Hi Jenna,
I’ve spent a happy half-hour on The Book Taster – partly because the Book and Pudding Club premise is the most cheerful sentence I’ve read all month, and partly because I noticed you’ve hosted Mike Gayle and David Nicholls on your online club. Which sort of had me spitting with the fury of jealousy – mostly because I didn’t know of it at the time!
I’m pitching Lisa Doyle is Absolutely Fine by UK novelist Mo Fanning, published in June by Spring Street Books. It’s a British fake-engagement romcom set in Manchester and Stourbridge – witty rather than spicy, warm rather than saccharine, sitting tonally somewhere between Mike Gayle and Mhairi McFarlane.
Lisa is four glasses deep into a Monday-night bottle of wine when (tired of being ‘the one who never brings a plus one’), she announces on Instagram that she’s engaged to a man called Brian. Brian doesn’t exist. Men under 60 tend not be called Brian – except for her boss at the Manchester theatre where she manages the box office – who (in a Freudian slip sort of way) also happens to be called Brian. And his wife Audrey is very scary indeed. From there it’s eleven weeks of escalating performance – with help from her GBFF actor flatmate, a vintage Art Deco ring, a hen night involving a drag queen called Fonda Cox, and one stubborn HEA earned the hard way.
A few things that might be useful to you specifically:
- One key scene is set in a Didsbury pub, which I noticed is one of your in-person Pudding Clubs – happy lever for that group if it lands well there.
- The hen night chapter features a “Black Country Tapas” set piece (pork pies, cheese, pickled onions) that’s pure Pudding Club energy if you ever fancied a themed evening around it. I even know a gin joint that fits.
- Mo would happily come and do a live online Q&A – he worked the box office at Manchester’s Palace Theatre in his twenties, which is the real-life model for the book’s fictional Empire Theatre, so there’s plenty of behind-the-curtain material for the chat.
Happy to send a copy in print, ebook or audio (or all three) if you’d like to take a look – and if it fits, I can put together a small signed-stock prize or two for the in-person clubs.
No pressure either way. Just thought your community might enjoy her.
Warmly