POP FICTION
HONEYMOON SUITE by Wendy Holden (Headline Review £20.99)
THINGS are not going well for Nell or Dylan. Dylan, author of a bestselling novel, has a bad case of writer’s block and is in a tempestuous relationship with passionate, but volatile, Beatrice. Nell’s career is also in the doldrums: her Pr agency has been hit by the recession — and a whirlwind love affair and impetuous proposal, swiftly followed by an abandonment at the altar, leave Nell emotionally vulnerable.
So she’s unsure about best friend rachel’s idea that they go together on the honeymoon.
But rachel is persuasive and, along with her brilliantly eccentric daughter Juno — obsessed by agatha Christie — they head to the beautiful country estate of Pemberton, where they find themselves swiftly involved in the lives of the locals. There’s embittered angela, harassed hotel manager Jason . . . and Dylan.
Can they swap heartbreak for happiness in this fun and fizzy romantic comedy?
THE WAY WE WERE by Maeve Haran (Pan £7.99)
CaTHErINE has high hopes for her smart, savvy child rachel — good a-level grades, an inspiring career and an easy-going motherdaughter relationship — but things aren’t quite going to plan.
rachel is slowly transforming into the ‘Daughter from Hell’: she’s shirking revision, is increasingly directionless and, most galling of all, their mother-daughter bond is becoming a battleground. ‘ How,’ wonders Catherine, ‘had beaming, glowing rachel transformed herself into silent, surly rachel within seconds of being with her mother?’
Things go from bad to worse with the arrival of a bad-news boyfriend, the broodingly handsome marko, an unconventional roads protester whom rachel meets on a visit to her starchy grandmother, Lavinia, whose own carefully ordered world is about to be upended when an old love re-appears.
add in unexpected developments at Catherine’s school, a flirty work colleague and a long-held family secret and the scene is set for a light-hearted, fresh and funny novel which tackles that age- old dilemma: what happens when everything you held dear begins to change irrevocably?
WHAT WE DIDN’T SAY by Rory Dunlop (Twenty7 £8.99)
THIS debut by rory Dunlop is a melancholy affair, a bittersweet examination of a marriage that has faltered due to miscommunication, misunderstanding and mistrust. Jack randall used to be happily married to Laura Ferguson, but things have gone to the bad. Separated for two years, Jack is addressing what went wrong with their relationship in emails and diary entries, which he shares with Laura as ‘emotions and memories are dangerous when they’re not articulated — they rattle around the mind, smashing things’.
Jack is older and content with a life of pub quizzes, shared evenings at home and holidays in the Uk, but Laura wants more from life.
as her annotations and rebuttals of Jack’s diary reveal, she was happy, but also bored — she married young, missed out on fun and loves Jack, but felt suffocated by his constant checking up on her.
Their exchanges deal with health scares, clothes and jealousy, but it’s the seemingly unbridgeable gap between words and feelings that illustrate how unhappiness arrives.