August 20, 2010 10:03 PM
COVER NEWS: New image for 'Cocktails for Three'
While we may be eagerly awaiting the arrival of Sophie
Kinsella's latest instalment in the Shopaholic series, some other Sophie news wouldn't go amiss!
The UK cover of Cocktails for Three, which bestselling author Sophie originally wrote as Madeleine Wickham, has recently been revamped with a look that fits in with her other novels. And it looks great! According to Sophie's website, the other six books that were written as Madeleine will also be getting a cover makeover.
What do you think? Leave a comment and let us know!
Here's the synopsis of Cocktails for Three:
Three women, smart and successful, working in the fast and furious world of magazines, meet for cocktails and gossip once a month. Roxanne: glamorous, self-confident, with a secret lover - and hoping that one day he will leave his wife and marry her. Maggie: capable and high-achieving, until she finds the one thing she can't cope with - motherhood. Candice: honest, decent, or so she believes - until a ghost from her past turns up, and almost ruins her life. A chance encounter in the cocktail bar sets in train an extraordinary set of events which upsets all their lives and almost destroys their friendship...
You can read more Sophie Kinsella news over at her official website (where you can listen to a second extract of Mini Shopaholic!)
Posted by Elle Symonds on August 20, 2010 in Book Extract, Book News | Permalink | Comments (2)
July 21, 2010 10:03 PM
BOOK NEWS: Mini Shopaholic extract now online!
We know you all can't wait to get your hands on the
latest instalment of Sophie Kinsella's Shopaholic series - but there's still a
while to wait! Becky Bloomwood (sorry, Brandon) won't be back with her next
retail-crazy adventure until September. But here's some good news - author Sophie
has made an extract of Mini Shopaholic available online.
You can hear Sophie read the extract over at her website. We can't wait for the release!
Posted by Elle Symonds on July 21, 2010 in Book Extract, Book News | Permalink | Comments (2)
July 20, 2010 9:34 PM
BOOK NEWS: Me, Myself and Why
Fans of MaryJanice Davidson (The Undead series, Derik's
Bane) will be delighted to hear that MaryJanice has not only just released Undead
and Unfinished, the latest tale from the world of vampire queen Betsy, but she'll
also be returning later this year with a brand new novel.
Me, Myself and Why is due for release in September, and is set to be a comedy focusing on FBI agent Cadence who has...well, an individual 'talent'. Here's the synopsis:
Sweet and innocent with a twist of girl-next-door,
Cadence Jones is not your typical girl and certainly not your typical FBI
agent. Just ask her sisters, Shiro and Adrienne. (Wait. . .best if
you don't ask Adrienne anything.) But it's her special "talent"
which makes Cadence so valuable to the FBI and it never comes in more handy
than when she and her partner, George, get tagged to bring down the Threefer
Killer. A serial killer who inexplicably likes to kill in threes, leave
behind inexplicable newspaper clippings, and not one shred of decent forensic
evidence, soon starts leaving messages that seem to be just for Cadence and her
sisters. Could it be that this killer knows all about Cadence's special
"talent"?
In the meantime, love blooms in the most unexpected place when Cadence meets her best friend's gorgeous brother who is in town visiting--and she discovers that he knows her secret too! When attraction burns hot between them her best friend isn't thrilled with the romantic development and this time Cadence just might agree!
Suddenly Cadence finds her unbalanced life turned even
more upside down as she tries to date a baker who wants to get in her heart and
in her bed, dodge a pesky psychiatrist, keep a leash on her sociopath partner,
while trying to catch a serial killer who's now fixated on her.
Some days it's not even worth getting up in the morning. . .
You can read an extract of Me, Myself and Why (and also a snippet from Undead and Unfinished!) over at MaryJanice Davidson's website.
Posted by Elle Symonds on July 20, 2010 in Book Extract, Book News | Permalink | Comments (0)
July 15, 2010 9:41 PM
BOOK NEWS: Sweet Valley High - Ten Years Later
Do you remember reading the Sweet Valley High novels? If
you enjoyed the teen tales of Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield all those years
ago then here's a little something for you!The book, a womens' fiction novel that's set for release in March 2011, will see the return of idealistic twins Jess and Liz as they deal with the complicated adult world of love, careers, betrayal and sisterhood.
