I went away with my eleven-year-old son for the night. In an impetuous moment, I booked a hotel which has the appearance of an art deco haunt in Miami, with jauntily-striped pool umbrellas and palm-print decor. More prosaically it sits on a clifftop in Bournemouth, just above the miles of sandy beach. It has smiling staff, a decadent lounge with a sunny…

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I write this on Sunday, which happens to be International Women’s Day, so I thought I’d offer you an apposite reading. But then I started thinking about IWD and how there’s a lot of what an old colleague of mine would have called kvetching about it all. They say it’s superficial. Driven by commercialism rather than activism. Has lost all sense of its radical roots. That it’s polarising, or foregrounds the few and forgets the many. And so on. There’s also been a fair amount of commentary about women’s writing over the last few months, which will doubtless continue to circle, like gulls over a sandwich, now the Women’s Prize shortlists have been announced.

On the face it, things are looking positively upbeat: the fiction bestseller lists tend to be dominated by women (up from 39% in 1998 to 57% in 2023). So much so that some commenters have wrung their hands fretting about men being ‘pushed out of publishing’. The poor beleaguered men! Let us pity them.

Last year, Jude Cook launched a new independent publishing house, Conduit Press, to correct this perceived literary imbalance, with the plan to publish only books by male writers. Cook pointed out that the majority of commissioning editors are female, hence, he implied, the bias, and the scarcity of young, emerging male writers. Now, I agree that there at this moment more young female writers in circulation, male writers have been foregrounded for, oh, centuries. “I am sure other people will point out that women doing well, or even better, for two good seconds after millennia of oppression should not be declared a crisis in masculinity – why would it be?” Anne Enright said, drily referencing the “gazillion books by men out there already”.

And yet, when David Szalay’s Flesh, won the Booker last year, The Guardian heaved a sigh of relief that after “nearly a decade” of “novels of female inferiority” by “writers such as Sally Rooney and Ottessa Moshfegh”, “portraits of masculinity” are, once again, back the centre of literary fiction. Nearly a decade! Caro Claire Burke (whose Yesteryear is coming in April) posted this response on Instagram, followed by this, looking at just how ‘marginalised’ the male novelist really is over the last 10 years. Answer: not very. Even a cursory study of the statistics (which, Burke pointed out, the journalists could have easily performed but why ruin a good story?) reveals that 80% of Pulitzer winners and 70% of Booker Prize-winners over the last 10 years have been male. Several commentators pointed out that in 2023, the shortlist for the Booker Prize featured more men called Paul (three) than female writers in total. Women have carried off just 30% of the prize laurels in the last decade, and only 10% have been women of colour. The demographic most commonly represented when it comes to the winning of awards? Men. Straight white men.

(It’s worth noting that the Women’s Prize team contacted The Guardian offering their thoughts for balance. The Guardian declined.)

Also, despite the increasing dominance of women on the bestseller list, the gender pay gap for writers stands at 36% which is 23% higher than the national average - an issue exacerbated for writers of under-represented groups e.g. BAME writers, those from lower socio-economic groups or who live with a disability or chronic illness. The picture is even less prepossessing if you look at non-fiction: only 34% of the top 500 books where written by women.

And have you sat an English GCSE lately? (Readers from other lands: these are the exams children take in England at the age of 15/16) I’m assuming you are past the stage, so let me tell you this: the literary content weighs heavily on the side of the traditional patriarchal canon. “What joy,” my daughter said flatly, slapping The Lord of the Flies atop the war poets. “Another book by a dead, white guy.”

I think the issue is more to do with reading than writing. Women read more than men: a 2025 poll showed 53% of men in the UK had read or listened to at least one book in the last year, as opposed to 66% of women. 11% of men ‘never’ read for pleasure, compared to 5% of women. And younger men are less likely to read than men over the age of 63. Maybe they do need more portraits of masculinity/about the crisis in male inferiority?

Women are open to reading books by women and men - and LGBTQ+ writers, come to that. Not only do men read less fiction than women, they read less fiction written by women. Research by Nielsen BookData commissioned for the Women’s Prize Impact Report shows that men account for 56% of the readership of books written by male authors, but only 19% of books written by women. And only 19% of readers of the the top 20 bestselling female fiction authors (a list that spans Jane Austen, Agatha Christie, Martina Cole and Taylor Jenkins Reid) are male. We don’t suffer from a lack of male writers, we suffer from a paucity of male readers, and amongst those who do read, a proportion are reluctant to engage with books not written by men.

I thought of this only this week, when discussing books with my parents, during which my darling dad raved about Claire Mackintosh (he was thrilled when I handed over my proof of It’s Not What You Think), and wondered if he should stick with Wild Dark Shore. He absolutely should, I said, telling him it’s on the Women’s Prize longlist. To which he replied he almost exclusively reads books by women these days. My head nearly fell off with delight. My dad used to be very much a man who read male writers: it was the combination of a fierily insistent daughter (me) and Maggie O’Farrell who won him over, and now, in his own small way, he is redressing the balance.

