I first encountered Lisa Jackson in 2016 when I read her amazing book, “Your Pace or Mine” which I know has single-handedly (pagedly?) encouraged so many beginner runners, especially those of us of the slower persuasion. I wrote her an email to say thank you as it helped me prepare for my first marathon, and Lisa very kindly sent me a good luck email on the morning of that marathon – how lovely.
We stayed in touch and I met Lisa at a couple of National Running Show events and have even been quoted in a couple of her Runners’ World columns.
Now Lisa has a very special book out. Let’s quote from the blurb:
Lisa didn’t think anything could be more devastating than the death of her beloved husband Graham. But then she lost her sister and father too – all in the space of 17 months. Feeling utterly broken, Lisa turned to an old friend that had already helped her through many tough times: running. But before long, a debilitating injury meant she lost her running mojo, too. Lisa sets out to rekindle her love affair with running, aiming to complete her 109th marathon in Graham’s honour. Can running take her from heartache to hope as she builds her new life by the sea? Still Running After All These Tears is a meditation on the redemptive power of running, what makes a good death and, most importantly, how to lead a joyous, meaningful life.
Today, I attended the National Running Show mainly in order to meet up with Lisa and attend her book launch. She was on the Flanci stand because they’ve done a link-up with Lisa to produce a range of skirts and leggings to match her flamingo theme (I get nothing for you clicking on that link, it’s just for your information and delight). It was wonderful to see her and we had a lovely chat and some pictures. Lisa gave me a signed copy of the book, which I will of course treasure.
It was lovely to see Lisa again (photo credit: Rachel Simmonite) and I hope her new book does very well and helps lots of people. You can order it from all the usual places (including your local independent bookshop).
I’ve almost caught up with blog reading so now I’ve fallen behind with reviewing – here are reviews of three NetGalley books published in February (so I’m ahead with reading, sort of!) that I have recently enjoyed.
Lillian Li – “Bad Asians”
(5 November 2025, NetGalley)
Maybe they’d been cruel, lobbying for front row seats to their childhood star’s fall from grace. Yet when the moment came, they had shown themselves as better than the children they’d been. How sweet and easy they were, how quickly they could take in a stray and turn her into a long-lost friend.
We follow five young Asian Americans from their hopes of college and careers through the 2008 financial crash and onwards, as Grace, film-maker then viral YouTuber videos her friends twice and splices together a film that affects them all deeply. I enjoyed this one at the start but it felt a bit long and ended up rotating through the characters, plus another, more famous, film-maker who messes up their lives just that little bit more. I’d have liked more of the parent group and it’s from them, in the end, that the truth is made clear. There were some good scenes near the end that undercut expectations and meant it continued to be an entertaining if slightly messy read. Would I have read it if it were not for the minoritised cast? Maybe not, as they were Disaster Millennials (or Gen Zs?).
Thank you to Pushkin Press for approving me to read this book via NetGalley in return for an honest review. “Bad Asians” is published on 12 February 2026.
Steven Blush – “When Rock Met Hip-Hop”
(4 November 2025, NetGalley)
A headlong rush through seminal groups, collaborations and albums that links first punk and hardcore, then rock itself, to the nascent then dominant genre of hip-hop. Blush has been a a writer on music for years and involved in these scenes and his deep knowledge is on display here. There is even a long appendix of the bands and records that never made it into the main text. It was a bit of a blur as it’s so packed full of quickly changing information, but lively and full of love for its subject, and if you like either genre you will get a lot out of this book. The NetGalley listing specifically asks for the text not to be quoted, so I’m abiding by that. I did love the story that the “band” appearing in the critical Aerosmith/RunDMC “Walk This Way” video is only 2/5 Actual Aerosmith and 3/5 another band entirely, hiding behind their hair, who were cheaper to hire than it was to ship in the rest of the band.
Thank you to Bloomsbury Books for approving me to read this book via NetGalley in return for an honest review. “When Rock Met Hip-Hop” is published on 5 February 2026.
Kallie Emblidge – “Two Left Feet”
(1 December 2025, NetGalley)
All of these rituals make him who he is: competitive, superstitious, a lonely only child awed by the luck of spending his life with two dozen brothers.
