Hello!

my second romance, Love Scene, is out in less than four months now (oh God) and while it is very much a standalone novel, its heroine Annie is the younger sister of Laura, the star of Our Song. When Our Song readers last heard from Annie, she was basically planning to murder the people who had upset her big sister…

Annie was one of the few people I talked to yesterday before Katie took my phone away.

‘I’m going to fly home and kill those pricks,’ she said when she rang me from London.

‘Which pricks?’ I said.

‘The journalist. Aisling’s husband. Tadhg fucking Hennessy. All of them.’

I almost believed she’d do it too. It was weirdly comforting.

So how, you might wonder, would she react when Laura and Tadhg actually got together?

I started writing Love Scene literally three days after I finished the draft zero of Our Song, which meant I had to quickly settle myself into Annie’s voice and POV. I had to figure out how she interacted with other people. And initially, that meant pairing her with characters from Our Song.

So in the beginning, when Love Scene was literally just a few scenes and sketches, there was a moment where she bumped into Laura’s ex Fiachra in the canteen of the broadcaster where she works (Our Song revealed he is a media personality after all - the nation’s favourite psychologist! BTW it always makes me extremely happy when Our Song readers tell me they loved Fiachra. I got a message at the weekend that described him as “affable slutty Fiachra” which utterly delighted me and is totally perfect). There was a bit where she chatted to Laura’s friend Katie. And there was a bit where I revealed exactly what she felt about Tadhg when she first met him and why.

I’d cut all of those bits by the time I’d submitted the draft to my editor. They served no purpose in Annie and Art’s story. But I did keep them (in a document imaginatively titled “Annie and Art cut bits”). And here, to give you a little bonus backstory and a proper taste of Annie’s general vibe, is what happened when Annie met Tadhg. Enjoy, and please pre-order Love Scene from your favourite indie bookshop!

When Annie Met Tadhg

Tadhg and I actually get on very well these days, but I was extremely wary when he and Laura finally got together a few years ago. I only met him once when they were in a band together in college (I must admit that when we went to one of their gigs, Roo and I were stunned to discover Laura was in a band with such a ridiculously good looking man. Her ex Fiachra was pretty hot too but we thought that was just a fluke. When we met Tadhg we discovered she was apparently surrounded by attractive men at all times. And no offence to Laura, but it was slightly surprising). But my wariness came from the fact that I had a very strong memory of a night a few months after that gig.

Our parents were out but I was taking advantage of having the house to myself and was watching Season 2 of Buffy on the big telly when Laura came home late one night and went straight to her room. Our family home isn’t exactly a mansion and the walls aren’t hugely thick (thanks, 1970s building standards) so I couldn’t avoid hearing her crying. I knew she’d been meeting Tadhg that night and was genuinely worried something awful had happened so I stuck my head in the door and said, ‘Are you okay?’

I expected her to snap ‘Do I look okay?’ but she wouldn’t look at me. She just buried her face in her pillow.

I’d seen her wailing about boys before but this looked different. She looked...broken.

A horrible thought struck me.

‘Tadhg didn’t…. he didn’t hurt you did he? Like… physically?’

She raised her head and stared at me through eyes so puffy they were almost swollen shut. ‘What? Jesus, no! Fucking hell, Annie!’

‘Okay,’ I said. But I was glad I’d checked. ‘Um, do you want to be on your own?’

She rolled over and faced the wall so I took that as a yes and slipped out of the room. She went off on her J1 to New York the next day, and she seemed fine when she came back three months later, but for sixteen years she never mentioned Tadhg’s name and I never brought it up. I didn’t forget him, though. I was very annoyed when he got super famous a few years later. I couldn’t hear his songs without thinking of how my big sister had looked that night. I never told her this, obviously. I just thought dark thoughts whenever I saw photos of Tadhg or heard him on the radio.

It was kind of weird when they reconciled a few years ago and became the most annoyingly affectionate couple ever. I’d been thinking of him as the evil villain who broke my sister’s heart for over a decade. But Laura reassured me that it was all a misunderstanding and I believed her. Eventually. A few months after they finally got together, they came over to London to visit me and we went for dinner in a ridiculously posh restaurant.

As soon as Laura went to the loo I said, ‘It’s been very nice to meet you, Tadhg. I’m glad you and Laura have sorted everything out. But I remember what she was like after you had that big bust up and I’m just going to say this now: if you hurt my sister again, I’ll kill you.’