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I turn to Kate Mosse, that titan of literature and champion of women, who must surely be in line for a damehood at the very least, if not some kind of literary canonisation? “I’m always asked ‘do we still need the Prize?’ which made me realise that people just didn’t listen,” she told me in her crisp tones. (Side note: I have never before interviewed anybody who speaks in such perfect sentences.) “I never said we’re doing this until we have 50/50 representation, and then we’ll stop. We said we are launching a prize that will, every year, honour, amplify, and celebrate exceptional writing by women in English from all over the world. But what people heard was ‘we need quotas’. Do we still need the Prize? Yes - sadly in the last three or four years, it has become evident that there is a rollback going on. We need it more than we did. Our mission remains the same: to put exceptional writing by women in front of readers: male, female, everybody.”

The longlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction was announced this week (the non-fiction equivalent) - featuring not only two of my favourite books from last year (Heart the Lover and The Correspondent) but a pleasing number of novels by lesser-known writers from independent publishing houses. If you want a reading list for IWD, you could do far worse than make your way through it. But because I cannot resist adding my tuppence worth, herewith some suggestions from my own bookshelves…

The Eights - Joanna Miller

The other week I stood in a queue behind a woman who was asking the bookseller if they had “that book about the suffragette friends at Cambridge”. The bookseller tapped away at the computer, “Cambridge Women and the Struggle for the Vote?” she suggested. “Oh no, that’s not it at all,” the customer sighed, shaking her head vehemently, despite the fact that this was exactly what she had asked for. “The title is very short. A name, I think?” The bookseller frowned, perplexed; the queue expanded. “Sorry to interrupt, but I wonder,” I said, leaning forward and being terribly British at the same time, “if you mean Joanna Miller’s The Eights?” “That’s it!” The woman beamed.

To be fair to the bookseller: Oxford not Cambridge; students not suffragettes; a number not a name; fiction not non-fiction.

However, this does not detract from the fact that Joanna Miller’s gorgeous debut novel is the perfect read for IWD, centring as it does on trailblazing women.

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I wrote this post in snatches of time between home and Lille. We travelled to the latter on Valentine’s Day, which sounds romantic, but I did not gaze into my beloved’s eyes, but sat next to my son, and typed away merrily - although I did have a plastic tumbler of champagne perched precariously on the table.

I have oft found myself thinking about matter…

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‘Do you really need all those books?’

I had a peculiar experience over the Christmas holidays. I went viral. Not in the malady sense of the word, but the social sense. This Instagram post was seen by millions of people (closely followed by this one). It was shared in America so my followers now number a former secretary of state and a handful of actresse…

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(Even worse than the one when I had pneumonia.)

I imagine Dame Jilly would be taken aback by the outpouring of love, affection and admiration which followed the news of her death. It is so fulsome, so universal, so heartfelt. It has been like being in the best of clubs and how wonderful to find so many people unit…

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This weekend, I had the very great pleasure of interviewing Gill Hornby about her new novel, The Elopement, a very fine tale of two families - the Austen-Knights and the Knatchbulls, the choices on offer for Regency women of a certain class: marriage - for love if you were very lucky, by arrangement if not viz. Fanny Knight, pragmatically married off to the insufferably pompous Sir Edward Knatchbull, who needs a step-mother for his brood of children; the single woman - destined to be “the one good woman to rely upon”; or perhaps luckiest still, the satisfied spinster - Cassandra and Jane. Hornby is very funny, very charming, and very good on Austen and writing in an Austen-esque manner. She is also a walking Austen encyclopeadia and the champion Cassandra Austen deserves. Jane’s best beloved; the sister who allowed Jane to write – had Cassandra married Jane would not have been able to do so.

It was a the perfect ending to my month of Jane. I visited her house in Chawton for my birthday [above: the small table on which she wrote her novels], and last week I went to No. 8 College Street where Cassandra brought Jane in the final weeks of her life, in the hope that a fancy city doctor would be able to cure the mysterious illness which plagued Jane. Unknown but speculation includes Addison’s disease, lupus, Hodgkin’s disease, and arsenic poisoning.)

Once a confectioner’s and now owned by Winchester College (where the Austen boys were educated) and formerly used as accommodation for academics, No. 8 has been restored to a state as near-to Austen’s day as possible (with help from that master of paint, Edward Bulmer). It is open to the public for a brief spell to mark the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth. It is a squat, attractive building, sandwiched between College buildings, P&G Wells - one of England’s oldest bookshops, where the Austens were customers, and an opportunistic mobile coffee cart.

