I was very happy to attend the Edinburgh International Book Festival as press again this year. I went to five fabulous events and saw authors both familiar and new. I’m excited to share with you some of the wonderful insights these events offered and the new books I’ve acquired. Alycia Pirmohamed & Ece Temelkuran: Hope when Home is Lost I’ve seen Alycia speak a few times and was lucky enough to be on the team of the Portobello Book Festival the year she appeared there, so I

Summer by Ali Smith (Seasonal Quartet #4) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Summer is the final novel, and stunning conclusion, of Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet. I absolutely loved this book. Once again Ali Smith points to the past, to art, the hidden present and to the nature of people and says: Look, the answers are all around us. In these reviews I always talk about how much I’m enjoying reading the Quartet seasonally, and this was especially true for Summer. I read this book through the heatwave

I love reading all year (obviously) and every season has its different lovely energy that it brings to reading. In summer reading is lying in the park for hours finishing a whole book in a day. It's being stuck on a roasting train going somewhere exciting and getting lost in a story to make the journey fly by. It's that special way you can somehow read at least twice as fast when you're on holiday especially if you're lying by the pool. I really think you slip into some other

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke ⭐⭐⭐⭐ I was extremely intrigued when I first heard the premise of Caro Claire Burke's debut novel - Yesteryear. The main character is a tradwife influencer, a phenomenon I am endlessly fascinated by. For anyone who doesn’t know a tradwife is a term mostly used to describe female influencers who make content surrounding their life as a traditional wife. It is a step further than just a stay-at-home mum. There is a focus on making everything (and