Book-Mad-Mum

    E vie Bird is a romance writer whose latest bestseller is being made into a Christmas movie. Behind the scenes, she has a lot on her plate, with her mother in a care home, no relationship with her father and now a new book deadline on the horizon. Duke Carlisle is a world-famous actor who has landed the role of leading man in the film. Fresh out of a relationship with his co-star Daphne, the atmosphere on set is a little fraught. Evie is contractually obliged to appear on set as a consultant, and when she meets Duke it’s a frosty encounter. In fact, the only thing icier than their interactions is the snow that coats the Bavarian streets they are filming on. But after images of them arguing leak to the press and put the movie in jeopardy, they are left with no choice but to fake date until the cameras stop rolling. As the pair start to put their differences aside, gradually, somewhere along the Romantic Road, th...

  Christmas is upon us and Kate, a lawyer who wants to change the world, but is stuck working on high profile divorce cases, embarks on a visit home with her partner Ed, a musician who now teaches at a local secondary school. At the start of the road trip while encountering the inevitable holiday traffic, a row ensues, and instead of singing along to their usual cheesy festive tunes their journey is as frosty as the outside temperature and their relationship melts away before their very eyes. Being Christmas, both Kate and Ed decide to put on a brave face and make the heart-breaking decision to go their separate ways after the holiday season but both agree not to tell their respective families and spoil Christmas for everyone. I absolutely adored this book – you can’t help loving Ed, he really has a heart of gold and would do anything for Kate, who seemed a bit harsh at times. Settle down with the Christmas tree lights on, a glass of either mulled wine, or a steaming cup of...

    Roxborough Hall is a stately home in in Norfolk, and when the current custodian Cecily dies the house goes through its unusual tradition. For this mansion is not automatically left to the next in line, but instead there is a special dinner for the family where each guest receives a letter telling them if the estate has been left to them or not and the reason why. Each member of the Mordaunt family feels they deserve to inherit it from the eldest son David and his wife Bryony to younger brother Grant who always has a different girlfriend on his arm. Or perhaps this time it will skip a generation and one of the grandchildren will take the reins. There is a long list of characters involved in this story, and initially at the start I had to really concentrate on the family linage to remember who was who, but that quickly settled down and you become very invested in the characters and their back story - my personal favourite was Willa who is trying desperately to keep her...

      Christmas is fast approaching for the Miller family which means lots of pressure for the younger members, Ross, Alice and Clemmie who live away from home and are forging independent lives for themselves. Like most families, Christmas brings with it the stress of returning home for a season of questions (albeit well meant!) but Ross, Alice and Clemmie have certain things they don’t want to share yet and so call a “siblings summit” ahead of returning home to discuss what they will and won’t share with the family!   Lucy Clarke is not having the best festive season…she is looking at a solo Christmas following the death of her grandmother and the future of her job, is the glue which is holding her life together, is looking uncertain. It all hinges on getting new clients to join the Marketing firm she works for in particular Ross Miller. Whilst working in Scotland for another client, Lucy decides to hand ...

In this book we hear the intertwined stories of four generations of women all from one family. Grace is fast approaching her 90th birthday and is very much the doyen of the group. Alys, her daughter has lived a troubled, complicated life which impacted on her daughter Erin, who now in her 40s has regained the control of adulthood that she never had as a child. Finally, teenager Beca, Erins daughter, is a breathe of fresh air who knows what she wants from life, and it differs greatly from the life her Mum wants for her! Four strong women who have faced different life hurdles but who all share the same DNA! I have read all of Ruth Jones' novels so far and this one is by far the best! It's as entertaining and enthralling as the others, but just has a certain magic ingredient that for me, makes it stand outfrom the rest! Each of the chapters tells a bit of the story seen through the eyes of one of the four women, which to begin with I found quite confusing as I had to remember thei...