It was a suitably melancholy day when I visited the place where Jane breathed her last: the rain lashing at the window, the skies a flat grey. The first-floor rooms are small and modest - it’s a stark reminder that Jane and Cassandra were more disenfranchised Dashwoods than a Pemberley polluting (in the words of Lady Catherine de Burgh) Elizabeth Bennet.

Cassandra and Jane rented from a local woman, Mary David, who I like to imagine bustling in with food to tempt the invalid (there is no kitchen in evidence). It is “very comfortable” and “We have a neat little Drawing-room with a Bow-window”, Jane wrote to her nephew, brightly. At first she was able to “walk from room to room” and wrote optimistically of “gaining strength” but the Winchester surgeon (one they could ill-afford) was to no avail. She took to the sofa, with its view over the street into the headmaster’s garden [below].

In a letter to her niece Fanny about Jane’s final days, Cassandra wrote. “When I asked her if there was anything she wanted, her answer was she wanted nothing but death.” On July 17, Jane was seized by “faintness” and such “sufferings” the doctor was summoned. “I sat close to her with a pillow in my lap to assist in supporting her head, which was almost off the bed, for six hours; fatigue made me then resign my place to Mrs. J. A. for two hours and a-half, when I took it again, and in about an hour more she breathed her last.” Jane died in these humble, little rooms with their low ceilings, her head on the lap of her beloved Cassandra.

“I have lost a treasure, such a sister, such a friend as never can have been surpassed,” Cass wrote. “She was the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow; I had not a thought concealed from her, and it is as if I had lost a part of myself.”

I stood in the first floor bow window, in that room where Jane Austen spent her final days; where Cassandra stood, watching the small funeral procession on the morning of 24th July - brothers, Edward, Frank and Henry; nephew Edward (women were not permitted to attend funerals. Too much for their delicate sensibilities, perhaps?). The coffin was carried on a cart, and turned under Kingsgate, bearing Jane towards Winchester cathedral. “I watched the little mournful procession the length of the Street & when it turned from my sight … I had lost her for ever.” How my heart breaks for Cass.

I recalled a moment in The Elopement, when Hornby has Cassandra reflect upon Jane’s death. “With every faith she had carried her ailing sister away from this very village and into a city. She too had hoped to find superior methods - was promised that Jane would be cured! Instead, she denied that dear home-bird of life’s ultimate comfort: a peaceful death with her loving family about her, and in her own bed.”

It is impossible not to think Jane would have preferred to die at home, and be buried in the little churchyard at Chawton, near the cottage where she lived with Cassandra, their mother Mrs Austen, and Martha Lloyd (even more impecunious than the Austens; sister of the noxious Mary, who married James Austen).

The house exudes warmth: I have visited on a bitterly cold day, when the frost nipped, and when the rain fell - and all was cosy inside. You feel the contentment.

This is a photo-heavy post (one woman goes snap-happy at Chawton), so you may have to click through to view it in the Substack app or online. It’s also for my paid subscribers - the Cassandras in my life!

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I say this about almost every month (aside from February, which has little to redeem it), but I think May is my favourite. Everything is green and fresh, the sun when it shines has actual warmth, the blossom has skittered from the trees and everything is bursting forth into bloom. In the countryside (where I am now), the narrow lanes are thronged with a tangle of cow parsley and foxgloves. It makes me long for a rambling old house in the countryside (like this one by Fabienne Delacroix), with an orchard - or at the very least an ancient apple tree, an artfully tumbledown wall, long grass and bluebells, children with bare legs and scratched knees, homemade lemonade, and eyes meeting across the tea cups.

Yes, it is family saga season. A sprawling story of family entanglements, and unspoken feelings between friends and lovers. (Even better if they are friends who wish they were lovers.) For secrets which spread like ripples in emotional pools. Preferably set against a suitably scenic backdrop.

When I was a teenager, I tried my hand at writing this type of book - one with a period setting. It opened on the lawn of a country house, with girls in sprigged muslin frocks (I was very precise on sartorial details) and a young man in cricket whites. There was a benevolent matriarch who hovered with a teapot and fine china cups. One of the girls was engaged to an eligible but priggish chap, and hopelessly in love with an unsuitable boy. If this sounds vaguely familiar, that’s because I quickly realised I had inadvertently lifted the scene almost wholesale from A Room With a View, which I had recently read, then watched, and promptly become obsessed.

Now, as previously discussed on these Subshores, I am (im)patiently awaiting the next instalment of the Cazalets, as written by Elizabeth Jane Howard’s niece, Louisa Young. (I have it on excellent authority that it’s shaping up beautifully.) However, in joyous news, this year is the summer of the family sagas - I’ve got a brace of them to add to your summer reading list. They are - if I may say so - perfect for holidays.

