The Wrong Sister by Claire Douglas
Tasha and her husband Aaron are having a romantic weekend in Venice so they can reconnect as a couple. Tasha’s sister, Alice, is taking care of their twin girls back home with her husband, Kyle. Then Tasha gets a phone call to say that there’s been a break-in at their house. Alice is in hospital and Kyle is dead. They rush home to be with their daughters and that’s when Tasha receives the note. On it, the words – it was supposed to be you.
This is such an excellent thriller. The plot is both full of unexpected twists and completely plausible, the characters are brilliantly drawn, and the writing is great. Claire Douglas keeps getting better and better.
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Burning Crowns by Catherine Doyle and Katherine Webber
Cat Doyle and Katie Webber are sisters-in-law who joined forces to write this trilogy about Wren and Rose, twin princesses separated at birth. One is raised as the crown princess and the other was taken as an infant and trained from childhood to eventually kidnap her sister and steal her crown. It’s like The Princess Switch meets The Princess Bride; it’s so funny and exciting and completely engrossing. If you know any teenage girl under the age of 16, I promise that they will love these books. (I’m very far from a teenage girl and I ADORE them) This is the final book in the trilogy and it’s a perfect way to end the series.
Hey, Zoey by Sarah Crossan
When Dolores discovers Zoey, an animatronic sex doll hidden in the garage, she assumes it belongs to her husband, David. Their relationship is already strained, is this going to be the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back? But then, Dolores and Zoey begin to talk…
This is superb. The writing is sharp, it’s incredibly witty and clever, and there’s a revelation towards the end at the book which I wasn’t expecting and yet is so devastatingly inevitable, it brought me to tears.
Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson
Small Worlds is the follow-up to Caleb Azumah Nelson’s phenomenally successful debut novel, Open Water. It’s set over the course of three summers, moving from London to Ghana and back again, and tells the love story between Stephen and Del. It’s also about intergenerational trauma and racism, fathers and sons, music and dance and love and loss. That sounds like a lot but when the writing is this beautiful, it’s impossible to resist.
Rough Beast: My Story and the Reality of Sinn Féin by Máiría Cahill
I met Máiría Cahill at an awards show years ago and was blown away by her courage and determination. Those qualities are very much evident in Rough Beast, her memoir. It details her sexual abuse at the hands of a prominent IRA man in Belfast, and how she was further traumatised by the organisation’s attempts to silence her afterwards. It’s devastating, important, and brutally honest.
Teddy by Emily Dunlay
Blurb is as follows – “It is the summer of 1969 and Teddy Huntley Carlyle has just arrived in Italy from Dallas, Texas, eager for a fresh start with her new husband, a diplomat assigned to the American embassy. After years of “spoiling like old milk,” in the words of her controlling, politically-minded uncle, Teddy vows to turn over a new leaf. She will be her most beautiful, luminous self, wearing the right clothes and the perfect lipstick, and she will be good. She will charm her husband’s colleagues at the embassy, and no one will have a word to say against her. Teddy keeps her promise, more or less—until the Fourth of July, when her new life explodes as spectacularly as the fireworks lighting the Roman sky over the embassy grounds. Now, Teddy is in the middle of a mess that even her powerful connections and impeccable manners can’t contain…”
A Season for Scandal by Laura Wood
I have written before about my love for Laura Wood’s novels. They’re just SO gorgeous. She’s writing some of the best historical romances around today. Our first introduction to the Aviary, an investigative agency run by women which specialises in digging up dirt on powerful men, was in The Agency For Scandal (which I also loved!). This book is a sequel of sorts, and I can only describe it as Bridgerton meets Enola Holmes. It’s utterly delightful. The blurb – “When Marigold Bloom finds her family business in trouble a chance encounter with the devastatingly handsome and extremely bad-tempered Oliver Lockhart leads her to the Aviary - a secret agency of women who specialise in blackmailing troublesome men. Soon, Mari is the agency's newest recruit, sent to investigate the mysterious return of Oliver's long-lost sister. Forced to masquerade as a newly engaged couple, it is up to Mari and Oliver to determine if there is an imposter in their midst. But what happens when the line between truth and fiction starts to blur? And what do you do when a pretend romance starts to feel all too real?”
Hagstone by Sinéad Gleeson
I loved Constellations, Sinéad’s 2019 collection of essays, so I was excited to read her debut novel and Hagstone didn’t disappoint. It’s about Nell, an artist living on a wild, isolated island where a commune of women known as the Inions reside. The Inions have travelled to the island from all over the world, seeking solace in nature. They commission Nell to create an art piece to commemorate their community and its long history. But all is not as it seems… This is a gorgeous, lyrical, and haunting piece of work.