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).…

Don’t you love it when you rediscover old books and they are just as much fun as you remember? Back in my teens, I went through a big fantasy phase (bring on the pseudo-medieval intrigue!) and used to haunt the fantasy/sci-fi section of the 86th Street Barnes and Nobles, looking for covers that looked more…

After finishing Tana French’s The Witch Elm, I’ve been in a bit of a book slump. Thinking a bit of Golden Age crime might be the answer, I tried Georgette Heyer’s early mystery novel, A Blunt Instrument— but it only reminded me how little I like Heyer’s mysteries. Which always baffles me, because her Regencies…

Happy Friday! I started off the new month with some non-fiction: Nadine Akkerman’s Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in Seventeenth-Century Britain— and if you think that has something to do with what I’m working on next, you might be right. Right now, I’m stealing every spare moment I can with Tana French’s new stand alone…

This week, when I haven’t been immersing myself in another century for the next book, I’ve been making my way through Robert Galbraith’s latest Cormoran Strike mystery, Lethal White. (Am I the only one who thinks of poisoned flat whites when she sees that title? No? Just me?) This one picks up where Career of…

I can’t tell you about most of my reading this week, since it’s for the next Work-in-Progress, which is hush hush top secret…. But I did treat myself to the new Robert Galbraith, Lethal White, which I’ve just started.  Somehow, there’s something about those Galbraith books that just says “September” to me.  Maybe it’s because…