When Penny Plage awakes from a near-fatal car accident, she has no recollection of her previous life. Queue the list of supporting characters who enter stage left to help remind Penny who she used to be. A romantic feel-good story as sweet as sugar, this book comes complete with the requisite fairy tale ending.
View Forget Love
Nina and her cat Phil made me contemplate my life as a thirty-something living in a city a little less hipster than LA. She is, as was I, fond of her easy life as a bookish person, with her friends and her pub-quiz team. Until a long lost dead father turns her life around, gives her siblings and a boyfriend she doesn't want. What more can I want as a reader, lusting for something funny, light and airy as a chocolate cupcake with a bit of chili?
View The Bookish Life of Nina Hill
This is a cleverly constructed and absorbing love story with a great sense of time and place. Sabine (the bicycle owner) moves to Trinidad with her husband, going through a gamut of emotions as the country gains independence but her independence, within the marriage, diminishes. I was hooked from the start, enjoyed the second half of the book the best, and was disappointed to reach the end.
View The White Woman on the Green Bicycle
Very funny - painfully so at times. This is so easy to read but oh so true.
A witty story full of likeable characters set in Canada's smallest town. I especially warmed to shy Mayor Funk who struggles with both his personal life and the seemingly ever increasing local population. An entertaining and enjoyable read.
View A Boy of Good Breeding
Jaz is one of those young people who want to find life as life begins to find them. Full of energy and witty asides, this fast-paced whirl through school, street and family will remind anyone of the joys and horrors of being 16.
View My Side of the Story
What a delightful, funny, touching book. I loved Mr and Mrs Ali - their bickering, their wisdom, their compassion. This was a magical depiction of that classic battleground - family, property, class - and marriage.
View The Marriage Bureau for Rich People
Discomforting with delicious morsels, this coming of age novel is set across two formative times from protagonist Roberta’s life: the abusive, domineering relationships she experiences with men as an undergraduate, and self-assertion through food and friendship in her late twenties. Cusp-of-adulthood millennial uncertainty finds release in the physically evocative food writing. A searching, hedonistically appetising read.
View Supper Club
What if you had known as an 18 year old what you now know as a middle-aged adult? This emotionally charged romantic comedy is a mad-cap romp across time and different fictional genres. It is a great antidote to the stress of these current fraught times, inducing in me an unexpected nostalgia for the Nineties!
A tale of ex-pat twenty-something millennials, filtered through the cultural perspectives of gender, sexuality, class, and race differences, as in the current zeitgeist. Sparky dialogue and banter between the protagonists disguise the hidden meanings, motivations and power dynamics in their relationships, whilst the reader can expect more of an interesting experience - as in the Chinese proverb - rather than the exciting times of the title.
You won’t find the biggest bestsellers on Whichbook as everyone knows about them already. But you can use your enjoyment of a current bestseller to see titles with a similar mood that you might try next.