And in date news, I’m interviewing two of the authors of two of the books discussed below in London. On 27th June, I’ll be chatting to Georgina Moore in an evening of summer cocktails and books, right by the river which inspired her new novel, River of Stars: tickets here (they include a delicious-sounding cocktail). And then on 14th July, Georgina and I will be reunited and joined by Fran Littlewood (The Favourite) at Waterstones Putney: tickets.

This post is for paid subscribers. In a world of constantly rising prices (not to sound like Outraged of Tunbridge Wells, but my local provider is out of control: they love adding a sneaky pound or two to the price at far to regular intervals) it’s still only £5 a month, so please do consider subscribing should you have the spare money in your metaphorical piggy bank.

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Hello friends! A midweek post from me - whatever next? But it’s the first of May, the weather feels like July, and there are some cracking books published this month: The Names, Consider Yourself Kissed, One Golden Summer, When the Cranes Fly South, Dream State, Cat Fight… Truly, we are spoiled rotten. What better reason for a bonus book post?

Today’s missive comes courtesy of a conversation with my friend Kat (author, journalist, good egg), who messaged me that she was going on holiday and now might be the time she finally reads Wolf Hall. She was put off by the hype but “It’s time will come,” she said, optimistically. It started me thinking about the books I have put off reading. I am, still, incidentally, putting off Don Quixote, despite Elif Shafak telling me it is the best novel ever written - she says, interview-dropping with shameless abandon - and War and Peace.

Obviously, I want to hear about the unread ghosts that haunt you. What have you been putting off reading - and why?

Before I embark on this writing adventure, some out-and-about updates - for I do leave my desk on occasion. I had a lovely Sunday chairing at Winchester Books Festival. Pollyanna Wilkinson dispensed brilliant, practical gardening advice with wit and charm - her book How to Design a Garden is my new bible; and Judy Murray was a revelation.

I was uncharacteristically nervous (I get nervous about a plenty of things, but chatting to authors isn’t usually one of them) because Judy is such a remarkable, some might say formidable woman. But she was generous, very funny, and honest about her years in tennis (if she knew then what she does now, she would not have embarked upon the journey, and she plans to teach her grandchildren to dance badly rather than play tennis well), and how Anton du Beke (her Strictly Come Dancing partner) gave her the idea to write a novel, The Wild Card. I wonder if he inspired her second, a murder mystery, Game, Set and Murder, with a victim so noxious I predict a Murder on the Orient Express ending. There was also that interview with Elif Shafak, whose heart and brain are the size of an ocean and who left me awed.

If you’re a fan of an author event, I’m jaunting to Cookham on 14th June, for afternoon tea with Gill Hornby - we’ll be discussing her new novel, The Elopement - tickets; in Waterstones Putney on 14th July, with Georgina Moore and Fran Littlewood - who will be telling us all about their new novels, River of Stars and The Favourite - tickets. And I am very excited to be doing an event in June with lady novelist and excellent woman , whose new novel The Treasures is pure joy - keep your eyes peeled on that front.

And so onwards to confession time.

Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel

I KNOW. But hear me out.

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Girl meets boy. Girl is charming, chatty, optimistic, and determined. Boy is the clever, brooding, aloof type, but with a deep undertow of wit and kindness. The two are pitted against each other and the sparks are incendiary.

Nope. Not Pride and Prejudice. The new Emily Henry: Great Big Beautiful Life. Henry’s fifth book in five years, which was publishe…

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Here’s a funny thing (pun intended): I am easily amused - or maybe just a cheap date? -however, I very rarely laugh out loud when reading. I slightly resent being told that a book is “hilarious” or “laugh out loud funny”. The more I am told a novel is wildly amusing, the less I am likely to find it so. I also take issue with very black humour: please see my issues with The Bee Sting, which was brilliant, but funny? Sure, learned critics, knock yourself out chuckling as a family falls apart at the seams…

I’m the same with live comedy - very rarely do I find it elicits proper laughter. (I realise am making myself sound like so much fun…) Years ago, I went to see a very famous comedian with my mother - but the moment which made us laugh the most the whole evening happened on the way there. We were listening to The Archers. (For the uninitiated, this is a BBC radio soap opera set amongst farming folk. Written down, I can see this looks very, very odd and distinctly niche.) A female vicar was having an affair with a married landowner and Lynda Snell (an interfering but good-hearted busybody type) remarked “beneath those robes beats the heart of a woman”. My mother and I still repeat this to each other from time to time.

I have been thinking about this since the shortlist for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction (not a pithy title) was announced this week. The winner (announced on December 2nd) receives Bollinger champagne, a complete set of the Everyman’s Library PG Wodehouse collection, and - best of all - a pig is named after their winning book.