Tadhg looked startled, as well he might I suppose, but then he said, sincerely as far as I could tell, ‘Annie, I love Laura more than anything on earth. And I will do my best, for the rest of my life, never to hurt her.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Well, good.’

‘Your sister’s terrifying, Lol,’ said Tadhg, when Laura returned to the table.

Laura laughed.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I know.’

There’ll be more where that came from in four months! Tadhg and Laura do pop up in Love Scene, and I can assure you that all is well between Annie and Tadhg now. And I can’t wait for everyone to meet Annie and her (fr)enemy-to-lover Art (remind me of this in a few months when I am literally crying with anxiety about people reading the book). Last week I shared the full cover on Instagram - I can’t even describe how much I love it and Lauren Mortimer’s illustration. This simply is Annie and Art!

And if you want a reminder of what their story is about, here’s the blurb…

HATE AT FIRST SIGHT. THEN COMES THE REWRITE.

Writing for an iconic soap opera was supposed to be a dream come true. But Annie’s boss is a tyrant, the actors are out of control, and there are rumours that Northside will soon be cancelled.

The worst part of all of it: Annie has to share an office with her nemesis, Art Sullivan.

Talented-and-he-knows-it Art was once the Next Big Thing with a promising Hollywood career. So why is he back in town, writing for a show he’s never seen a single episode of?

Annie tries to ignore Art, who still knows exactly how to push her buttons – and is still distractingly hot. But when she suspects someone’s sabotaging Northside, she realises she’ll need Art’s help to stop them. If they can quit arguing long enough to work together, there might just be another plot twist ahead…

Two posts in one week?! Unprecedented! But this is an unprecedented month because not only has Our Song been shortlisted for an Irish Book Award (you can still vote until 6pm tomorrow, November 16th!) but I have just announced my next book, which will be published next May by Hachette Books Ireland. And here it is - or at least, here is the title and blurb, the full cover will be revealed in the not-so-distant future:

HATE AT FIRST SIGHT. THEN COMES THE REWRITE.

Writing for an iconic soap opera was supposed to be a dream come true. But Annie’s boss is a tyrant, the actors are out of control, and there are rumours that Northside will soon be cancelled.

The worst part of all of it: Annie has to share an office with her nemesis, Art Sullivan.

Talented-and-he-knows-it Art was once the Next Big Thing with a promising Hollywood career. So why is he back in town, writing for a show he’s never seen a single episode of?

Annie tries to ignore Art, who still knows exactly how to push her buttons – and is still distractingly hot. But when she suspects someone’s sabotaging Northside, she realises she’ll need Art’s help to stop them. If they can quit arguing long enough to work together, there might just be another plot twist ahead…

Yes, I am in my enemies-to-lovers era and I couldn’t be happier! Writing about Annie and Art brought me a lot of joy during the last rollercoaster year, and I can’t wait to introduce them to the world (I also can’t wait to show you the cover - writing Annie and Art’s dynamic was so fun and illustrator Lauren Mortimer has captured them PERFECTLY 😍). This book is my love letter to soap operas and comfort TV shows and the people who make them. It’s my homage to the classic screwball romcoms I adore. It also features what might be the most romantic moment I’ve ever written. And I really hope you enjoy it.

Oh, and while it’s a standalone novel, Annie is Laura from Our Song’s sister so you’ll get a Tadhg and Laura update…

You can pre-order it here! And please do!

I started writing Love Scene the week I submitted the first draft of Our Song. I was so scared that the creative spark that had carried me through the blissful experience of writing that first draft would leave me forever if I stopped. On one level, in retrospect, I should have taken at least a few days off because it meant that by the time I finished the second draft of Our Song last December, I was basically a burned out husk (I found a selfie I took the week I submitted it and I looked like I’d been living in an undersea cave for a year). But on another level, starting the next book straight away was one of the best things I ever did.

I found the second draft of Our Song very difficult, mostly because my first draft was WAY too long and I had to cut a whopping 25,000 words out of it. This initially felt impossible but with help, I did it. But it was tough, not least because I was doing it in the weeks leading up to my dad’s first anniversary, on which we were burying his ashes in the family plot in Glasnevin. So while I was trying to chop tens of thousands of words out of my book, I was also having to do stuff like finalise the wording on my dad’s gravestone. Not exactly brilliant timing.

