Review: Starter For Ten

Synopsis

It's 1985 and Brian Jackson has arrived at university with a burning ambition - to make it onto TV's foremost general knowledge quiz.

 But no sooner has he embarked on 'The Challenge' than he finds himself falling hopelessly in love with his teammate, the beautiful and charismatic would-be actress, Alice Harbinson. When Alice fails to fall for his slightly over-eager charms, Brian comes up with a foolproof plan to capture her heart once and for all. 

He's going to win the game, at any cost, because - after all - everyone knows that what a woman really wants from a man is a comprehensive grasp of general knowledge...Starter for Ten is a comedy about love, class, growing-up and the all-important difference between knowledge and wisdom. Are you up to the challenge of the funniest novel in years?

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Review 

We've been told that our days are university days will define and shape the rest of our lives. This is the notion I had in my mind whilst embanking on my life at the University of Sheffield. I was told I would make numerous numbers of friends with great personalities and memories that will last me a lifetime. 

They (the UCAS advert) people lied. Although I did meet wonderful people I also met a few posh ones, the ones with more money than sense, the “oh look my daddy owns a bank” type of girls. Starter for Ten David Nichols reminded me of why some of my days at University were at times challenging and fraught. The story starts with Brian, a working class boy heading off to the great adventure that is University. He hopes to join the University Challenge Team with the ultimate goal of winning the television show. On his first night at University he meets and falls in love with Alice, a rich, spoilt and promiscuous wannabe actress. When Alice fails to fall in love with him, what ensues is a traumatic venture into the mind of teenage boy in love.  

This is a story of youth and falling in love for the first time. Falling in love at such an age can charming and filled with happy memories, watching Brian fall in love is neither of those things, it is embarrassing and filled with cringe worthy moments. Starter for Ten is realistic in its view of university with the inane lectures, posh boys with more money than sense and politically charged girls. 

The Longest Holiday

Synopsis

Sometimes secrets surface after the wedding date. Another scintillating tale from the bestselling author of One Perfect Summer and Lucy in the Sky

'Don't wait for the storm to pass; learn to dance in the rain…' 

Laura has been married to the man of her dreams for seven months. But a week before the wedding, Matthew made a terrible mistake.

Escaping the humiliation that is now her marriage, 

Laura is whisked off to Florida's Key West by her best friend Marty. A carefree holiday full of cocktails and fun, surrounded by gorgeous, tanned men, is exactly what the doctor ordered.
Distraction comes in the form of sexy Cuban scuba diver Leo. 

Laura's instant attraction to him knocks her flying, and she falls hard.  As the end of the holiday approaches, Laura doesn't want to go home. Is it time to face the music? Or is there more to Key West than a holiday romance?

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Review: His and Hers

Synopsis

From their first meeting at the student union over a decade ago, Jim and Alison successfully navigated their way through first dates, meeting parents, moving in together and more . . . Then they split up and divided their worldly goods (including a sofa, a cat and their flat) into his 'n' hers. Now, three years on and with new lives and new loves, they couldn't be happier. 

Until a chance encounter throws them back together, and causes them to embark on a journey through their past to ask themselves the big question: where did it all go wrong, and is it too late to put it all right?

Review

Back when I was in a relationship I didn't quite understand how couples stayed together. I struggled to keep the relationship going, always in fear that it would end soon. I used to watch all kinds of couples, the kissing couples, the touchy feely couples, the couples who stood miles apart but still managed to say to the world that they were still a couple. I would wonder how and why they stayed together. The problem is that No one ever talks about staying together, they talk about chance meetings and falling in love but no one ever talks keeping it together. They perfect the beginning, gloss over the middle and before you know it, they are grey and old and talking about falling in love all over again.

I read His and Hers with this in mind, the story kicks off with the death of Disco, Jim and Alison's cat. These two ex lovers meet up to say their goodbyes to their cat. Gayle explores simply how they met, how they fell in love, how it fell apart but also how they try to make it work past the honeymoon period. I was consumed with finding out why these two seemingly perfect individuals couldn't make it work. What happened to drive these two apart? Mike Gayle explores what went wrong with Jim and Alison without intruding too much into their lives. When I read this I felt like a bystander watching as these two lived their lives, I could imagine them on the train as the touchy feely couple, on the bus home as the kissing couple and also at home in a kitchen with friends.

Usually this kind of book would be filled with melodrama and a dramatic ending but not His and Hers. Gayle excels in the simplifying relationships. His and Hers is simple story of a man who meets a women, they fall in love, get married and break up. There is no over the top ending or melodramatic music playing loudly over the closing credits. This book is funny, addictive and the most realistic portrayal of a relationship I've read in a long time. Relationships, ever afters and all that malarkey that is associated with life, he demystifies. Sometimes relationships end because the other person stops trying or falls out of love. In this case Jim becomes dissatisfied with the life he wished for, the ever after becomes a prison of his own making and decides to leave.

The story concludes anticlimactically with an open end.  The anti climatic end to this book although I found to be depressing is very true of life. Life isn't a soap opera, we don't run off into the sunshine holding hands while skipping to fairy tale music. We make conscious adult decisions with no symphonies in the background.  This story will transcend time.

Review: Fiance By Friday

Synopsis

Gwen Harrison:

The beautiful, high-born daughter of an English duke came to America to take over her sister-in-law’s matchmaking business. But just because she’s the boss doesn’t mean she can’t fantasize about making her own perfect match with bodyguard Neil MacBain. Will the enigmatic man who haunts her dreams cost her more than she bargained for?

Neil MacBain:
The retired Marine can’t deny the effect blue-blooded Gwen has on his troubled soul or his battle-hardened body. But as a client, Gwen is off-limits—until a threat from Neil’s past returns…and Gwen is caught in the crossfire. Now to keep her safe he will risk it all: his career, his life…and his heart.

Review

I've been looking forward to reading this book for sometime now since reading Married By Monday. 
Fiance By Friday is part of a series of books by Catherine Bybee based around a friends or a group of people who are brought together by love.  This story is based on Gwen who is a daughter of an English Duke, she is rich and pampered but lovable. She falls helplessly in love with Neil who is a retired marine, a man of few words in love with his boss's daughter: Gwen. This story follows their journey to happiness. 

These books has many funny, sexy moments which make you realize what a talented author Bybee really is. She balances romance, mystery and indulgence without being too cheesy and over the top. With any other author at the helm, these characters would have been contrite and unlikable but Bybee manages to bring humanity and feeling. I must admit I'm not murder mystery kind of girl but I was invested in the characters so much that I was able to read the entire book.

She writes stories that are sexy, indulgent but also gripping. I'm look forward to reading the next installment in the series. 

A Place Called Here

Synopsis 

The magical new novel from the number 1 bestselling author of 'PS, I Love You' and 'Where Rainbows End'. 

Sandy Shortt has been obsessed about where missing things -- and people -- end up ever since the disappearance of a childhood friend twenty years ago. It has even motivated her to become a private investigator, attempting to track down missing loved ones and giving devastated families hope. 

So when she finds herself one of the missing people, stuck in a strange place with people who vanished into thin air years ago, she wonders if she has found the answer to one of life's greatest mysteries. But if she has, will she be able to return to life as she knows it? 

If Jack Ruttle, her latest client and mystified by her own disappearance, has anything to do with it she will!

The Park Bench Test

Synopsis

How do you know when you've found Mr Right?

Aspiring journalist Becky Harper loves her boyfriend Alex, but she doesn't think he’s Mr Right.

Her best friend Emma doesn't believe in Mr Right – she’s just looking for a man who will stick around longer than her dad did.

Katie has found her Mr Right and is planning her September wedding with her two best friends.

Debut author Sarah Lefebve asked her own friends and family how they knew they had found the elusive Mr Right and then turned their honest – and often surprising – answers into this charming, emotional and downright funny romance about three friends and their search for Mr Right – if he even exists that is…

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Between The Sheets

Synopsis

Dana De Lacey, bestselling romance novelist, has the world at her feet. The words on the page flow easily; an exciting new book deal beckons, and life at home in Dublin is good.

But Dana's self-confidence and success depend on one person: her gorgeous husband, Gus. Without him, she has no fall-back. No children, no close family of her own to call upon. When Gus leaves her, she is devastated. The words fail to come. The alcohol flows too freely. She cannot sleep.

Then her estranged brother, Ed, arrives to take care of her out of the blue, and memories which she has buried for many years begin to surface: startling recollections of a childhood and a little girl long-forgotten, which inspire Dana at last to write from the heart.

Which Dana was it that Gus walked out on -- the glamorous party girl, whose romantic novels always have a happy ending? Or someone with a different name, whose life tells a very different story? Forced to face up to the past, can she find the real Dana, recover her career, and try to make Gus love her for the person she really is?