Et voila - the shortlist:

Thoughts? Opinions? Your winner/pig?

Rootling around in the annals of the past, I note that in 2018, no prize was awarded as none of the books submitted incited the requisite “level of unanimous laughter”. And this neatly encapsulates the problem: it is very hard to find a novel which is considered universally amusing. Earlier this year, The New York Times ran a feature on the funniest novels since Catch-22 which lost me from the start because I find Catch-22 disturbing not amusing, and it made me think the list would be populated by a whole host of novels written by Big American Men (big as in status not necessarily girth).

So, having thrown down the metaphorical gauntlet to - ahem - myself, herewith 15 books which amuse me. I may not laugh out loud, but I am chortling on the inside… And I would love further reading, so do by all means leave your suggestions in the comments.

Excellent Women - Barbara Pym

Perhaps there can be too much making of cups of tea, I thought, as I watched Miss Statham filling the heavy teapot. Did we really need a cup of tea? I even said as much to Miss Statham and she looked at me with a hurt, almost angry look, 'Do we need tea? she echoed. 'But Miss Lathbury...' She sounded puzzled and distressed and I began to realise that my question had struck at something deep and fundamental. It was the kind of question that starts a landslide in the mind. I mumbled something about making a joke and that of course one needed tea always, at every hour of the day or night.”

Barbara Pym’s note-perfect comedy of very English manners, social climbing and ill-advised liaisons is one of my favourite novels. Mild-mannered spinster Mildred Lathbury is a clergyman's daughter and one of the exemplary "excellent women" of the title whose excellence is taken for granted by everyone around her. She finds herself inviegled in the lives of her neighbours (with whom she - horrors - shares a bathroom) anthropologist Helena Napier and her handsome, dashing husband, Rocky; Julian Malory, the vicar (who is in danger from a designing minx type); and Everard Bone, an anthropologist who thinks Mildred might like to type up his notes (for free - naturally). Pym is peerless.

Just William - Richmal Crompton

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“Why did I not do more in my life, I ask myself, as I read the obituaries of the people who have crammed their lives with "doing" while I have wasted great chunks of mine dreaming? What have I given?” - Mary Wesley

Unless you are one of those ultra high achievers or someone who has reached a spiritual state of not measuring yourself by earthly goals, you may well fret that you have not done enough. That you need to achieve more. How have you not founded that company, written that bestseller, built that dream home, climbed that metaphorical mountain? And now you fear time is running out.

*Takes a deep breath and turns to the books*

Fortunately, I recently rediscovered Mary Wesley whilst idly hanging out next to the bookshelves in my in-laws’ house. Take a house, any house, and this is where you are likely to find me. I love other people’s bookshelves. Not in a snobbish, ‘Oh I see you have the collected Jilly Cooper’ or ‘Only the obvious Hardys, I see’ kind of way. Because 1. The collected Cooper is a gem and strongly indicative of a good sense of humour and 2. You can have whatever you want on your bookshelves. Little makes me happier than an unexpected marriage of books and individual.

Anyway, the point is that Wesley wasn’t published until she was 70 - and then became a bestselling author, producing a book a year in a prodigious feat of output until she had nothing left to say (true story). She went from abject poverty to pots of money which she used to spoil her family, gift to other (because she knew what it was to be poor), and indulging her penchant for cashmere jumpers.

And then I remembered I had been sent a book written by an octogenarian first-time author and thought, ‘Well, there we are then. Truly, hope springs eternal.’ (More of this later.)

Which makes this a multipurpose newsletter: a call to action: DO THE THING - you still have time, but also: let’s have a Mary Wesley renaissance. Because she was quite the gal - and so is my newfound authorial inspiration….

To read the rest of this post, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to Book(ish) - think of it as buying me a cup of artisan coffee from that lovely little independent cafe you like to support. I am your book recommending equivalent of that independent cafe. Have I stretched the metaphor too far? Anyway, paid subs get all the goods - not just some of them! (Much as I love all subscribers, it’s the paid ones who allow me dedicate the time to this newsletter.)

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Well, well. How do we feel about the very partial, American, testosterone-heavy New York Times list of the 100 best books of the 21st Century? It caused quite the furore-which was, I suspect, very much the point. Clickbait for the win these days. I bet you, like me, have been mentally compiling your own (far superior) list ever since. What would be on yours?

We’re well into July now, which means we have reached the time of year when it is advisable to up your reading time and limit your social media use: the latter may lead to teeth gnashing on account of those who spend the whole summer on a jaunt abroad/on a yacht. It is one of my life goals to be the type of person who decamps for the entire summer. I wouldn’t mind working. It is, in fact, part of the dream that I become that person who gets up early and writes with a strong coffee before the heat of the day becomes overwhelming. Probably whilst wearing a winsome cotton nightgown. In reality, I will mostly spend the summer shuttling between the tennis club and my desk; and encouraging more reading and less screen time - a noble endeavour echoed by parents everywhere. Thank heavens I have plenty of books to keep me company.