  All The Broken Places is the follow up story to the Boy In the Striped Pyjamas – a book which had me sobbing on a packed commuter train many years ago. This time we hear the story of 91 year old Gretel, Bruno’s elder sister who is now living in London and trying to put her dark past behind her, but she finds that she cannot shrug off the guilt of her father’s War Crimes. Now a widow with a grown up son and living in Mayfair, Gretel finds herself defending a young boy who has moved into the apartment below. This is another thought provoking read yet again from John Boyne. It is a powerful tale following on from Bruno and Shmuel. A beautiful book which will stay in your heart forever.

It is no secret that I am a massive fan of Amanda Prowse's books and I have also been extremely lucky to meet her and I can personally vouch for the fact that her bubble personality lights up, not only the room, but the whole street and is also extremely infectious. You don't leave a meeting with her feeling down in the dumps and so to read her very honest and open book about her insecurities of her weight and body image really took me by surprise.  I found that there were times reading this memoir that I wanted to laugh with her, cry with her and more often than not, I wanted to reach through the pages of the book and hug her - if only Kindle offered that facility! You couldn't read a more candid book about body image and I think every single woman in her early 20s should read this and know that more often than not, if's ok not to be ok, but also have a chat with a friend when you feel like that as you don't go through things on your own. 

    It’s the last night in October 1999 and the clocks are going back. Will and Ella are teenagers at the fair with a group of friends and that’s where their love affair began.   Fast forward through marriage, children and empty nest and life suddenly takes a jolt for Ella. She remembers back to the night when she first met Will and recalls bits of a conversation with a woman in a green coat and red scarf. Facing a crisis in her marriage, Ella has to confront the past to see if her marriage has a future.   I am really mixed about how I felt about characters in this book- there were times when I loved Ella’s strength yet there were other times when I found her really annoying and irritating especially when she spoke to Robin – she seemed to regress into a teenager.   Will and Ella’s friend Cole was another enigma for me – he was a constant in their life and almost a cuckoo in the nest, but no one seemed to notice and there were times when I really w...

  Algernon is a 97 year old widower living in Essex. His life is routine based, punctuated by the carriage clock which he got as a retirement present from his office job. However, his 15 year old granddaughter Anna lives in an offbeat world where colour and body art are her main survival aids. Anna and Algernon have never met, but soon their very different lives will collide. When Anna’s Mum Helene splits up with her partner Harry, they find themselves homeless and having nowhere to live, they relocate to Essex to stay in Algernon’s small home while they get their lives back on track. Anna “the child” is told to sleep in “the shed” but this turns out to be a sanctuary and not the dog kennel that she originally thought it would be. This heart-warming story is told through three generations of one family, granddad Algernon, daughter Helene and granddaughter Anna and the journey they all go on to get to know each other and to try and face the demons that their past threw at them. ...

  MY FAVOURITE READ OF 2022 SO FAR... After 17 years of an unhappy marriage, Anna finally leaves husband Conor and moves in with James, but both have “baggage” - Anna has two children, Jack and Grace and James has a teenage daughter called Bella. The “blended” family isn’t exactly the Brady Bunch that Anna and James had hoped for - the kids hate living in their new set up but just how do they all live together in harmony?   I absolutely loved this book but I think it resonated with me, because I am a Step Mum, and when I first met my partner’s daughter she was a teenager and my own son was Jack’s age so there were a few similarities, but not that many and my son certainly didn’t share our bed!!   Anna’s ex husband Conor was an absolute idiot, a man-child and I hated him from day one as he used his children to get back at Anna, and his behaviour at Jack’s birthday part was just unforgivable. Anna also annoyed me at times as she was constantly making excuses fo...

  It’s the 1990’s, Pulp, the Verve and The Stereophonics are in the charts, the National lottery was launched and the internet for most people, was just a twinkle in the eye. The order of the Sisters of Saint Philomena are down to just three last nuns and the convent needs a lot of repairs. With no money and no new novices coming in they face a dire future. Sister Cecilia, a 90 year member of the convent starts praying for a lottery win and after that a series of small miracles start to unfold. I loved this book, but think it was helped by the fact that my grandma worked in a convent in Ireland, and so I was always around nuns from a young age, and was fascinated by their lives, so for me this felt like a trip down memory lane. There were some occasions in the book when I was really surprised by the behaviour and attitude of Sister Margaret, but then you discover why and it all fits into place, and the intertwined story of Matthew and George was a delight to read.

    The Love Of My Life – Rosie Walsh   Emma is married to Leo and together they have a young daughter Ruby who they both adore. They are a perfect family unit…or are they? Almost everything that Emma has told Leo about her life is a lie! When Emma suffers a serious illness, Leo, an obituary writer for a newspaper, copes by doing what he knows best – researching and writing about his wife’s life. But as he starts to unravel the truth, he discovers the woman he loves doesn’t really exist. Even her name isn’t real. When the very darkest moments of Emma’s past finally emerge, she must somehow prove to Leo that she really is the woman he always thought she was . . . But first, she must tell him about the other love of her life. This book for me was a slow burner – up until 50% of the way through I couldn’t quite engage with it – we knew from the get go that there were secrets in Emma’s life and I wanted things ...

  When Eliza’s children grew up and flew the nest she downsized to a smaller house. Little did she know that eventually they would all come back to live with her! With an online college deadline looming, Eliza needs to get her final essay written but there just isn’t the room or the head space to do it at home. When she sees an advert for a house sitter, Eliza regards this as a chance to escape her noise, hectic life and find peace and quiet in rural Spain. However, things don’t quite go to plan, and she finds herself looking after the owners’ pigs as well as his finca and his dogs – but it’s given Eliza a new zest for life.   Jo Thomas has done it again! She never disappoints when it comes to story telling – she reels you in from the first page and together you go on a wonderful journey with your new found friends within the pages of the book. If you are a fan of Jo’s you will know that she has an absolute passion of food and cooking, and her love for it is infectious – t...

  Ella works at Frills, Frocks and Fairy Tails as a seamstress for a nightmare boss called Wanda. She continues to work there because she wants to help every bride find their dream dress. Outside of work, Ella is about to be a bridesmaid AGAIN! This will be the eighth time, but this time, her friend has chosen dresses which are a shade of muddy brown and could possibly be the worst bridesmaid dresses that Ella has seen! I absolutely loved this – it was a very short read and felt like a long story in a magazine rather than a book. I was also left hanging at the end which made me really excited for the next part of the book. I think personally I would prefer to buy this in the complete novel form rather than in parts. I love Bella’s relaxed writing style and the way that she draws you into the lives of the character which feels so natural.

  Thrown tells the story of four women Becky, Louise, Jameela and Sheila who all live on the Inventor’s Housing Estate. As manager of the local community centre, Becky is constantly looking for new ways to bring the community together and to also raise vital funds to keep the centre open. The new pottery class draws all four women together, and we get to peek behind the net curtains of their homes and their lives. As they work the clay into vases and pots, we discover what made these women come to the classes…whether it be heartache, secrets or relationships that have lost their spark. As a debut novel, I thought this was amazing and, on many occasions, I heard her voice in my head so it really felt like she put a lot of herself onto the pages. The characters were interesting, warm and friendly – although sometimes I thought Sheila was a little bitchy to Louise but I soon got over that the occasional barbed comment! I’ve never done pottery, and so was concerned before I read ...

    London. Nine million people. Two hundred and seventy tube stations. Every day, thousands of chance encounters, first dates, goodbyes and happy ever afters. And for twenty years it's been where one man and one woman can never get their timing right. Jennifer and Nick meet as teenagers and over the next two decades, they fall in and out of love with each other. Sometimes they start kissing. Sometimes they're just friends. Sometimes they stop speaking, but they always find their way back to each other. But after all this time, are they destined to be together or have they finally reached the end of the line? This is a story told over twenty years, starting on 9 th September 1986 in North London, and over the course of the book, it brings us right up to the current day – including Covid. It’s primarily a trip that you take with the two main characters Nick and Jen from their first encounter at college right through the ups and downs of their platonic friendship. ...

