Books I’ve bought lately
A book recommendation special
There are so many good books out now that I’ve been on a book-buying binge. As many of you already know, I love books, and I love book shopping. Spending time in a bookshop is just wonderful—very much my happy place—and if it’s a bookshop with a cafe selling tea and cake, that’s even better.
Books are my ‘thing’. I like to keep up to date with new releases, see what’s coming out, what’s making literary shortlists, and what’s at the top of the charts. I suppose you could call me a book nerd.
So, this week, I am spreading the book love and sharing what I’ve been buying. My to-buy list is massive—far too long for just one piece—so this is a snapshot. These are the titles that have made it off the list and onto the pile stacked by the side of my bed, ready and waiting to be enjoyed.
All except one of my choices are new releases, which means they’re hardback, but I promise you, they will be worth buying now and not waiting for the paperback. I’m also delighted that three of the writers are from Yorkshire. I tell you, Yorkshire is full of literary talent. 😊
My purchases were made at Waterstones in York and House of Books & Friends in Manchester. Both are lovely bookshops, and both have a cafe.
As ever, I would LOVE to hear what you are reading, what books you’ve been buying, and which bookshops you like to visit.
Happy reading.
Liz xx
Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld
Curtis Sittenfeld is a well-known and well-respected American writer. I’ve read a couple of her novels, most recently Romantic Comedy, which I loved, so I was keen to read her latest work.
Show Don’t Tell is a collection of short stories, exploring marriage, fame and female friendship.
Here’s the blurb.
In this compulsive collection of twelve witty stories, Sittenfeld shows why she’s as beloved for her short fiction as she is for her novels, as she conjures up characters so real that they seem like old friends.
In ‘The Patron Saints of Middle Age,’ a woman visits two friends she hasn’t seen since her divorce. In ‘A for Alone,’ a married artist embarks on a project intended to disprove the so-called Mike Pence Rule, which suggests that women and men can’t spend time alone together without lusting after each other. And in ‘Lost but Not Forgotten,’ Sittenfeld gives readers of her novel Prep a new window into the world of her beloved character Lee Fiora, decades later, when Lee attends an awkward school reunion.
Witty, confronting and full of tenderness, Sittenfeld peels back layer after layer of our inner lives, keeping us riveted to the page with her utterly distinctive voice.
We Pretty Pieces of Flesh by Colwill Brown
This debut novel from Colwill Brown interested me for three reasons. It’s written by an author from Doncaster, South Yorkshire, and I love to support local writers. It’s also set in Doncaster, and it’s written entirely in South Yorkshire dialect.
Here’s the blurb.
Ask anyone non-Northern, they’ll only know Donny as punch line of a joke or place they changed trains once ont way to London.
But Doncaster’s also the home of Rach, Shaz and Kel, bezzies since childhood and Donny lasses through and through. They share everything, from blagging their way into nightclubs to trips to the Family Planning clinic when they are late. Never mind that Rach is skeptical of Shaz’s bolder plots; or that Shaz, who comes from a rougher end of town, feels left behind when the others begin charting a course to uni; or that Kel sometimes feels split in two trying to keep the peace ― their friendship is as indestructible as they are. But as they grow up and away from one another, a long-festering secret threatens to rip the trio apart.
We Pretty Pieces of Flesh takes you by the hand and leads you through Doncaster’s schoolyards, alleyways and nightclubs, laying bare the intimate treacheries of adolescence and the ways we betray ourselves when we don’t trust our friends. Like The Glorious Heresies and Shuggie Bain, it tracks hard-edged lives and makes them sing, turning one overlooked place into the very centre of the world.
Nesting by Roisin O’Donnell
Nesting is the debut novel from prize-winning Irish writer, Roisin O’Donnell. It’s been longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2025 and critics have described it as an ‘extraordinary and urgent debut’, introducing a ‘new voice in fiction’.
Fascinating fact: Roisin was born and grew up in Sheffield.
Here’s the blurb.
On a bright spring afternoon in Dublin, Ciara Fay makes a split-second decision that will change everything. Grabbing an armful of clothes from the washing line, Ciara straps her two young daughters into her car and drives away. Head spinning, all she knows for certain is that home is no longer safe.