And so onto today’s subject at hand, which I’ve been thinking about this since my last post. Because one thing I failed to address - tut, tut - is that sometimes you grind to halt in a state of overwhelm at the sheer volume of (ahem) volumes in the big, wide world of books. When there are so many books to choose from how do you decide?

[Item (as the Provincial Lady would say): there is no such thing as the wrong choice, in my view. And if it doesn’t feel right, you can always veer off course and go down another track.]

And I realise that I automatically ask myself four questions…

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This is a day later than scheduled because - on the hottest, sunniest day of the year thus far in the UK - I elected to paint my kitchen cupboard doors. Alas, the blue is the wrong blue so if you need me today, I shall be repainting. What are your thoughts on fluctuating delivery days in your Substack missives? Does it trouble you? Do you mind - or not even notice?

But you are not here to listen to me lament my paint choices. (Could this serve as a metaphor for life? Too many choices etc.) Onwards to the books.

I was about to declare hot girl summer over in a dramatic fashion, but then a quick search on my old friend Google revealed that whilst the concept has been appropriated by influencers and their ilk, the roots of it are in fact germane to today’s issue: a carefree confidence and electing to be apologetically yourself.

Well, this threw me a curveball, but I am running with it. Because here I sit at my desk, surrounded by novels featuring what I’m calling ‘gumption girl’ - literary heroines with get-up-and-go. This makes me inordinately cheerful. Which is handy as I recently finished Moon Road, which is utterly brilliant, but completely devastating. More on this later this week, once I have picked up the pieces of my shattered heart.

In this post, I spoke of my delight at the recent spate of novels featuring older heroines with chutzpah (to which reading list I would also add Sylvia’s Second Act), and how my friend Helen (author, editor, excellent woman) and I have oft-lamented the sad lack of gumption in younger literary heroines.

In recent years, our bookshelves have been littered with young women to whom life just happens. Along they drift in a sea of ennui, lamenting their (usually perfectly fine and often rather privileged) lot - sometimes in improbably flowery prose. The seek solace in unsatisfactory and/or debasing sex (sexual passivity is A Thing with these women). They have ill-advised affairs with terrible men. They hate their jobs but exist in a state of paralysis which prevents them from moving on. The navel-gazing is so intense it’s a wonder they don’t spend their lives bumping into things. And they don’t really put up much of a fight about anything. They make me want to fling the book at the wall in despair, issuing a sharp grandmotherly rebuke to “pull your socks up, for heaven’s sake, you wet weekend”. (N.B. I would never fling a book. No matter how cross it made me.) Where are the young woman grasping the mettle of life and taking charge of their own fate? Where are the ones having FUN and enjoying themselves? Yes, life is besets by challenges and thorns and mountains to climb, but ye gods young women, accept the adventure and climb the mountains.

*Pauses to take a deep and cleansing breath*

Well, you cast around for a heroine with gumption, and along comes a summer of them. These women are ripe for adventure. Moreover, many of them are mystery-solving detective types a.k.a. very much my kind of woman. I do like a thread, no matter how tenuous. I think this is the product of spending 20 odd years working on magazines where ‘three’s a trend’.

We have already spoken of two of them: the glorious Miv in Jennie Godfrey’s The List of Suspicious Things (read my thoughts on it) and Jessica Bull’s pitch-perfect reimagining of Jane Austen - Miss Austen Investigates (my thoughts - but suffice to say it is a truth universally acknowledged that what the world needs is Jane Austen as sleuth).

There are more, my friends.

Firstly, if you like any of the following things (and why wouldn’t you?) I must exhort you to pre-order D is for Death - the first in a new series from Harriet F. Townson - the detective pen name of Harriet Evans. Lyon’s tea houses, sequin jumpsuits, Dorothy L.Sayers, peppermint creams, the London Library, landladies who are a dab hand with a whip, giraffes, Lyon’s tea houses, laughing from the tops of London buses, silver sequin jumpsuits, fondant fancies, champagne, plucky, Eva-Ibbotson-style heroines for whom nothing is impossible.

The rest of this post (in which I enthuse rather than gnash my teeth, I promise) is for paid subscribers - and I’d be delighted if you decided to support my writing. There’s lots of goodness to come - including my summer reading special (you can read last year’s in the meantime - or find out what some of my favourite authors were reading). But - and I am not just saying this to curry favour and flatter you (although may I say you look lovely today?) I truly do appreciate each and every subscriber, like, share and comment. It’s wonderful to find so many fellow bookworms. And if you are already in the paid club - thank you from the bottom of my bookcase.