Is Liz a hot young journalist engaged to pro-basketball player Todd Wilkins and planning the sweetest backyard wedding? Is Jess gracing the covers of international fashion magazines and breaking the hearts of wealthy jet-setters? After the perfect childhoods, how will the real world affect the lives of the Wakefield Twins? We'll find out soon enough.
There's no official cover yet (we'll bring you updates ASAP!) but the first chapter is available to read on the Sweet Valley Confidential website.
Posted by Elle Symonds on July 15, 2010 in Book Extract, Book News | Permalink | Comments (0)
July 9, 2010 12:10 AM
AUTHOR INTERVIEW: Aliya S King
Back in June we published the news of entertainment journalist
Aliya S King's debut novel, Platinum, which is due for release this month. Trashionista was delighted to speak to Aliya
about the upcoming title!
Please describe your book in 15 words or fewer.
Platinum is a saucy, sexy beach read about a group of four women in romantic relationships with entertainers.
What inspired you to write Platinum?
I was inspired to write Platinum after writing a story for VIBE magazine on the lives of rappers' wives. I was very intrigued by what I saw and after I handed in the story, I still had more to say. So I created composites and fictionalized the plot.
Where do you do most of your writing?
I have a wonderfully appointed office space that I rent out. And yet, I do most of my writing in my bed!
What is your favourite book?
I have many favorite books! I'm in love with Linden Hills by Gloria Naylor and I read it over and over again.
Which part of Platinum was the most fun to write?
I have to be honest, I looooved writing the sex scenes. I didn't know I had it in me!
Do you have any tips for readers who are looking to become published authors?
If you want to be published, you have to write. A lot. Preferably every day. The first three books I tried to get published were all rejected. PLATINUM came out of sheer tenacity. I'm not an overnight success.
Who is your favourite heroine?
My favorite heroine of literature would be Sula Peace from Toni Morrison's Sula.
Are you working on anything else at the moment, and if so can you tell us?
I'm working on the sequel to PLATINUM. And it's almost done!! And I'm in love with it!
Thanks, Aliya!
To find out more about Aliya S King (and read chapter one of Platinum!), check out her website.
Posted by Elle Symonds on July 9, 2010 in Book Extract, Book News, Interviews | Permalink | Comments (0)
July 7, 2010 10:49 PM
NEW RELEASE: A Desirable Residence
Most
chick-lit fans would recognise the work of Madeleine Wickham as the hugely popular
Shopaholic series. (Editor's note: If you haven't heard of those, then clearly you're living
under a rock. Or you're an alien. Either way: Hello!) However, aside from
penning the wonderful tales of fashionista and retail freak Becky Bloomwood,
Madeleine has also been writing books under her...well, actual name...for years.
Posted by Elle Symonds on July 7, 2010 in Book Extract, Book News | Permalink | Comments (0)
May 25, 2010 11:16 AM
NON-FICTION RELEASE: Mousetrapped
Recently I stumbled upon the blog of Catherine Ryan Howard, author of Mousetrapped. With the summer on its way and the UK being sunny for once, many will be dreaming of heading off abroad to somewhere hot and exciting, and of course, many won't want to leave. And with Disneyland being dubbed the happiest place on earth, who WOULDN'T want to move there? Well, 29-year-old Catherine from Cork did exactly that. In Mousetrapped, her memoir, Catherine tells all about her move to paradise which isn't exactly as happy as it seems...
When Catherine Ryan Howard decides to swap the grey clouds of Ireland for the clear skies of the Sunshine State, she thinks all of her dreams - working in Walt Disney World, living in the United States, seeing a Space Shuttle launch - are about to come true. Ahead of her she sees weekends at the beach, mornings by the pool and an inexplicably skinnier version of herself skipping around Magic Kingdom.
But not long into her first day on Disney soil - and not long after a breakfast of Mickey-shaped pancakes - Catherine's Disney bubble bursts and soon it seems that among Orlando's baked highways, monotonous mall clusters and world famous theme-parks, pixie dust is hard to find and hair is downright impossible to straighten.
The only memoir about working in Walt Disney World, Space Shuttle launches, the town that Disney built, religious theme parks, Bruce Willis, humidity-challenged hair and the Ebola virus, MOUSETRAPPED is the hilarious story of what happened when one Irish girl went searching for happiness in the happiest place on Earth.
View the Mousetrapped book trailer here, or check out view Catherine Ryan Howard's website.