Set in the invented football club of Camden FC in 2017, we meet Oliver, who has known he’s gay since his teens and told his girlfriend, now best friend, Maggie when he turned 18 but has hidden it beneath his love of football ever since, and Leo, half-Columbian, Spanish-raised, but originally in the academy as well, who’s assigned to Ollie as his mentee when Ollie busts a hamstring. There’s tension at first but of course it turns to something else, as love, admiration and football all meld together to create a winning team in the midfield. Wish fulfilment – and why not have some positive stuff in this? – means that there’s a happy ending waiting in the wings, and the author notes at the end of the book that she wanted to show that in the hopes that members of the men’s teams can be as open as the women’s are about their sexuality. Fair play to Emblidge for being an American football fan writing about the English game, although this does lead to some slightly clumsy juxtapositions between American English spellings and phrases and British English banter and terms.
Thank you to Bedford Square Publishing for approving me to read this book via NetGalley in return for an honest review. “Two Left Feet” is published on 12 February 2026.
Two more memoirs read which fall under my “Read the Darn Hardback” challenge, with no paperback available for “Words from the Hedge” and Dean Atta’s book being discounted at the Heath Bookshop when the paperback came out. “Words from the Hedge” was part of a bumper crop of 23 books acquired in May 2025 – out of those, I have now read and reviewed five and passed two along (one after using it to beef up a review I was writing). “Person Unlimited” was part of a six-book acquisition month in July 2025 and out of the five books I acquired to read then, this is the first one I’ve read and reviewed.
Richard Negus – “Words from the Hedge: A Hedgelayer’s View of the Countryside”
(14 May 2025, subscribed to from Unbound)
Negus is one of the few hedgelayers left in England, and together with his working partner, uses a variety of methods, from tractors to hand-tools, to perform a variety of processes to hedgerows in mainly the East of England. He’s lyrical about East Anglia and careful in his descriptions so the reader really understands what he’s doing. He goes into the history of enclosure and hedges, and, so, farming, and makes it plain how nothing is permanent and everything comes and goes. He’s not keen on full rewilding and rewetting, saying it cuts productivity and is only doable by rich landowners and organisations with money behind them, but shares case studies of farmers who have shaped their fields to be squarer, so easier to work, while leaving large margins by the hedges to promote habitats for wildlife. He also brings out the hypocrisy of the use of “ecological surveys” by developers et al. who employ people to not look at things properly in order to get their plans passed.
One point I really enjoyed was where he celebrated the use of dictation software on his phone when doing his own nature surveys as part of his hedge work, then shared the rubbish it came out with when he looked at the results – good to hear as I struggle with the incursion of automated transcription into my own work!
A central argument which made me uncomfortable, I’m afraid, even though he’s probably right, being in at the thick of it, is that personal and commercial shooting industry is what keeps most of the hedges and indeed the hedgelayers in business. I suppose this would be fair enough, but then he shares his own enjoyment of shooting birds (all the while describing his love for and relationship with (other) birds and his respect for the intelligence of rooks, etc., and also acknowledging the oddity, to give the most positive term I can, of this practice) – bird species that I love. I couldn’t really get past this to enjoy the rest of the book.
A shame, as it is full of detail and interest and a desire to explain to non-countrypeople how the countryside and countrypeople operate.
Dean Atta – “Person Unlimited: An Ode to My Black Queer Body”
(10 July 2025, The Heath Bookshop)
This isn’t a coming-of-age story. This isn’t a coming-out story. This isn’t a chronological story. This is a story of coming to terms with what I remember. Shining a light on the memories that make me the Black queer man I am today. (p. 5)
A more traditional full memoir but fractured and fragmented and organised in an unorthodox way. Under headings such as crown, voice, heart, he picks up details and moments from his life, in the first section taking us all the way through via the vehicle of his hair and the people who work on it, from his childhood barber where he learned how to not act gay and never considered gay men might be present, through his mother and friends creating his cornrows then helping with his dreads.