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Some may beg to differ, but I don’t *think* I’m difficult. I am a yes woman, a people pleaser. I do not rock the boat; I smooth the waters. To be frank, I could probably do with being more difficult, especially when it comes to career-related matters. Because ‘difficult’ women are disruptors, achievers, the type of women who will not lie down, acquiesc…

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Welcome friends to an Easter weekend edition of Book(ish), in which I combine two of my passions: books and ogling dream houses.

I love houses - and not just my own. I’m fascinated by houses in films (especially anything directed by Nancy Meyers); other people’s homes; I appreciate people who don’t pull the curtains at dusk, so you catch a glimpse of the bustle of home as you walk by. Give me a hot coffee and an interiors magazine and I am a happy woman (“Why yes, I do fancy that lampshade. Eleventy-hundred pounds you say?”) I even enjoy house-hunting, and despite being settled, an idle perusal of property websites, imagining lives I will never lead - “Oo, look what we could buy if we moved to this tiny hamlet in the middle of nowhere!” And I adore a good fictional house.

Fictional houses often loom large - a silent character. Manderley in Rebecca is so crucial it claims both the classic opening (‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again’) and the ending. And so many of the best children’s books begin with a child displaced to an unknown house. Think of orphan Sylvia who joins her plucky cousin Bonnie in grand Willoughby Chase with its secret passages and grand library . Mary Lennox, dispatched from India to Misselthwaite Manor on the Yorkshire moors. A rambling house of secrets, “pictures and fine old furniture and things that's been there for ages”, and a secret walled garden. The Pevensie children, evacuated to the Professor Digory Kirke’s house in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - “the sort of house that you never seem to come to the end of; and it was full of unexpected places”. The safe haven of Three Chimneys in The Railway Children.

When I was around my daughter’s age, I attempted to write a book set in a rambling English house during a sultry summer (err, hello The Go-Between?), where youths lounge on lawns in tennis whites and pursue girls in sprigged muslin frocks through yew mazes and along secret corridors hung with family portraits. I still think this is An Idea although it’s possible I suffer from an overdose of Merchant Ivory films at an impressionable age. You know: tensions simmer as matrons sit beneath sunshades and stir tea in fine china cups, and cocktails are served in the drawing room. (That’s a very beverage-heavy unwritten novel.)

I ought to add that I am uncharacteristically decisive, but extremely selective when it comes to houses - real or fictional. I know almost immediately if they feel right. It’s all about the feeling. Here are five which more than pass muster - I’d happily move into any of them.

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I am instinctively an optimist, a yes woman, a sure-can-do, glass half full type. Not quite Pollyanna, who I’ve always thought veers perilously close to saintly and pious (and it really irks me when Miss Polly reverts to type in the sequel: has she learned nothing?), but the bright side is definitely my side.

I also feel it is my job to keep the family …

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Perhaps I ought not to bow to the shameless commercialisation of love.

Yet who doesn’t enjoy a really good romance and basking in the satisfied glow of a couple who fit together? Plus the new adaptation of One Day has hit Netflix absolutely garlanded with laurels. (The Times says it’s “perfect. If you’ve any heart at all, you’ll love this to bits” and The Guardian assures us it is “a flawless romcom you’ll fall for, hard”. Have you seen it yet? Will I weep a thousand rivers?) And - she admits whilst itemising on her fingers - I do have an extremely sentimental streak, and I’ve balanced my literary couple winners with some misses. So it’s not all wallowing in soppiness.

Moreover, it gives me an excuse to use a picture of Anne and Gilbert (Megan Follows and Jonathan Crombie are the only A&G worth having IMHO), so everyone’s a winner.

(You might disagree. I stand willing to be corrected in the comments.)

The greatest couple hits…

Anne Shirley and Gilbert Blythe (the Anne of Green Gables series)

I cannot be the only person who swooned over Gilbert Blythe. He is splendid first crush material to set the bar high. Captivated by “the Shirley girl” from the very start, Gilbert is noble enough to apologise for his faults (namely: calling her carrots), openly admires her brains and spirit, and their love is rooted in a profound friendship and respect. Anne and Gilbert are what lasting love looks like - not the “flattered fancy” of being swept off your feet.

“She loved Gilbert—had always loved him! She knew that now. She knew that she could no more cast him out of her life without agony than she could have cut off her right hand and cast it from her…She belonged to him and he to her…What a fool she had been not to realise what the bond was that had held her to Gilbert.”

Sniff.

Rachel and Luke (Rachel’s Holiday and Again, Rachel)

It is possible I am dazzled by Luke’s quite frankly blinding hotness. I once chaired an event with Marian Keyes and she admitted he is “ridiculously” attractive. However, I think there is more to it.

