Book-Mad-Mum

    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...