  If like me, you are a book worm, just the title of this book alone with send a tingle down your spine. If ever a book was written for me, this is it!!! Based around the closure of a town library, which is becoming all too familiar (and horrific) across the, teenager Tom and pensioner Maggie are thrown together to save this important foundation stone in their local community. The two main characters are Tom, an awkward teenager who stumbled into the library one day, and walked out with a rucksack full of romance novels for “his mum” and pensioner Maggie attends the book club each week. One evening when leaving the library Maggie is set upon by two muggers and Tom comes to her aid, and this is where their friendship blossoms.   On paper their friendship shouldn’t work but it does and it is a lovely thing to read about. Without knowing it, Tom and Maggie lean on each other emotionally as their friendship grows.   This is a book that I didn’t want to end, I absolute...

    It’s 1976 in Cambridge and undergraduate Alice Kenzie bumps straight into PhD student Tristan Somers. There begins a whirlwind romance, and Alice falls pregnant and gives birth to a baby girl. Then Tristan is killed in a car accident. Unable to cope, Alice takes her baby to Summer House, Tristan's family home in Suffolk, leaves her there and disappears. Fast forward to 2018, when Olivia Somers grandmother dies, she discovers a bundle of letters in Summer House and she finds out that her mother didn’t die in the same accident as her father, she left Olivia with her grandparents when she was a little girl.   I thoroughly enjoyed this book; it was beautifully written and has made me want to visit Cambridge! The books deals with lots of issues including grief and loss, but they are dealt with very sensitively. My favourite character in the book was Stella she was a constant pillar of strength to Alice and was alw...

  Little Joe aged six sits down in front of the tv every Saturday morning to watch Scooby Doo cartoons while his mum goes running and his dad looks after him. Joe is told by his dad not to move from the spot, so one Saturday when the tv screen goes black just before the villain is revealed in the cartoon, Joe makes the decision to move from the sofa and find his dad. It’s a decision which will change all their lives as little Joe makes a gruesome discovery. Fast forward six years…Joe and Mum Kelly are now living in a small Devonshire village. She is struggling to make friends but carries a massive secret – her husband is a convicted serial killer serving time in prison whilst herself and Joe had to relocate and change their identities.  Joe is now in Year 6 at school and has put the past behind him (or has he?) he’s built a friendship group with Mia and Leon, but when best friend Mia goes missing accusations start flying left, right and centre. This is the second book at Bryon...

  Nurse Nell Sweeney walks to and from the hospital where she works every day believing that no harm will come of her until one day when she is taken.   When Nell’s friend and flatmate makes the call to say that she hasn’t seen her for two or three days, her parents Marian and Stephen who bought their daughter up to be an independent woman, are now questioning their judgement especially as she flew the nest at a young age. A man in their area is also targeting women through fear and logging his intentions and results on the dark web. Working alone, he thrives on the responses he gets on the website until someone suggests they team up and work together –but this is one step too far for “him”. I really enjoyed this book, although the subject matter was hard hitting and sometimes a little too difficult to read for a long while. I think it’s fair to say that it was a disturbing read and wasn’t the kind of book that I could devour in one or two sittings. I found that I ...

  Lucy is at a crossroads in her life – after walking out of her job in a small, local ad agency, she meets Caleb, a photographer in her seaside town. On the same night, she also bumps into her ex-Max, who was once the love of her life. Lucy must choose which path she is going to go down, does she pursue her dream of writing a novel and stay in her hometown, or does she move to London to work as a Copywriter for a large Advertising agency. This book is a tale of two stories – the “Go” part of the book tell us what happens if Lucy goes to London, lives in a room in her best friend’s house, she lands her dream job and addresses the issues of Max and what happened to their relationship. The other part of the story “Stay” tells us what would have happened if Lucy had stayed in her seaside town and finally sat down to write the novel she’s always dreamt of writing. Initially I wasn’t sure if I liked this story of not – and at times it felt like a real slog to get through it, but I a...

    Villa Sesame is a wedding venue on the French Riviera run by two sisters Rebecca and Delphine…imagine an azure blue swimming pool, gorgeous terraces, and the chirping of the cicadas of a balmy evening and you’re halfway there! Freya and Marcus have rekindled their love and are getting married to each other…again and decide to have their wedding at Villa Sesame, gathering their friends and family to share their special day. However behind the scenes at the villa Delphine has announced to her sister that she wants to retire and travel, however Rebecca doesn’t know where life is going to take her especially when Rufus turns up at the villa as a guest at the wedding.   Jennifer writes books that are completely relatable even if they are set in exotic locations that you may never get to visit – but we can all dream though can’t we? I am a similar age to most of the characters so it was refreshing to read about people in their 50s falling in love and getting a sec...

