I belong to a book club and we get a book to read every month. Some of these novels are very entertaining, others not so much. There is a trend in publishing every year, remember Gone Girl, the Girl on the Train, and a host of other similiar titles? It gets kind of boring after a while: The Couple Next Door, the Woman in the Window, I could go on...
I usually make up my mind if I like a novel after the first chapter and I don't give it much longer than that, I must confess.
What reels me in to a story? Basically, I have to feel interested in the main character and the plot has to be intriguing. There is a character called Nicki in one of my crime novels, The Past Is Never Dead and I never thought of her as a major person of interest, to use police speak, so I was surprised by the amount of readers who wanted to know what happened to her, did she get murdered in the end? I am delighted that Nicki resonated so much with so many people. What was it about Nicki that they liked? She is a happy-go-lucky girl who worked in a bar in Spain and fell for the son of a rich landowner. Not super intelligent or super sophisticated and yet she struck a chord somewhere.
Can I plug this particular novel so you can judge for yourselves? Thank you.
Available as Amazon Kindle or paperback and also online from Waterstones.
What am I reading at present? I picked up my Collected Works of Oscar Wilde last night and started reading Lady Windermere's Fan. And do you know what? I'm hooked. Why? I can't really answer that. Why is Lady Windermere so wary of Lord Darlington? What role does her fan play? And the dialogue is typically witty Oscar Wilde. "Do you know that good people do a great deal of harm in this world" says the cynical Lord Darlington. I want to find out what his game is and how it all progresses. And it's not the kind of stuff I usually read.
At present, I need something to make me smile, with the world the way it is. I am also reading Wendy Holden's Last of the Summer Moet and she always makes me smile or even laugh out loud. Priceless.
Keep reading everyone!
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