Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
I found this slow to start, but do stick with it. It’s a deceptively slim time travel novel and, two chapters in, you find the floor opens up beneath you and suddenly you see the point. I love intelligent novels that take science fiction or fantasy tropes and use them for reasons that elucidate human stories. This time travel device – the particular chair, the cooling coffee, the terrifying ghost who nips to the toilet so you can steal her place at the magical table – it all coheres to tell lovely, heart-stopping, interconnected stories of lovers, parents, siblings and second chances. Yep, loved this.
A Book of Lists by Alex Johnson
A witty gift book with hidden depths. It’s a whole book exploiting the fact that so many readers simply love making, reading, poring over and adding to booklists. These are very quirky ones – the bookshelves of heroes and villains, real and fictional. Banned books and burned books and books that never existed but should have. Johnson’s short, digressive chapters are fun and informative and make you feel like you’re in good, chatty, erudite company in a library that’s not just huge but also somehow deeply silly.
Sunny Days and Sea Breezes by Carole Matthews
Carole never disappoints! This is something like the fourteenth of her many novels I’ve read and I’ve loved each one. I’m never sure whether I love the beachy summery ones or the cosy Christmas ones more, but this one is firmly in the summery camp. We follow Jodie as she flees from her awful husband to a houseboat on the Isle of Man. Soon she’s being coaxed back to life by a variety of colourful characters – my favourites being the chatty cleaner and the steampunky statue fella. Romantic but never mawkish and always extremely funny – this is a lovely romance featuring a sexy wood sculptor and his noisy chainsaw (!). I demand a sequel. (SURELY the heroine’s brother is going to visit and fall for the clearly gay statue fella..? I DON’T believe George is going to go off with that grumpy women from the café. No way! He’s Bill’s!)
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