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Hello, and a very happy Sunday - thank you so much for allowing me to be a part of yours. Today, you find me scratching a long-held itch and mounting a trenchant defence of my beloved books, whilst also offering you even more reasons to read.

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Hello! How was your Christmas? Merry and bright? Like mine, rather lower key than expected? Or perhaps it was just plain awful? If it’s any comfort, I’ve always thought terrible Christmases make for excellent copy. The dysfunctional family gathered in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections; the ghastly family assembly in Mistletoe Malice; Saki’s bitingly satirical portrait of tedium and obligation in Christmas With Dull People.

I know it is traditional to laud the successes of the year just gone, but to be frank, my 2023 has been a bit of a damp squib. Not a disaster or a tragedy, but thoroughly unsatisfactory on a number of fronts. So, whilst I’m not a huge one for new year’s resolutions, now feels as good a time as sharpen my (proverbial) pencil and wrest back control where I can.

Before I begin, a huge thanks to YOU - this community is heartwarming, inspiring and a joy. Thank you for reading, chatting, and supporting my writing. It means the world. This has been one of 2023’s joys.

Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good

There are too many things I have not done this year for fear of not doing them well. See: making a concerted effort to write one of the several books I have swirling around my head/laptop and think I could write. (I may be deluding myself here, but equally I won’t know if I don’t try.) See also: pushing forward with house renovations. Is this radiator The One? Should the stairs be white or off-white? If I look for another hour, will I find the perfect carpet? Etc. Just pick one. Or pick up the damn paintbrush.

Tell me I’m not alone in this?

But how much does failure really matter? Is it end of days? When I interviewed Harriet Evans and Claire Daverley, who wrote two of my favourite books of 2023, Talking at Night and The Stargazers, they talked about the process of writing. Claire mentioned casually that (huge debut hit) Talking at Night wasn’t the first novel she’d written. Heavens no. And Harriet (superstar bestselling novelist) added that as a writer you have to go wrong sometimes in order for things to go right. Submit to the chaos or the mess, as it were. And hope it all comes right in the end. But if it doesn’t, that’s okay. Failure, as my nine-year-old tells me owlishly, is an opportunity to learn.

Swallow the frog - one at a time

Herein lies the problem of working from home: distractions. I don’t mean digestive biscuits or the laundry (although these things are indeed potent distractions). I mean the fact that you’re not at work-work in an office where you are accountable to others, so if it suddenly occurs to you to break off and paint the stairs, or put supper in the slow cooker, or attend to the myriad domestic admin which accompanies having a family, then you can break off and do just that. And I find Instagram a terrible temptation: it lures you in with that distinctive bing-bong, you decide to ‘reward’ yourself with a quick look; before you know it, you’re lost in the scroll vortex, primarily involving accounts you don’t even follow.

Herewith, let us focus and finish. No more faffing. No more succumbing to the sweet distractions of multitasking, which means I have several things left dangling. One thing at a time. And to mute notifications on my phone during working hours.

Schedule - because creativity needs boundaries, too

Traditionally, I have been averse to the idea of scheduling my time. It feels so uncreative, so restrictive, so very much the opposite of being free, flexible and spontaneous.

However, this year I realised the problem is that without the structure of a ‘normal’, 9-5 working day and office life, I am less unfettered and creative, more time-wasting by floating through the days and not getting enough done. Sure, I get by and things do happen, but on a need-to-do basis (write this article; cook that meal etc), rather than scheduling time to tackle the big projects, which mean I either don’t start them or they linger into what feels like infinity.

I am better with a deadline. A time by which something must be done. I need to give myself end points and schedule time to work towards them.

Let’s try it. Gift yourself a schedule and a designated time in which to complete tasks, and actively pursue the bigger projects. You are worth your own time, but without boundaries, creativity is unmoored.

Read, don’t scroll

It’s that dastardly time-suck social media again. Yes, I have scrolled when I should have read. I desecrate the good name of bookworm. Henceforth, I shall eschew the scroll for the book.

This said, I have already read some absolute corkers for 2024. In no particular order: The List of Suspicious Things, Green Dot, The Divorcees, The Fellowship of the Puzzlemakers, Piglet, Prima Facie and The Painter’s Daughters. Reviews coming soon.

I’m thrilled by the very thought of new novels from Stacey Halls ( The Household), Kiley Read (Come and Get It), David Nicholls (You Are Here), Marian Keyes (My Favourite Mistake), and Emily Henry (Funny Place). Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie in Death at the Sign of the Rook and Anthony Horowitz’s fifth outing as himself as hapless sidekick in Close to Death.

And some things I will continue to do: hold those I love closely, be present for my children, yoga, invest in friendships, revel in the small joys (if you hang on for the big ones, you could be waiting a long time).

Happy new year, my friends. May it be a year of small joys and controlled creativity!