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Relative Strangers

Synopsis

The year is 1965. Jemima is just fifteen. And pregnant. And scared and distraught. 


Her parents are desperate to cover up the scandal, and force her to give up her baby. He is taken away from her before she has even had a chance to see him.

By 2009, Jemima is happily married with a grown-up daughter. But she has never stopped thinking about her son.

Where is he?  What happened to him?  Will she ever get a chance to meet him?

When her daughter’s boyfriend mysteriously disappears, Jemima is reminded of the missing piece in her own life. Desperate for closure and to heal her broken heart she decides to delve back into the past in a desperate search for the secret she has kept hidden from her family. Should she reveal the truth? 

How To Choose A Sweetheart

Max is a bookseller. Since his relationship with Jazz ended, he’s struggling to find purpose in life. That all changes when a beautiful woman, Cath, walks into his shop and pins up and advert asking for a piano teacher for her daughter, Alice.

It’s almost perfect. Max takes down the details and gets in touch immediately. Within a short space of time he manages to secure the position as Alice’s piano teacher and establish that Cath’s a single mother. 

What could be better?

Well, he might be able to play the piano for a start.

Or his newly acquired piano teacher might not be an old, alcoholic wreck.

Or he might be completely over his ex-girlfriend. 

And he might not be forced into a position where he needs to come up with a composition of his own to woo the new lady in his life.
It’s a tangled web we weave and Max seems to be sticking in the threads like a spider in a web.

A topsy-turvy romantic comedy that will warm your cockles and split your sides.

How To Be Good

Synopsis

In Nick Hornby's How To Be Good, Katie Carr is certainly trying to be. That's why she became a GP. That's why she cares about Third World debt and homelessness, and struggles to raise her children with a conscience. 

It's also why she puts up with her husband David, self-styled "Angriest Man in Holloway". But one fateful day, she finds herself in a Leeds car-park, having just slept with another man. 

What she doesn't yet realise is that her Fall from Grace is just the first step on a spiritual journey more torturous than the M25 at rush-hour. Because, prompted by his wife's actions, David is about to stop being Angry. 

He's about to become Good--not Guardian-reading, organic-food-eating good, but Good in the fashion of the Gospels. And that's no easier in modern-day Holloway than it was in ancient Israel.

AMY AND ZACH

Synopsis

Meet Amy & Zach

Amy has moved to the US in order to find her real father, but she hasn’t quite worked up the courage to do so yet. 

Then she met Zach, who swept her off her feet. They fell in love, fast. But Zach has a secret with the potential to ruin everything.

As Amy prepares to return to England for her sister Libby’s wedding, Zach drops a bombshell. Amy is furious, so she hides his passport and flies alone. But Zach’s secret isn’t her only worry. She will see Tim again – her sister’s fiancé. 

After he finds his passport, Zach heads to the UK to surprise Amy. He wants to apologise and finally meet her family. He knows he has a lot of explaining to do. But just what will he face?

Amy & Zach take it in turns to share their tale with you. They will reveal all, and may surprise you, in the end...

Expected

Synopsis

Red Alert.

Sam Sweet is terrified of giving birth. 

Only, she doesn’t dare tell anyone. Especially her grandchild-obsessed mother, or her fiancé, Simon - top surgeon by day, mind-game expert by night. 

Repressed by the expectations of others, Sam feels trapped. All she ever wanted was a career and a crack at independence, but as a catastrophically failed psychiatric nurse who now injects fillers into the crinkled faces of unhappy women, a career is proving tricky. There’s something wrong with the product and now clients are suing. 

Nasty work colleagues stir up scandalous gossip, and soon Sam hits rock bottom, consoling herself with button-popping chocolate binges and terrifying spending sprees. 

Sam is going to have to find her voice if she ever wants to be herself, fall in love, and follow her dreams. 

Alas, the wedding date is set...Purchase

Lost and Found

Synopsis

It started with a letter ...

Carol is married to a man she doesn't love and mother to a daughter she doesn't understand. Crippled with guilt, she can't shake the feeling that she has wasted her life. So she puts pen to paper and writes a Letter to the Universe.

Albert is a widowed postman, approaching retirement age, and living with his cat, Gloria, for company. Slowly being pushed out at his place of work, he is forced down to the section of the post office where they sort undeliverable mail. When a series of letters turns up with a smiley face drawn in place of an address, he cannot help reading them.