Posted by Elle Symonds on May 25, 2010 in Book Extract, Book News, Memoirs, Non Fiction | Permalink | Comments (0)
April 19, 2010 10:33 PM
BOOK NEWS: It's Got To Be Perfect (plus the chance to appear in it!)
Claire Allan, author of Rainy Days and Tuesdays, Feels Like Maybe and Jumping in Puddles, has yet another new release at the ready! It's Got To Be Perfect is due for publication in October 2010, and you can now view the first chapter over at Claire's website.
Read the opening chapter of It's Got To Be Perfect.
In addition, Claire is offering readers the chance to bid for a cameo appearance in the book, as part of a fundraiser for charity Camille's Appeal. Here's some more information from Claire's blog:
The highest bidder by the end of this month will win the prize.
They can feature in the book themselves, or nominate a family member or friend to appear in the book.
Their name will appear in the book which will be published by Poolbeg Press at the end of September 2010.
The winner will receive a mention in the acknowledgements of the book along with a plug for Camille's Appeal. They will also received a signed copy of the book for them and/or their chosen special guest star.
Want to be in with a chance of winning? Then head on over to the website now to bid and learn more about Claire Allan, It's Got to be Perfect and Camille's Appeal.
Posted by Elle Symonds on April 19, 2010 in Book Extract, Book News | Permalink | Comments (0)
March 4, 2010 11:41 PM
COMING SOON: Della Says: OMG!
I just can't WAIT to read Keris Stainton's debut novel (admittedly I love YA fiction too) and we won't have to wait THAT much longer. Della Says: OMG! is due for release on 6 May by Orchard.For those new to the site, Keris was previously editor of Trashionista. She's also written a number of articles and blogs over at Five Minutes Peace. You can find out ore about Keris at her website.
Here's the synopsis of Della Says - this looks fantastic!
Della's over the moon when she kisses her long-standing crush at a party - but then she discovers her diary has disappeared...
When scans of embarrassing pages are sent to her mobile and appear on Facebook, Della's distraught - how can she enjoy her first proper romance when someone, somewhere, knows all her deepest, darkest secrets?
You can read an excerpt of Della over here.
Posted by Elle Symonds on March 4, 2010 in Book Extract, Book News, Young Adult | Permalink | Comments (2)
February 15, 2010 7:10 PM
BOOK NEWS: Married With Zombies
It's true - zombies are becoming more popular. They've already caused havoc in Jane Austen's world, and it was only a matter of time before zombies started to make their brain-munching way into the mainstream. September will see the release of a brand new zombie series from author Jesse Petersen, published by Orbit (US). The first in the series is titled Married With Zombies.The books will see a married couple in crisis who are forced to work together in a zombie apocalypse. There's no synopsis available as yet, but here are a few tips, from the author's current website:
Marriage survival tips during a zombie apocalypse:
- Balance the workload in your relationship. No one person should be responsible for killing all the zombies.
- Put the small stuff into perspective. It's better to be wrong and alive than right but eating brains.
- Talk out your big decisions. Hear both opinions before you decide if you're going to flee the city or hole up with Campbell's Soup and CNN.
- Share in your activities and interests. If you're going to kill zombies anyway, why not do it together?
- Plan romantic getaways. Or just getaways.
- Show physical affection. Nothing says 'I love you' like bearing the entirety of your spouse's body weight.
Chapter one of Married With Zombies is available on Jesse's website.
(Thanks to Book Chick City for this news).
Posted by Elle Symonds on February 15, 2010 in Book Extract, Book News, Book covers | Permalink | Comments (0)
February 12, 2010 10:24 PM
BOOK NEWS: The Body at the Tower
YS Lee's first book in the Agency series - A Spy In the House - was fantastic. Needless to say, it was exciting to hear that the sequel will be released later this year! The Body at the Tower, the next in the series about Mary Quinn, a young detective in Victorian London, will be published in May 2010. Here's a little bir more about the book, which can found on YS Lee's website along with other Agency goodies!In The Body at the Tower, spy-in-training Mary Quinn disguises herself as a twelve-year-old boy to investigate a mysterious death at St Stephen's Tower - better known as Big Ben. Passing as a poor boy is hard enough. Yet things get worse: almost immediately, she makes enemies on site. And then her nemesis, James Easton, turns up. And he recognizes her...
