, and deliver me a nice, unchallenging 30s-set murder mystery. The cover’s pastel pink for crying out loud.
Among the Mad
Jacqueline WinspearJohn Murray 2010, Paperback, 352 pages, £8.99
Anyway, it turns [...]
It’s probably a good thing that David Nicholls’ acting career didn’t take him stellar, because people adore his writing.(And how lucky is that, to have two talents to pick from?)
One Day
David NichollsHodder Paperbacks 2010, Paperback, 448 pages, £7.99
And people will, and do, love One Day. Partly because that cheery orange and white cover is gracing every 3 [...]
The latest instalment of Charlaine Harris’s chatty, witty and hugely enjoyable Sookie Sackhouse novels comes with a clonking great fib on its front cover.
Dead in the Family
Charlaine HarrisGollancz 2010, Hardcover, 320 pages, £14.99
Having spawned the just as enjoyable hit TV series, True Blood, the TV cast adorn the book’s cover despite, in this universe, one of [...]
Pony books get a terrible press. They summon up thoughts of pink-faced young gels in breeches smacking crops against their boots and “winning through” to win umpteen rosettes in implausibly competitive country shows.
Well, Thelwell’s certainly full of these caricatures, and the frankly terrifying Saddle Club series from the 90s scared any competitive edge out of [...]
Times columnist Sathnam Sanghera bookends his memoir on life growing up in Wolverhampton with a letter he’s battling to write to his protective, ultra-traditional Punjabi mother. We don’t know what this letter contains, beyond the fact that it’s going to break her heart and it’s got Sanghera swigging neat vodka while he tries to write [...]
Carter is a delicious writer. I’ve only read two of her novels, six years apart, and I’m tempted to keep that distance so I don’t just guzzle down the rest and make myself sick. As it is, the first – the batty and beautiful Nights At The Circus – makes a theatrical diptych with this, [...]