      Debs and Marc have reached a crisis point in their marriage and they don’t really know how they got to this stage. It’s the night before Christmas Eve and with their two children upstairs in bed, things begin to boil over and emotions run high. The relationship has turned sour, nasty, and toxic and you know from the start that this can’t possibly have a fairy tale ending, but Tina holds our hands and guides us through the twists and turns and occasionally puts an arm around our shoulder when she reminds us happier times for Debs and Marc.   This is a dark, twisted tale which will leave you feeling uncomfortable at times but also wonder what goes on in Tina’s head for her to come up with a story as dark as this!!!! Wonderful characters that you really invest in – a brilliant read.

  Hannah is an agony aunt known as the Queen of Hearts who works on a radio programme, but she’s just been offered her dream job working on a morning TV show. During her last radio broadcast, a caller (Diane) rings in with a tragic story about how her brother committed suicide because two people did something to him years before that he could never quite move on from. Hannah’s blood runs cold as the story seems very familiar to her, as she knows only too well what happened on that night. Is Diane just sad, or a lonely woman looking for a friend, or does want revenge?   I should start this review by saying that I know MK Hill when we worked together “back in the day” but this is an honest and open review. This is the first book of MK Hill’s that I’ve read, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. There are several WTF moments, and when I got to the first one, I squealed with delight as I wasn’t expecting it at all – it was a complete surprise! There are loads of twists and turns an...

  Wow! That’s how I’m going to start this review. Any book that keeps me awake until 2 o’clock in the morning so that I can finish it, is a brilliant book as far as I’m concerned. Don’t get me wrong, I tried to be sensible and put it down to get some sleep, but then I was lying there in the dark and wanted to know what happened – it was like binge watching a series on Netflix – there was absolutely no way that I could sleep without knowing the conclusion! At the start of the story, lawyer Amy is approaching her 30 th birthday when she slips and bangs her head. This leaves her with temporary amnesia which means that she can’t remember anything that happened in the last six months. She certainly doesn’t remember her boyfriend Jack, a busy doctor who has yet to meet her friends and family. From there the story builds as Amy narrates us through her account of events, and you’re left not knowing if her version is real or is it paranoia from her brain injury! There were times when I...

  Lachlan Wallace is stuck at home after a car accident stalled his army career. With months of physiotherapy still to endure and only Bert & Ernie, his dog and cat for company, he’s taken to gazing out of the window, watching the world spin on without him. And then he notices a vase of flowers on the windowsill of the apartment opposite his. Drawn to their hope and colour, he decides to reach out and sticks a message in his window… WHAT ARE THOSE FLOWERS CALLED? Bethan Gwynne is a stranger in a new town. Bringing up her son Noah by herself, she is slowly rebuilding her life, but loneliness is one obstacle she has yet to overcome. She’s intrigued by a glimpse of her neighbour in the apartment across from hers – and then, one evening, she sees a message in his window just for her.   This is the first book of Miranda’s that I have read, and it was quite enjoyable. I felt I could engage with the characters, although at times they really frustrated me as well!! I did q...

  What a way to start the New Year! You will open the pages of this book and instantly you will be drawn into the dysfunctional story of identical twins Leah and Megan. Also thrown into the mix, is Megan's coercive husband Chris - it's safe to say that these three characters all have "issues"-  these are not people you want to live next door to!   I don't want to say too much about the plot as I want everyone to experience it for themselves, but it's safe to say that it has more twists and turns than an Alton Tower's rollercoaster.   Sarah Bonner gets into your head and completely messes with it! The book is split into several parts, and each part is told by a different character - when each character told their version of events I truly believed what they were saying and so my opinion was constantly changing, and just when I thought I had figured out who did what...BOOM! Another twist!   My first book of the New Year, and to be honest, I don...