And on top of this, the second draft involved digging into the infertility aspect of Our Song a bit more and showing some things on the page which had happened ‘off camera’ in the first draft (for example, the reader originally didn’t directly see Laura’s break up with Dave, she just told Tadhg about it).

I found this genuinely upsetting. Several people later asked if writing about this stuff was cathartic. It was not! It made me revive a lot of stuff I’d processed years ago and it made me cry! But while I was doing this rewrite - exactly a year ago this weekend in fact - I posted an Instagram story about how upsetting I found miracle baby narratives, and the flood of DMs I received in response were both incredibly moving and made me very glad I was writing about this topic. I am hugely grateful to my editor for encouraging me to dig deeper into this subject because it was the right thing for the book and its readers and ultimately for me, and I’m very, very happy I did it.

But it wasn’t easy. So during all this, and during the months that followed when Our Song started going out in the world (a source of such constant gut-wrenching anxiety that I could barely enjoy the good stuff, which was basically all of it), when all my hopes and dreams for it started coming up against reality, I would let myself write a bit of Annie and Art ‘ as a treat’. Whenever I got stressed, or scared, or disappointed or jealous (and yes, all authors feel all of these things, even when things are going very well, and then you, or at least I, feel bad about feeling those things because you should just be happy and counting your blessings), I would turn to the one thing that I could control, and that always made me happy.

Writing about Annie and Art.

Now I’m working on their second draft (I learned from my mistakes - I did NOT go 25,000 words over my contracted word count and I took a holiday once the first draft was submitted). And yes, I now have something else I’m working on ‘as a treat’. I am aware the whole new book publishing cycle is going to begin again soon and I know from experience that the only way to deal with all the things I can’t control is to keep on writing. To keep on creating. Because writing romantic comedies has made me love writing again, after years when it felt like a slog, and I want to keep doing it for as long as I can.

So you know, it would really help if you pre-ordered my new book!

First things first: my debut adult novel Our Song (buy it here if you haven’t already) has been shortlisted for an Irish Book Award! Along with some incredible fellow authors, I’m up for the Popular Fiction Book of the Year prize. These awards are a pretty big deal here in Ireland and are decided partly by public vote. So please vote for Our Song! You can vote from anywhere in the world but if you’re in Ireland or the UK, you also have the chance to win book tokens (always a good thing).

I am very happy that Our Song has been shortlisted. I won the Senior Children’s Book of the Year prize back in 2011 for my first book, The Real Rebecca. I did not expect to win. At least one other person in the room that night didn’t expect me to win and made their astonishment clear! But I did.

Look at that baby with her giant gas jet (the sponsor was Bord Gáis in those days)!

This has been a weird, intense and kind of amazing year (have I mentioned that?), not least because the shift from publishing books for children to publishing a novel aimed at my fellow adults has been so… discombobulating. I am, and always will be, very proud of my books for children and am proud to call myself a children’s writer. When people say (and they do), ‘So, Our Song’s your first novel’?’ I feel quite defensive. Because it’s my eighth! But I can’t deny that the whole experience of publishing for adults, who are buying books for themselves (unlike a lot of child readers, whose books are bought for them by adults) and who will contact you directly if they have strong feelings about the book, has been very different. And amazing, but also, well, intense.

And so it means a lot that my first novel for adults has been acknowledged by the Book Awards. I couldn’t think of a better way to end this publication year than by celebrating in a fancy frock (vintage, of course - this is my fifth Book Award nomination and I wore vintage to every ceremony apart from 2020, when lockdown meant we didn’t have any ceremony and I watched the winners being announced at home in my yoga pants. Anyway I always wear vintage to these things because as Katie says in Our Song, vintage is basically always the right level of fanciness because there’s nothing like it in the world). Winning would be a bonus of course! And I’m up against some fantastic authors so I know the odds are against me.

So please do throw me a vote, I would very much appreciate it. And sure, if I don’t win, I’ve already got a Book Award and as a friend said to me, ‘You’ve only got to win it once and then you’re an Irish Book Award-winning author for life.’ Which is true! But it would be lovely to win another one, especially for this book which means so much to me. And just as Laura was reunited with Tadhg after more than a decade, well, I wouldn’t mind having a second chance with the Book Awards. So your votes would be much appreciated. The closing date for votes is November 16th and if you haven’t voted yet, now is the time!

Oh, and speaking of books, I’ve been working away on another one and on Friday I’ll be telling you all about it which is very exciting (for me, anyway) so watch this space…

Last month, I cried in front of 366,000 people.

It wasn’t, like, sobbing crying. It was more ‘oh shit, there are tears in my eyes, my voice is going all wobbly’ crying. But it was definitely crying. I had to take my glasses off and rub my eyes. I wished I had a tissue. But I didn’t have a tissue because I was in a studio in RTÉ, our national broadcaster, being interviewed very sensitively and thoughtfully by the lovely Dearbhail McDonald about my book Our Song (you may have heard me mention it. Once or twice). Dearbhail was the guest host of The Brendan O’Connor show, whose Sunday episode (on which I was appearing) regularly has roughly 366,000 listeners which, given that the adult population of the country is roughly 3.7 million, is about 10% of all adults in the country.

So ten per cent of all adults in the country heard me talk to Dearbhail about the fact that, like Laura in Our Song, I had wanted to have children but I couldn’t get pregnant and now I know I will never be a mother. Until the book came out, I had never talked or written publicly about this fact. I told some of my friends and family over the years, but not all of them, not by a long shot. More people I know found out in 2020 because, the year we both turned 45, my husband published a book of essays called Let’s Do Your Stupid Idea. It included an essay, written with my full approval, called Something Else, about realising that you weren’t going to have children after all when you always thought you would, and the complicated grief and sense of loss that comes with that. 2020, by the way, was also the last time someone told me they were pregnant and I held it together in front of them and then cried in the car all the way home.

It may be hard to believe, given that I had a Livejournal in the early ‘00s, but I’m quite a private person. In my professional life as a writer, I’ve never really written hugely personal stuff. But before Our Song came out, I knew I was going to have to do it. Infertility is an element of Our Song and that’s because I felt, on a very deep level, that it was important to write a story in which a character can’t have children and gets a happy ending that doesn’t involve magically becoming a parent. From the very beginning, before Tadhg and Laura were even called Tadhg and Laura, Our Song was always going to be a book in which the characters were, very explictly, going to live happily ever after without children.

And that was because I needed to see that story myself, and I felt wasn’t seeing it. I kept encountering stories, true and fictional, in which couples who couldn’t have children were eternally heartbroken by the grief and sense of loss, or stories in which they miraculously got pregnant or adopted a child. All of these things happen in real life, of course. I don’t want to belittle that reality, and that long-lasting pain, or the huge joy people experience from long-wanted parenthood. But I never saw my own experience, as someone who wanted to have children and couldn’t and who went away and cried after every single pregnancy announcement for years and years, but was now genuinely happy with her life and how things had turned out. I knew I wasn’t the only person in my situation. I have friends who are in the same boat, and we all felt we didn’t see ourselves in the public narratives around fertility and parenthood.

Well, I’m literally seeing myself now. Last month a photo of me appeared on the cover of the Sunday Times’s Home section with the caption “Author Anna Carey on child-free marriage”.

Inside was a very sensitive, thoughtful interview by the brilliant Aoife Barry in which I talked about all of this stuff. A few weeks later I was interviewed by Sinéad Moriarty in front of an audience at the Dalkey Book Festival, and the next morning I was on the Brendan O’Connor Show. A few weeks after that I was interviewed live on Ireland AM, and the following week I was on All About Books on Dublin City FM. In all of these interviews, I talked about infertility, the narratives around it and my own personal experiences. I was and am very glad to have the opportunity to talk about these things publicly, and every time I get a message from someone saying it makes them feel seen reminds me why I’m doing it. I have absolutely no regrets about any of it.

But… it’s weird.

Sometimes it’s very weird.

My parents in law came to the event I did in Dalkey. I had actually asked my relatives not to come to events or listen to interviews because I knew I’d be asked about personal stuff and it made me self conscious, but it turns out people thought I was joking. I was not! Anyway, my parents in law - whom I adore, by the way, and with whom I have an excellent relationship - were there while I talked to Sinéad about my inability to have children with their son. A couple of days after the Brendan O’Connor show interview, I was walking home from the local shops when I passed one of my neighbours. My neighbourhood is a friendly place and we’d always greet each other in passing, and this time they said, ‘You were great on the radio the other day.’ A few weeks ago I was at a concert and afterwards my husband and I were talking to a few of the performers, who we know slightly from singing sessions in Dublin. We were chatting away and then one of them said he’d heard me on the Brendan O’Connor show. Another man said he’d heard it too. They were both lovely about it and it was really nice to hear but it also kind of freaked me out. It all kind of freaks me out.

In the normal scheme of things, I would never have talked to any of these people about my fertility issues. I would never have cried in front of them. But now… well, now I basically had. Like I’ve told all of you. I should stress that I was under no pressure to do any of these things - my publishers asked me if I was okay with talking about fertility issues in promo interviews, all the interviewers were extremely sensitive, and crucially, I actively wanted to talk about it for the same reason I wanted to write a book about it. I wanted people to feel less alone.

I wanted to feel less alone.

And I do. The single most moving thing, the single most important thing that has happened to me as a result of this book coming out is the fact that I’ve received lots of messages from women who don’t have children who felt seen by it, and who felt moved by the ending. Every single one of those messages has made me cry. Every single one of them has made me very, very happy. Just one of those messages is worth all my neighbours knowing about my unproductive reproductive system. It means so, so much to me. Knowing it’s not just me who has experienced this, and who feels this way, and who needs to see other women in the same situation. Who needs to see other stories.

That’s what made me cry on the radio, by the way. Not the fact that I don’t have kids, that I didn’t get close to having kids, that I couldn’t get pregnant. I cried when I talked about a scene towards the end of the film Up. Everyone who’s seen it remembers the devastating opening sequence of that film, the wordless montage of a young couple getting married and setting up home and planning a family and then losing a baby. We then meet the husband as a cranky old widower and there’s an implication that this lack of children might have blighted his whole life.

But near the end of the film, he finally looks at the rest of the scrapbook his wife left behind when she died not long ago.

And it’s not sad at all. It’s beautiful. It’s the story of their long and happy life together without children. It’s the only time I’ve seen such a relationship portrayed so beautifully, and lovingly, and happily. It’s the only time I’ve seen what I needed to see.

That’s why I cried on the radio. And I don’t regret any of it.

You can order Our Song here or Bookshop.org in the UK. If you like it, please rate and review it accordingly! And spread the word to people who might like it.

My new book Our Song is coming out in exactly ONE MONTH. You may have heard this. In fact, if you know me in real life you have definitely heard this, because worryingly I talk of little else. This weekend I am going into a recording studio to record the two songs at the heart of the book. Because yes, I did write actual songs, not just the lyrics. Now, in the book one of these songs is meant to be so good that it made the hero a massive star and the other song is so amazing that he and the heroine were never able to finish it to their satisfaction. I am not deranged enough to believe that the music I have written is like that. If it was, I myself might be a massively successful musician. BUT if any readers of Our Song would like to know what general musical vibe I had in mind, these songs will be available to stream and, if all goes well, they will be an extra at the end of the audiobook! So, you know, no pressure.

Anyway to distract myself from The Fear that accompanies impending publication, I’m going to recommend some other excellent love stories.

A Perfect Story (Netflix)

I fell totally in love with this Spanish Netflix standalone series when it was released last summer. On paper, the story of Madrid hotel heiress Margot and aimless David, who pretend to be dating to show their exes what they’re missing, could be a trope-filled cliché, but hugely likeable leads, a witty script and some very smart storytelling make A Perfect Story stand out.

As Margot and David become friends and then friends with benefits and then maybe more, the chemistry between them is full of genuine heat. These characters seem to genuinely like each other as well as fancy each other, which makes it all even hotter and made me totally invested in their relationship. I was in floods of tears by the final episode, and the fact that I wasn’t sure if they were going to be sad tears or happy tears until the very last minutes is a testament to how good this series is. Strongly recommended.

The Last Days of Summer by Sarra Manning (Hodder & Stoughton)

Full disclosure: Sarra is a friend of mine and she generously blurbed Our Song. HOWEVER. I was a fan of her writing long before we actually met, so this is a genuinely unbiased paean of praise! In her new book The Last Days of Summer, Cassie has loathed Marc (with good reason) for over a decade, but the fact that they have mutual friends means that they can’t totally avoid each other. When they discover that their friend Russell is seriously ill, Cassie and Marc must present a united front to support him and his wife Lucy. And that means (oh yes) fake dating. Full of heart and heat, this book is a convincing, compelling and witty love story, while never shying away from the darker realities of life. And it takes place in the same universe as many of Sarra’s books, right back to Unsticky (there’s a nice little treat for fans of that book), which I love. Also FYI it’s very hot, to the extent that I felt wrong reading it on the bus, so bear that in mind.

Sidenote: Writing good sex scenes is VERY hard to do, which makes Sarra’s work all the more impressive. All too often authors stumble into deeply unsexy territory full of awkward anatomical detail (“body part A goes into body part B and then body part C does this to body part D”). I am an adult! If I’m reading a novel I do not need every single moment of the physical act described in detail as if you’re explaining the mechanics of sex to an alien who’s never even heard of it before! Give me just enough detail so I know what’s going on and then make it about the vibe and the chemistry and the desire! This does not happen enough.

His Girl Friday

Who can resist characters with chemistry to spare whose bickering clearly (to the audience at least) conceals their deep mutual attraction? Not me, especially when those characters are played by Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. Ace journalists Walter (Grant) and Hildy (Russell) might be divorced, and Hildy might be about to give up the newspaper business to marry another man but Walter knows that she’s “a newspaper man” at heart and is determined to win her back for himself and for the paper. It’s fast (SO fast), it’s snappy, it’s funny and Rosalind Russell wears amazing hats. I love it. You can watch it (legally! It’s out of copyright!) right here:

You Are Here by David Nicholls (Sceptre)

Last summer I was visiting my sister in London and we went out dancing at the regular ‘80s night at Paper Dress Vintage in Hackney. I had been to this extremely fun club night before and it’s exactly what you would expect from an ‘80s night in a Hackney vintage shop. Were we the only people there who could remember the ‘80s? Definitely! Were we the only people there who were even alive in the ‘80s? Probably! But the crowd was so fun and the vibe and the music was so good that we didn’t care that we were old enough to be the mothers of some of the attendees. By the time we got home around 3am I realised that I had already hit well over 10,000 steps on my Fitbit, purely from dancing. I tumbled into bed and, as I’ve always done even back in the days when I was indulging in many more and much wilder nights out, I picked up my book so I could read a few pages before going to sleep.

I ended up staying awake for another hour until I finished it.

The book was You Are Here by David Nicholls. You mightn’t think a book about two 40-year-olds walking across England would keep you up until after 4am, but this novel was a reminder that a good love story should be as compelling as a thriller. You should want, you should need these characters to be together, or at the very least be happy, so much that you can’t stop reading until you know how they end up. I cared so much about Marnie and Michael that I simply couldn’t bear the idea of them not being okay. I won’t spoil it - we all know David Nicholls has no problem with unhappy or at least bittersweet endings, so this book is not predictable.

VERY SLIGHT SPOILER ALERT FOR CONTENT WARNING. FEEL FREE TO SKIM THE NEXT FEW LINES

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I will say that he explores issues related to infertility which I and plenty of other people can find quite triggering. When I was reading this book I had to ask my husband, who had read it before me, if there was going to be a “miracle baby” at the end, as I often find this narrative trope very upsetting (not least because the implication is “don’t worry, these characters won’t end up like YOU, you failure, that would be a fate worse than death!”). Anyway he reassured me that there is NOT a miracle baby which was actually a massive relief because if there had been I would have had to brace myself or possibly even stop reading. I should also say, if you also find this trope upsetting, or if any specific issues around fertility are triggering for you in fiction, that while Our Song does include infertility issues, there is no pregnancy loss and there is also no miracle baby.

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*END OF SLIGHT SPOILERS/CONTENT WARNING

So those are four very different but all excellent love stories. I will have more recommendations in future newsletters! In the meantime, you can pre-order Our Song from Irish retailers here and from UK indies here. Excitingly (for me, anyway) it will also be out in Australia though I don’t have the local indie links yet. But if you are in Australia and would like to order it, support your favourite local indie shop! Also, the book is available to request on Netgalley, so if you read it there and like it, please leave a review. In fact, if you’ve read it anywhere (legally of course) and enjoyed it, I would massively appreciate it if you could leave a positive review or just a rating on Goodreads or NetGalley or whatever platform you choose (I cunningly saved those urls on a word doc because I am too scared to check out either page).

Oh, and if you’re in Ireland, I will be talking about romcoms, second chances and the risks of inter-band romance with the great Sinéad Moriarty at the Dalkey Book Festival on June 14th and you can get tickets here. Do come along, it’ll be fun! Unless I’ve had a total publication-fear-triggered nervous breakdown by then, and in that case I suppose it’ll be morbidly fascinating? Anyway, join us!