This was meant to be an escape. But with dwindling savings, no job, and her family across the sea, Ciara finds herself adrift, facing a broken housing system and the voice of her own demons. As summer passes and winter closes in, she must navigate raising her children in a hotel room, searching for a new home and dealing with her husband Ryan’s relentless campaign to get her to come back. Because leaving is one thing, but staying away is another.
What will it take for Ciara to rebuild her life? Can she ever truly break away from Ryan’s control – and what will be the cost?
Tense, beautiful, and underpinned by an unassailable love, hope and resilience, this is the story of one woman’s bid to start over.
Base Notes—The Scents of a Life by Adelle Stripe
Adelle Stripe is an author, poet and journalist based in Calderdale, West Yorkshire. This is a memoir told through a prism of vintage perfumes and is described as a ‘tragicomic tale of working-class womanhood’.
As one of the reviews says, ‘Base Notes documents that lost, last tribe that rarely gets served by contemporary literature — the Northern working class.’
I can’t wait to read this book. I know it will be warm, witty and wonderful.
Here’s the blurb.
'Already your future has been planned out. There is not much choice about what to become in the small town where you live . . .'
A bedroom dreamer with a headful of Warhol, Adelle Stripe's formative years were ones of daytime drinking and religious fervour, frustrated mothers and reckless daughters, desire, ambition and the pursuit of creativity. Told through a prism of vintage perfumes, and played out in vivid detail with startling clarity and colour, Base Notes chronicles an unbridled Northern England of the late 20th century already fading from view.
With a keen eye for the absurd, an ear cocked to eavesdropped conversations and a nose that finds perfume wherever it goes, this tragicomic tale of working-class womanhood is no clichéd story of redemption or escape, but instead a bleakly funny yet unflinching memoir of dead-end jobs, lost weekends, brief encounters and those wild, forgotten characters who slip through the cracks.
Infused with acerbic observations and unexpected poignancy, Base Notes sees Adelle Stripe boldly laying her lived experience on the page, creating literature from a life less ordinary.
Bookish—How Reading Shapes our Lives by Lucy Mangan
I am a fan of Lucy Mangan—enjoying her journalism, fiction and nonfiction. I met her in person a few years ago at the Off the Shelf Festival in Sheffield, and she was just as witty in person as she is on the page. She is also a fellow bookworm.
Here’s the blurb.
A love letter to all those who come alive when they pull a new treasure off the shelf, stay up late reading just one more page and pack their suitcases with clothes wedged between books instead of the other way around.
From exploring the stacks as a student, to finding her feet as a bookseller-turned-journalist, falling for a fellow bookworm in an independent bookshop, escaping the doldrums of new motherhood and finally building a (book) room of her own, Bookish is the story of a life spent falling in love with reading. Bookworm author Lucy Mangan chronicles her years of buying, borrowing and hoarding everything from well-worn literary classics to steamy bonkbusters, gripping thrillers, young adult novels and other not-so-guilty pleasures.
Brimming with literary insights, wry observations and stellar recommendations, this book is an ode to the bookish places – from local libraries to bookstores big and small – and the stories that make us who we are.
Pity by Andrew McMillan
This one has been out for a while. I snapped up the last paperback copy in Waterstones York. Andrew McMillan is from Barnsley. He is a poet and Professor of Contemporary Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. This is his first novel and was selected as a book to look out for by the Sunday Times, BBC, Independent, I-D, New Statesman and the Guardian.
Here's the blurb.
The town was once a hub of industry. A place where men toiled underground in darkness, picking and shovelling in the dust and the sleck. It was dangerous and back-breaking work but it meant something. Once, the town provided, it was important; it had purpose. But what is it now?
Brothers Alex and Brian have spent their whole life in the town where their father lived and his father, too. Now in his middle age and still reeling from the collapse of his personal life, Alex must reckon with a part of his identity he has long tried to conceal. His only child Simon has no memory of the mines. Now in his twenties and working in a call centre, he derives passion from his side hustle in sex work and his weekly drag gigs.
Set across three generations of a South Yorkshire mining family, Andrew McMillan's magnificent debut novel is a lament for a lost way of life as well as a celebration of resilience and the possibility for change.
Have you read any of these titles? Let me know in the comments.