He’s brutally honest and there is quite a lot of fairly graphic detail, although it never seemed gratuitous. The description of his rape part way through the book makes both Atta and the reader think back over other encounters and wonder whether they were sexual assaults before he had the language or confidence to describe them as such. We’re relieved when he meets his life partner and settles with kindness as well as being present in his body through yoga and having talking therapy.
Atta’s family, both the Jamaican and Greek Cypriot sides, are described movingly and with deep love, and it’s an intimate and loving book, even if he doesn’t love himself very much at times.
Atta’s technical ability is shown by the fact that although we hop all over the place through his life, whenever he mentions something it looks like we should already know about, we do – the ordering is done meticulously, as is necessary in a book like this, but not always quite there.
I enjoyed this author’s previous book, “The Cruise Club“, also read via Rachel’s Random Resources, and particularly liked the way she features older protagonists, who often aren’t given a look-in in romance novels (although this is changing, I think), so I was happy to pop onto the (mega, it turns out: see below) blog tour for this one, more so because it features northern waters and the Northern Lights!
Caroline James – “The Arctic Cruise”
(5 December 2025, NetGalley via Rachel’s Random Resources)
Beneath the sensible clothes and modest appearance, was there more to Joy than she let on? Leticia’s eyes narrowed and she wondered if more was to come. After all, the sea had a habit of revealing things, and while they were on the cruise, if it did, Leticia hoped that she’d be there to watch it all unfold.
Joy has been compelled by her somewhat unfeeling daughter to join the Artic cruise she and her late husband had booked for a big anniversary. He’s passed away, she’s spent time mourning and she’s not sure if she’s ready for this. Meanwhile, Henry has been encouraged by his friend and neighbour to take the cruise of his dreams, where he might just see and photograph the Northern Lights, a long-held ambition.
As the lovely Leticia and her husband Jim, with troubles of their own in the health area, watch on and gently encourage, and with the mutual enemies of the rather dreadful Barbara and Kenneth to keep them on their toes, Joy starts to blossom and Henry finds himself drawn to her. But Henry has his own worries around how to deal with his rather over-friendly cabin attendant (this is a lovely aspect to the story in the end), and we also watch some of the cruise ship staff with a bit of yearning and wish-fulfilment going on.
There’s no big mystery like last time, so it’s sufficiently different, and we hope for something lovely for Henry and Joy. A book full of kindness (even Kenneth and Barbara have their moment), but also funny, and again with great descriptions of the places the protagonists visit.
The HUGE blog tour has been going on and will continue: see below for all the info!
Thank you to Avon Books and Rachel’s Random Resources for making this book available to me via NetGalley in return for an honest review. “The Arctic Cruise” was published on 15 January 2026.
About the author
When she’s not writing in her cosy writing retreat, Caroline enjoys tranquil walks with Fred, her Westie, and refreshing swims in a local lake. As a member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association, the SoA, ARRA, and the Society of Women’s Writers & Journalists, Caroline is a champion of lifelong creativity.
This one isn’t out until the end of February, but I couldn’t resist picking up the new Christie Barlow, of course (I did finish my January NetGalley books first, I hasten to add!). Coming hot on the heels of the last instalment of her new(ish) Puffin Island series, it’s an excellent read I can, as usual, gladly recommend.
Christie Barlow – “No. 17 Curiosity Lane”
(18 December 2025, NetGalley)
How had this happened? This morning she was in her stylish London flat, surrounded by sleek furniture and pristine everything. Now she was in a building surrounded by antique horrors and a moose that looked like it was plotting something sinister.
In the intriguing Prologue, we have an older woman looking at a vinyl record and a music box, and her thoughts about how “She had lost everything that day. Her family. Her reputation. Her name”.
Then we’re in the present, where Fern, London-living hard-living music journalist, has had an odd letter from a solicitor telling her she’s inherited a second-hand shop from a great-aunt she never knew she had. When she meets a handsome stranger, Daniel, on the train up to Puffin Island, you know he’s going to crop up again, and so he does, as the only employee of No. 17 Curiosity Lane, and the sitting tenant of the charmingly ramshackle flat above the shop.