Happy Endings

Four people. Two couples. 

Six months that will change their lives forever.

Kate wants to go travelling before she reaches the big Three-O, while her long-term boyfriend Ed just wants to settle down.

Jack is desperate to be a published writer for many reasons, but mainly to save his relationship with fiancée Emma.

Emma wants to be an actress more than anything in the world, or at least that's what she thinks . . .

Told from each of their perspectives, this is a story about love, growing up and, of course, the search for a happy ending.

Must Read: Fractured

Synopsis

What would you do if life gave you a second chance?

The night of the accident changed everything... Now, five years on, Rachel’s life is crumbling. She lives alone in a tiny flat, working in a dead-end job, desperate with guilt over her best friend’s death.She would give anything to turn back the clock. But life doesn’t work like that... Does it?

The night of the accident was a lucky escape... Now, five years on, Rachel’s life is perfect. She has a wonderful fiancé, loving family and friends around her, and the career she always wanted. But why can’t Rachel shake the memory of a very different life?

Gripping, romantic and heartbreaking, Fractured is a magical love story that asks: can two different stories can lead to the same happy ending?

Review: Casting The Net

Synopsis

Anyone who’s dabbled with internet dating has a story to tell but few tell them as well as Julie McDowall.
Her online dating blog was an instant sensation when she charted her bizarre and hilarious experiences in search of the perfect man. Or at least a man who wasn’t a total freak. Or, failing that, a freak who was freaky in the right ways…

Now for the first time Casting The Net – Volume 1 presents the unexpurgated true story of her ongoing quest, including all the material deemed unfit for a family news site.

Join the eloquent, witty and intrepid McDowall as she tackles The Janny, The Accountant, The Comedian, Foxy Doctor, the inimitable Shug — and her ultimate nemesis, The Clown.Purchase

Review 

The painful world of online dating with its rules, games and overzealous personalities. No wonder almost 40% of women are single.  Channel 4 recently had a Mating season (a series of shows hylighting the horror that is online dating) where we saw first hand the horrors of first dates, if you missed the brilliant First Dates, I will sum it up in few words: cringe, cringe and more cringe. The individuals who appeared on the show were somewhat normal however compared to the characters in Casting the Net. The Janny, The Accountant, The Comedian, Foxy Doctor, the inimitable Shug are very unsuitable, in the world of online dating, they are the type of men to avoid. 

Casting The Net explores Julie's disastrous dates with The Janny, The Accountant, The Comedian, Foxy Doctor, the inimitable Shug. In a virtual sea full of men, Julie manages to find the unsuitable, the boring and the completely clueless.  It is an honest, painfully funny account of the misery of Internet dating.  I was also blown away by the  first paragraph of this book "He loved Stella more than me, so it had to end".  This book begins with an Julie making the conscientious decision to leave her alcoholic boyfriend. Her single status leads her onto online dating.   It is a multifaceted book exploring one woman's recovery from an abusive relationship to her trying to finding her way through the sea of unsuitables. There's a little desperation about her search for a relationship and like most single women, she's willing to try as many types of man as possible in search for a good man.

 I read this as a piece of fiction, it was my first introduction to this author and the more I read the more I wanted to find out about the author.  After a quick search I found out that Julie McDowall writes a blog for a Newspaper (Herald Scotland) on dating.  Her blog is delightful and very open.  This book is very similar if not identical to the blog, this does not detract from the book.  Julie McDovall is a brilliant author, she is humorous but truthful. I have to say however I wished this volume was longer, I was gripped, the characters are brilliant, the dialogue true to form, this book was a real joy to read. 

Digested Read

"And it wasn't just Stella, either. He loved Budweiser too, and Miller, and Kronenbourg. He loved all cheap drink. He was a booze whore and would go with anyone if the price was right. There was even a brief dalliance with cider when it was on a special offer but a few bottles made him queasy, so he returned to his beery lovers and wallowed and boozed and got further lost to me with each passing day"

"Now, I like the freaks and I'd rather have a dead fox text than some simpering 'hey
babes, saw this sunset and thot of u' crap. But even though Foxy Doctor had told me where he
lived, how much he earned, told me of his divorce and his new personalised licence plate on his
car, he wouldn't tell me what he was called. Even now, he was boldly texting me pictures of the
interior of his home, yet felt cagey about revealing his name. It was like strutting down the
street naked, but keeping a wee hat on for modesty."