What sunshine brings...

Latest column - page 6 

GUEST BOOK REVIEW: The House We Grew Up In (Lisa Jewell)

I am delighted to present a guest review by Super Speedy Reader Mum - aka - my friend Jackie....

When Book Club Mum handed over this book and then sneakily suggested: "perhaps you could write a review?" I surprised myself by agreeing. Lisa Jewell is one of my favourite authors and I'd finished her most recent novel, Before I Met You, a week ago with a joyous bounce and a greedy eye for her next page turner.

With this book, The House We Grew Up In, still unread, my theme was going to be how good it is for children to learn to play on their own, and how my children learned to do this while I, in the interest of good parenting, sat in the garden and chomped through pages and let them get on with it.

This book isn't a romance though. This is a sad book. It's sad in a reflective, thoughtful, gently peeling back the wallpaper sort of way.

BOOK REVIEW: Life After Life (Kate Atkinson)

Life After Life charts the many lives – or possible lives – of its protagonist, Ursula Todd.

Born in the middle of a snowstorm in 1910, she dies before even taking a breath because the umbilical cord is wrapped around her neck, the doctor and midwife kept away by the weather.

On the next page, her birth is a very different story - the doctor has managed to get there in time and the baby is saved.

Thus the novel unfolds, with Ursula’s idyllic, Merchant Ivory-style childhood regularly peppered with untimely death. A baby is smothered by a cat, a child slips off a roof, two girls drown playing in the waves, a murderous paedophile roams the countryside and Spanish ‘flu is hard to avoid.

Author Lisa Jewell on her new novel - Before I Met You

Lisa Jewell is on a blog tour. Here, for Book Club Mum, she explains her inspiration for the '90s section of her latest book - Brit Pop London, a world just before the internet and mobile phones.... 

Lisa Jewell

My novel, Before I Met You, is a dual time frame novel set in both the mid nineties and the early 1920s. But when I started writing it, way back in 2010, I’d intended it to be a simple love story set in the Brit pop years. I hadn't written a romance for years and I really wanted to see if I could still do it.

The – very tenuous – inspiration for the romance was actually the story of Meg Mathews who left the island of Guernsey back in the early 90s and by 1995 was married to Noel Gallagher and living it up with a phalanx of gossip-column celebrity mates in a huge house in Primrose Hill called Supernova Heights. I loved the arc of her life and the concept of leaving a tiny, compact island for the sprawling mess of London and finding yourself slap bang in the middle of the zeitgeist.

Author Lisa Jewell is heading this way on a blog tour....

Before I Met You is the latest novel by  Lisa Jewell, author of The House We Grew Up In and After The Party. It's a love story set in bustling, grungy '90s Soho, and 1920s bohemian London. Lisa will be sharing her inspiration for the 1990s section of the book with a guest blog here at Book Club Mum this Friday. So don't forget to drop by for a blast from the past - Cool Britannia, the Primrose Hill set and the time when telephone numbers were still exchanged on pieces of paper... 

A letter to Kate and a case of hypochondria

Latest column - a severe case of hypochondria, page 6, and a letter to Kate Middleton about those first few weeks of motherhood, page 8.

From the sick badge to Looks of Envy.....

Look at this jewellery. Gorgeous, isn't it?

In terms of accessories, I’ve been wearing the same brooch for the last few months. I say brooch, it’s really more of a badge. A badge of honour for parents of babies with reflux.

It’s so versatile – I’ve worn it with absolutely everything since Ben was born. Though I find it really sets off a manky old fleece particularly well.
Here's a picture: