This book was an absolute surprise to me. It's not really like anything else I've read before although it absolutely has notes of other books I've loved including Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone, Meg Mason's Sorrow and Bliss and Emily Austin's Someday Everyone in this Room Will Be Dead.

Unexpectedly one of my top reads of 2021, I requested this book on Netgalley because I’ve also been writing a novel about a young woman obsessed with dying and I was keen to compare and learn. Of course, because Everyone in this Room will Someday be Dead (let’s ‘shorten’ this to EITRWSBD) starts in such a well written and attention grabbing way I instantly lost the will to write my own novel.

For a couple of years now I’ve heard people gushing over Sally Rooney novels, obsessing over the BBC adaptation of Normal People, and getting into tit-for-tat arguments over whether her books deserve the celebrity status they’ve been afforded. Whatever people believe, they tend to have pretty strong feelings on Rooney’s writing.

I usually can’t wait to put together my reading wrap ups at the end of each month but for the last few months, around May onwards, I’ve had an absolutely terrible few months reading wise.

Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss is not a book that has arrived quietly. Although Mason herself says she wrote it pretty much in secret, it has been received with enthusiasm from reviewers and fellow authors to the extent that, despite a self-imposed book buying ban and a general dislike for heavier, more expensive hardbacks, I was desperate to read it.

I assume I must have snapped up Anna Wilson’s A Place For Everything on Netgalley as soon as I saw that it was a memoir about her mother’s late-diagnosis of autism but I have no memory of doing so. However, when I came across it one evening recently I was absolutely hooked within the first few lines.

Mark Watson is, in my opinion, one of the sharpest, funniest and most articulate artists out there.

It must be almost impossible for anyone with even a passing interest in books not to be aware of Candice Carty-William’s Queenie. When it came out back in March 2019 it appeared in the windows of Waterstones in an eye catching display, the cover art printed in four different colours: pink, blue, minty green and orange. I, like many other book obsessives loved it, and had no idea which one to buy.