New Year, new pile of books to read!

This month, I am focusing on some chunky hardbacks on my shelf. And I am really excited to read all of my choices

Bleeding Heart Yard by Elly Griffiths

The Popsugar Reading Challenge always inclueds the prompt ‘Favourite prompt from a past challenge’ this is a great way to read a book of your choosing and see where it fits. With multiple narrators, Bleeding Heart Yard ticks off the 2019 prompt “A book told from multiple character POVs.’

What it’s about?

Is it possible to forget that you’ve committed a murder?

When Cassie Fitzgerald was at school in the late 90s, she and her friends killed a fellow student. Almost twenty years later, Cassie is a happily married mother who loves her job–as a police officer. She closely guards the secret she has all but erased from her memory.

One day her husband finally persuades her to go to a school reunion. Cassie catches up with her high-achieving old friends from the Manor Park School–among them two politicians, a rock star, and a famous actress. But then, shockingly, one of them, Garfield Rice, is found dead in the school bathroom, supposedly from a drug overdose. As Garfield was an eminent–and controversial–MP and the investigation is high profile, it’s headed by Cassie’s new boss, DI Harbinder Kaur, freshly promoted and newly arrived in London. The trouble is, Cassie can’t shake the feeling that one of them has killed again.

Is Cassie right, or was Garfield murdered by one of his political cronies? It’s in Cassie’s interest to skew the investigation so that it looks like it has nothing to do with Manor Park and she seems to be succeeding.

Until someone else from the reunion is found dead in Bleeding Heart Yard…

All About Evie by Matson Taylor

I absolutely loved The Miseducation of Evie Epsworth when I read that. It was one of my top reads of 2020, and I have recommended and gifted it to friends. The follow-up book, All About Evie, moves into the 1970s, which is the decade in which I was born, and another prompt ticked off.

What it’s about?

EVIE EPWORTH IS TEN YEARS OLDER. BUT IS SHE ANY WISER?!

1972. Ten years on from the events of The Miseducation of Evie Epworth and Evie is settled in London working for the BBC. She has everything she’s ever dreamed of (a career, a leatherette briefcase, an Ossie Clark poncho) but, following an unfortunate incident involving Princess Anne and a Hornsea Pottery mug, she finds herself having to rethink her life and piece together work, love, grief and multiple pairs of cork-soled platform sandals. 

Ghosts from the past and the spirit of the future collide in a joyous adventure that sees Evie navigate the choppy waters of her messy twenties. Can a 1960s miseducation prepare her for the growing pains of the 1970s?

Big-hearted, uplifting, bittersweet and tender, All About Evie is a novel fizzing with wit and alive to the power of friendship in all its forms. 

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

So many friends have recommended Lessons in Chemistry. And I happened to have a bookstore gift card that was burning a hole in my purse, so I snapped this up last year and have been meaning to read it since. It’s also being made into a TV series released this year so that’s another prompt ticked.

What it’s about?

From Goodreads:

Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing as an average woman. But it’s the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute takes a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans; the lonely, brilliant, Nobel–prize nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with—of all things—her mind. True chemistry results.

But like science, life is unpredictable. Which is why a few years later Elizabeth Zott finds herself not only a single mother, but the reluctant star of America’s most beloved cooking show Supper at Six. Elizabeth’s unusual approach to cooking (“combine one tablespoon acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride”) proves revolutionary. But as her following grows, not everyone is happy. Because as it turns out, Elizabeth Zott isn’t just teaching women to cook. She’s daring them to change the status quo.

Laugh-out-loud funny, shrewdly observant, and studded with a dazzling cast of supporting characters, Lessons in Chemistry is as original and vibrant as its protagonist.

I’m really looking forward to all three of these, so here’s to a great month of reading!

Best wishes

E x