At first, she can only think about how to sell the shop and in the process winkle Daniel out, but the charms of both start to play on her, and when she realises there’s a mystery involved – and that island life and with Daniel might be a happier existence than her rather hollow one in London – she ends up considering staying.
No need to invent a royal family for this one, thank goodness, and it’s fun to have the island-dweller in the romantic pairing the guy for the first time. Our friends from the previous books of course pop up as they weave Fern into the life of the island.
Will she abandon her journalistic ambitions and nasty rock star hook-up for the fresh air and kindness of Puffin Island?
Thank you to One More Chapter for offering me a copy of this book to read via NetGalley in return for an honest review. “No. 17 Curiosity Lane” is published on 27 February 2026.
As I’m lagging a bit in reviews (but not books read!) I thought I’d take the opportunity to share with you my birthday book (and other!) incomings today.
I’ve been very lucky! I have had a lovely day in general: I went for a 5.4km run this morning (OK, in the rain), then went to my dear friend Ali’s apartment complex for lunch (some of you might remember her as blogger Heaven-Ali, also now on Bluesky; she is happy and well), opened my presents when back home and we’re about to have a takeaway (in fact it’s imminent so I might break off in a moment …) (yes … now I’m back).
So, so far, I have been lucky enough to receive (in addition to chocolate bars and another book token online, and the pictured book token, library card keyring, Hotel Chocolat gift box, Birmingham colouring book and Birmingham map jigsaw):
Susan Scarlett – “Murder While You Work”
Susan Scarlett – “Pirouette”
D. E. Stevenson – “The Blue Sapphire”
D. E. Stevenson – “The Musgraves”
(these are all from the wonderful Furrowed Middlebrow imprint from Dean Street Press; Susan Scarlett was the pen-name of Noel Streatfeild)
Tim Moore – “I Believe in Yesterday” (adventures in re-enactment from the humorous quester
Jane Cholmeley – “A Bookshop of One’s Own” (about the late lamented Silver Moon bookshop on Charing Cross Road)
Nicole Dennis-Benn – “Here Comes the Sun” (a novel of women in Jamaica amid changes to their village) How fortunate I am! Plus Matthew always gives me money on a spreadsheet to spend through the year, and that usually includes the odd book splurge. I will update this as anything more comes my way …
When I signed up to do a cover reveal post for this book, after loving my first read by this author, “The Santorini Writing Retreat“, I said to Rachel of Rachel’s Random Resources, who has run all these events, that I hoped to bag a space on the eventual book tour. So I was very pleased to have the opportunity to read this new book, and I wasn’t disappointed.
Eva Glyn – “The Croatian Island Library”
(1 November 2025, Rachel’s Random Resources / NetGalley)
Ana has a new venture for her catamaran which she hopes will save her from the terrible customers of the boating holidays she’s been offering and the looming pressure of contributing her beloved boat to her parents’ oyster-harvesting business: she will be hosting a roving library which will take books around the children of the islands off Croatia. Joining her for the summer are librarian Lloyd, a widower with something slightly murky in his past, and troubled, almost-silent Natali, a brilliant young mechanic and cook with a precarious life off-boat thanks to her chaotic mother and a beloved dog, Obi. As well as these main characters we meet Ana’s best friend and ex-boyfriend, threatening to call in an arrangement they made years ago, and Baka, an elderly woman on one of the islands who takes a liking to Natali and Obi.
Will Ana learn to manage her crew? Will the people of the islands embrace the travelling library and borrow enough books to prove the library’s value? Will Lloyd face his troubled history with someone on one of the islands? Will Baka’s son ever arrive off the ferry?
Although there is some blooming romance and decisions on love and life to be made by the protagonists, this book, like the previous one by this author, is mainly about the bonds and friendships forged between them. The islands also star, and the sense of place is palpable: I have been to different Croatian islands but these ones really came to life for me. The structure of the book meant we circulated around the islands, so there was always something new happening and lots of detail about how the library developed. The war in the former Yugoslavia does feature in the book in a very natural way, as Lloyd reflects on his time there just as war broke out, but there’s not too much detail to make it upsetting to read. Oh, and I’m not breaking a rule to say that Obi remains fine throughout.
