I’ll confess: I’m in a reading slump.  I’m longing for something new to read, but I can’t decide what it is.  A new mystery series, perhaps?  (How I wish there were more Julia Spencer-Flemings!)  Or some stand alone fiction? What I need is that book karma where the right book falls into your lap entirely…

Happy 2019, all!  I hope everyone’s holiday was merry and bright and the new year has started off as new years ought to do: full of promise and sparkle. I began the new year by finally, finally reading a book I impulse bought months ago: Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, in which the lives of…

This week, I’ve mostly been reading up for my portion of the next Team W novel, and if I told you which books I was reading, you would absolutely know which section I was writing! I am, however, starving for fiction.  Next up: Charlotte MacLeod’s Rest You Merry, which Karlene recommended last week.  Thanks, Karlene!…

‘Tis the season!  (Or getting there.)  I’m re-reading an old favorite, Trisha Ashley’s Twelve Days of Christmas, which combines several of my favorite things: a stranded house party, an old manor house, a quirky cast of characters, and a perky first person narrator.  And food.  Lots of descriptions of food.  You might want to have…

Every now and then you need to escape a bit.  So this week, I’ve been hiding in the gentle and bucolic world of Angela Thirkell’s 1930s Barsetshire, a fictional county peopled with (generally well-meaning) eccentrics of all kinds, from kindly vicars with literary aspirations to overbearing dowagers with Gardens (you know, the sort of gardens…

What am I reading right now?  The proofs (the final version before the actual book) of The Summer Country.   I can’t wait to share this book with you in June!  ARCs should be appearing fairly soon, so stay tuned for some contests. In the meantime, I also had the privilege of an early peek…

This week, I’ve been reading background material for the next Team W book in anticipation of our Grand Plotting Retreat this coming week.  But, of course, I can’t tell you what those books are, because it would be a dead give away for which section I’m writing.  So my lips are zipped. But I can…

This week, I went back to an old favorite: Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate.  The cleverness of it, the beauty of the language, the humor, the characterization, never ceases to delight me. And, of course, Halloween wouldn’t be Halloween without a bit of theme reading, so I picked up Agatha Christie’s Hallowe’en Party,…

This week I had the privilege of getting to live in late Victorian England with the scandalous Lady Randolph Churchill via Stephanie Barron’s latest novel, That Churchill Woman, which tackles the scandalous life of Jennie Jerome, the American heiress who married the younger son of the Duke of Marlborough (also the mother of Winston Churchill).…