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Catherine moves to Dublin, she has a baby called Cyril and she gives him up for adoption. The book is basically about their two lives, her life and his life, and they’re both treated as outcasts. Because she never got married but had a child that she had to give up for adoption, and Cyril is this boy who grows up with his adoptive parents, who were really eccentric – one’s an author who chain smokes. It's about two friends, John and Owen, and it's written in the first person by John who's talking about his best friend Owen, who is an odd boy - he is very, very small, he has almost iridescent, luminescent skin and a very, very odd voice. A sort of high-pitched nasal voice which is illustrated in the book every time that Owen speaks - it's in capital letters! I can hear him. Underneath this haze of self-deprecation, there is a through line of an absolutely solid determination to be up there on stage, showing off. When she was a kid, growing up in Leatherhead with a Polish father and English mother (her dad was an engineer and, for his second act, a Latvian medievalist), her pattern was that she’d try for the school play, not get a part, “and I’d say: ‘Maybe I could write a little prologue?’ And I’d write something really long, and end up with quite a big part. Such a showoff.” Plot Mia has it all: a husband, a stepson, an important job and a cat. However, she increasingly feels as if she is simply holding it all together to present herself the way society wants. If only she could be more like her cat. This is the fifth novel by presenter Dawn O’Porter.
Main character Gary, a man with a job that Mortimer used to have, in the same location where Mortimer used to work. He also has the exact same cadence, vocabulary and thought processes as Mortimer, as seen in his long digressions about pies. That said, Gary is described as having a slightly larger nose than Mortimer, so they are definitely different people. She lives in West Ealing “very near Slough”. And she has this theory: “When you grow up in the suburbs, you feel you have to work harder to prove yourself. I’ve never been one of the cool gang. It’s a good feeling.” Another good feeling is being the youngest of four: “I adore my siblings [ Miko, a musician, Kasia, a writer and teacher, Coky, a TV director]. They’ve looked after me and let me get away with stuff. It’s golden.” From the start, she has been obsessed with comedy. “I applied to Cambridge [she has a degree in modern languages from Trinity College] because of Footlights.”Jordan says: “I absolutely love this book, it's storytelling at its finest. From start to finish, it’s heart-warming, harrowing and just one of the best books, if not the best book, I've ever read. After seven series, they got wind of something afoot but didn’t know until it was publicly announced that the production company, Love Productions, had sold the show to Channel 4. “I was getting messages from the head of C4 saying: ‘We hope that you’ll be on board.’ I think it took us under 20 seconds to work out that we weren’t going to go with it. We felt that the show had been nurtured by the BBC. And effectively, the makers of the show were just going ‘See ya’, and going for the money. And that didn’t sit well with us.” They never thought it was going to crash and burn without them, since they were only ever “bookends”. In the end, there would always be more bakers, other cakes. So I went on a @netgalley requesting spree again despite saying that I was so over it!! I saw this book by Mel Giedroyc and as I have always loved her on TV I thought why not? I have purely read Christmas themed books since November so I guess it was time to have a change. At the mercy of fortune and coincidence, he will spend a lifetime coming to know himself and where he came from – and over his many years, will struggle to discover an identity, a home, a country, and much more. This novel sounded so intriguing. I kind of love seeing rich people get their come-uppances by thinking they'll always be rich and it turns out, they won't. Not when they buy exorbitantly expensive things just for the sake of it, and the person who brings in the money works in the financial sector of all places. However, what normally makes those novels great is that it gives the characters a certain humility. It makes them humble and appreciative and, quite honestly, the Parker family were so bloody up themselves I just didn't care about them.
Overall. It’s a fun, enjoyable well written read and a nice piece of escapism, so needed at this time. I found this did not have any flow at all - one minute we were looking at Sally and the next one of her four children or someone else seemingly random. This meant, for me, I found it really hard to keep up with and was a bit lost at times. I did not feel any empathy towards the characters, even though they had lost everything and just found it all a bit odd. Everything happened quite fast, but in a way it was very slow to get into.
Writing style Love Untold has a plot, but its real joy is in how Jones digs her fingernails into decades of complicated family history. The risk here would be to boil down at least one of the generations to stereotype, but Jones fiercely resists this. These are four complicated, singular women on their own paths and the story comes entirely from watching them rub against each other. It is stridently confident when it comes to hitting you around the head with sentiment until you relent and start crying, too. Jones could write books like this for the rest of her life and they’d all be brilliant. Sally Parker and her family are rich. When her husband loses all their money and life begins to fall apart, she knows that she should be the strong one who holds her family together - but how does she manage that when she can't even hold herself together. As life around them crumbles, so does Sally - can she find her inner strength?
Main character Technically, the Thursday Murder Club are an ensemble – Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron and Ibrahim – but the leader is arguably Elizabeth, an ex-spy and primary carer for her husband, who has dementia.Previous works Two other Thursday Murder Club books, Richard Osman’s House of Games, A Pointless History of the World, The World Cup of Everything: Bringing the Fun Home. Plot Gary, a down-at-heel London solicitor, goes for a drink with a friend. The next day, the friend goes missing. Meanwhile, Gary meets and falls for a mysterious woman. Could the two be connected? And why does Gary keep having conversations with a slightly belligerent squirrel? The debut novel by comedian Bob Mortimer has the answers. It’s fine for what it is; Mel writes well, it’s decently structured and readable. The trouble is, it all seemed such old hat – to the point of being trite in places. The characters are well drawn but oh-so-familiar and I really couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for any of it. Cover quote “His grasp of human loneliness and longing is beautiful and comforting” – Marian Keyes (again). More gory goings on in BBC Four’s Colosseum. Photograph: A+E Networks/BBC/October Films Colosseum 9pm, BBC Four
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