A lovely story about learning to trust and love again, about the love of books, and about following what you need to do in life. I thoroughly enjoyed it and can’t wait to read some of Eva Glyn’s back-list next.
Thank you to One More Chapter and Rachel’s Random Resources for making a copy of this book available to me via NetGalley. “The Croatian Island Library” was published on 16 January 2026, and the rest of the book tour stops can be found here:
Note: there is a competition to win a paperback copy of this lovely book, for readers in the UK and Ireland only. Click on the link to enter!
*Terms and Conditions –UK & Ireland entries welcome. Please enter using the “Competition” link above. The winner will be selected at random via Gleam from all valid entries and will be notified by Twitter and/or email. If no response is received within 7 days then Rachel’s Random Resources reserves the right to select an alternative winner. Open to all entrants aged 18 or over. Any personal data given as part of the competition entry is used for this purpose only and will not be shared with third parties, with the exception of the winners’ information. This will passed to the giveaway organiser and used only for fulfilment of the prize, after which time Rachel’s Random Resources will delete the data. I am not responsible for despatch or delivery of the prize.
We’ve only been reading it since October, and it’s a longish book, but here’s another Emma and Liz Reads book read! (If you want to see them all, click here.) The excellent Paul from HalfMan HalfBook sent me this one after I’d been interested in his review (which I can’t find now) and I am pleased to say I have read and reviewed or otherwise dealt with all eight of the print books that came in in March 2025!
Craig Taylor – “Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now – As Told by Those Who Love it, Hate it, Live it, Left it and Long for it”
(17 March 2025, from Paul)
It’s funny, because when I got the call from London Underground I was at a restaurant with a guy I was seeing at the time and she said, “God, I’ll hear you everywhere”. He wasn’t saying it happily. We split up after that. He has since told me he is haunted. It is scary: you’re having a bad day and you get on the Tube and there’s the voice. Poor guy. (p. 49: Emma Clarke, Voice of the London Underground)
A special book, where Taylor interviews all sorts of people who (in the main) live in London, putting down their own words with his own descriptive interpolations here and there. Grouped into shortish sections (we usually covered two per Reading session) – Arriving, Getting Around, Going Out, Leaving – we find pieces that are vaguely connected, often with echoes or complete contrasts. Only two people crop up more than once: one I won’t spoil, the other is a rather odd chap Emma noticed we’d had before, who appears three times.
We’d been worried that this book would be dated when we realised it was published in 2011; however, apart from a few things which hadn’t happened yet around building train and tube lines and a rather chilling prediction of pandemic arrangements by a crematorium worker late on in the book, it worked just fine for the two of us, Emma still living in London, me having lived there for eight years or so twenty years ago.
The pieces are funny, melancholic, thoughtful, shallow, shocking, sometimes all at once. Some were incomprehensible to us – we could not work out what the market trader guy was on about but that’s the joy of Reading Together, that we could compare notes and confusions at the time. Ones we loved – and there were many – included the arboriculturalist and the guy who runs a restaurant and makes sure his staff all sit down and have a proper meal. A few of them had returned home or moved out of the city somewhere else and that made an interesting contrast. It was certainly always interesting.
Emma really enjoyed this one, too – we seemed to like and dislike the same characters. She knew quite a few of the bits of London I didn’t, although I wasn’t bad on any South London or Covent Garden bits as that’s where I lived when I lived there.
Just to recap for anyone new to the blog: my best friend and I sit down in our respective homes in London and Birmingham at the same time (usually on a Thursday after dinner) and read the same bit of the same book, while chatting about it on Messenger. We started in lockdown and decided to carry on. We always make sure we have several to go on our special TBR piles, which you can see on my State of the TBR posts, and are always adding more to the possibles list!
Our next book is Guy Shrubsole’s “The Lost Rainforests of Britain”, which is one of the two oldest on our now-substantial Pile.
Wave a book at me about two newcomers to the UK making friends and falling in love and I’ll get that NetGalley request in. With its intriguing cover, this book was all I hoped and more and I could not put it down. It would be good to get this into the hands of people who rail against those who come here on small boats or who need to improve their English language skills.
Manish Chauhan – “Belgrave Road”
(16 October 2025, NetGalley)
Through their conversations, he discovered the Gujarati word for sambusa: samosa. The Gujarati word for tea – cha or chai – was similar to the Somali word: shaah. The word for shop, dukaan, was the same in both languages. In the space of a few syllables, the world began to contract around them.
We meet Mira first, flying into the UK, aged 24, married for six months already but seeing her husband for the first time in all those months, and her parents-in-law for only the third time. Everything she owns is in one small suitcase: the other two larger cases are full of gifts from her parents to her in-laws. Her husband Rajiv is as she remembered, but as they progress through a year of marriage, she realises she doesn’t know him well at all, and there’s one thing about him that would have meant she wouldn’t have married him in the first place (she does tell him this). Mira grows in confidence as she learns English with the brilliant Valerie – “I’m not here to turn you into British people. I’m here to teach you English, so that you can live well in this country. But I want you to remember who you are, where you’ve come from. That’s important.” – and gets a job in the local sweet shop, and she also meets Tahliil.
Tahliil has come to Leicester with his sister to reunite with their mum, who travelled over from their home in Somalia a lot earlier – and legally. He’s haunted by the fact that he wasn’t able to protect his sister when something awful happened to her, and is understanding when she’s paralysed at home, unable to look for a job. It’s when he gets his second job, working at a cash and carry operated by an Indian boss, that he sees Mira for the first time.
At first they make friends, talking about Tahliil’s photography, about India and Somalia, then they fall in love. But Mira must stay married for five years for her visa, and Tahliil and his sister have just got into the asylum-seeking system (and obviously shouldn’t be working, but how can he support the rest of his family?).
Although in less competent hands this could become stereotyped and didactic, there are subtleties that make that not happen. Tahliil cares for an elderly man who has some dodgy views, but realises he has a kind heart; Mira’s mother-in-law is lovely and really appreciates her; Rajiv’s cousin Rupal’s girlfriend Chantelle is (just about) accepted by the family.
Of course you hope and hope that things will work out and Mira and Tahliil’s simple dreams for a home with a garden together will come true, but this book is realistic and you don’t really dare hope for that. The ending is I think just right.
Thank you to Faber and Faber for accepting my request to read this book in return for an honest review. “Belgrave Road” is published on 29 January 2026.
In the Introduction to this super volume (with no duds, as usual with these collections), Lucy Evans clarifies that the stories are included in order of the protagonist’s age / life stage – so we have some young love, returned and not, then courtships and the start of marriages, settled longer-term couples and a bit of widow(er)hood at the end. It’s an interesting way to arrange things but does make sense. It also means we can start with a bang with a Margaret Atwood story (“Hair Jewellery” which I hadn’t encountered before).
We find well-known and less-well-known authors (again, as usual), with a fab run of E. M. Delafield – Richmal Crompton (giving a deliciously different idea of love altogether) – Elizabeth Taylor in the second half of the book, but also Malachi Whitaker (Marjorie Olive Whitaker) and Ling Shuhua (translated by Nicky Harman) who I don’t think I’d met before. Stories are funny or tragic or simply keenly observed, often with that wonderful twist in the tail that more traditional short story writers give you.
Favourites included “The Obstacle” by E. M. Delafield, in which a woman past her youth meets a very promising man on a train, but their connection is derailed by the obstacle of the title, and Virginia Woolf’s “The Legacy” which has an older man musing on the sudden death of his wife as he reads through the diaries he’s left with. Mary Lavin’s long “The Heart of Gold” is an excellent 30 pages spent in the life of a woman whose long-gone lover returns in much later life to claim her – but does she want to be claimed and replace another woman?
As I said above, not a dud among this excellent collection which would please any fan of the mid-to-late-20th-century short story.
Thank you so much to the British Library for sending me this book in return for an honest review. “Stories for Lovers” is published tomorrow, on 13 January, just in time to buy it for someone (or yourself) for Valentine’s Day! You can buy all the British Library Women Writers books (and more) at the British Library Shop (https://shop.bl.uk/ and this one here).
Adventures in reading, running and working from home 
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