Posted by Elle Symonds on February 12, 2010 in Book Extract, Book News | Permalink | Comments (1)
February 8, 2010 10:18 PM
Win a weekend in New York!
Fancy an all-expenses paid trip to New York? Well, here's your chance. Publishers Simon & Schuster are giving away a weekend in fabulous NYC in order to celebrate the release of Adriana Trigiani's new novel, Very Valentine, on February 9th.To win, head on over to the site and fill out the online entry form. Want to know more about Very Valentine? Here's more info...
Meet Valentine, an unforgettable and passionate woman with a heart and a dream as big as New York City. Her dream? To design the perfect pair of shoes ...The Angelini Shoe Company, makers of exquisite wedding shoes since 1903, is one of the last family-owned businesses in Greenwich Village. Now, in the twenty-first century, the company run so devotedly by Valentine and her grandmother Teodora faces financial ruin. Juggling a romantic relationship with dashing chef Roman Falconi, her duty to her family, and a design competition for a prestigious department store, Valentine accompanies her grandmother to Italy in the hope of finding inspiration. There, in Tuscany and on the Isle of Capri, she discovers her artistic voice and much more, turning her life around in ways she never expected.
You can read an excerpt of Very Valentine here, or check out Adriana's website.
Posted by Elle Symonds on February 8, 2010 in Book Extract, Book News, Competition | Permalink | Comments (0)
January 28, 2009 5:18 PM
The Secret Life of Evie Hamilton
We mentioned The Secret Life of Evie Hamilton back in October last year where I admitted to never having read any of Catherine's books before. If you're the same then you can read the first two chapters to see if you want to buy it or not. Brilliant.
Ooh, by the way if you're a fan of Catherine Alliott then you must check out The Telegraph for an interview and photographs of her home.
Posted by Helen Redfern on January 28, 2009 in Book Extract, Book related | Permalink | Comments (0)
September 29, 2008 10:54 AM
BOOK EXTRACT: Knit Two by Kate Jacobs
I loved Kate Jacobs' debut, The Friday Night Knitting Club (which is being turned into a movie starring Julia Roberts, no less) and I've been looking forward to the sequel for a while now. I had heard it was to be called Secrets and Sweaters, but apparently it's called Knit Two and is out in the US on 25 November.
Carry on over the cut to read the first chapter and look out for a review of Kate's second book, Comfort Food, coming soon.
Beginner
Seeing a pattern doesn’t mean you know how to put it all together. Take baby steps: don’t focus on the folks whose skills are far beyond your own. When you’re new to something—or you haven’t tried it in a while—it can feel impossibly hard to get it right. Every misstep feels like a reason to quit. You envy everyone else who seems to know what they’re doing. What keeps you going? The belief that one day you’ll also be like that: Elegant. Capable. Confident. Experienced. And you can be. All you need now is enthusiasm. A little bravery. And—always—a sense of humor.
Chapter One
It was after hours at Walker and Daughter: Knitters, and Dakota stood in the center of the Manhattan yarn shop and wrestled with the cellophane tape. She had spent more than twenty minutes trying to surround a canvas Peg Perego double stroller in shimmery yellow wrapping paper, the cardboard roll repeatedly flopping out of the paper onto the floor of the shop and the seeming miles of gift wrap crinkling and tearing with each move. What a disaster! The simpler move would be to just tie a balloon on the thing, she thought, but Peri had been quite insistent that all the items be wrapped and ribboned.
Gifts, smothered in bunny paper or decorated with cartoonish jungle animals, were piled in a mound atop the sturdy wooden table that was the focal point of the knitting store. The wall of yarn had been tidied so not one shelf—from the raspberry reds to the celery greens—was out of hue. Peri had also planned out a series of cringe-inducing guessing games (Guess how much the baby will weigh!
Eat different baby foods and try to determine the flavor! Estimate the size of the mother’s stomach!) that would have caused Dakota’s mother to shake her head. Georgia Walker had never been a fan of silly games.
“It’ll be fun,” said Peri when Dakota protested. “We haven’t had a Friday Night baby since Lucie had Ginger five years ago. Besides, who doesn’t like baby showers? All those tiny little footie pajamas and those cute towels-with-animal-ears. I mean, it just gives you goose bumps. Don’t you love it?”
“Uh, no,” said Dakota. “And double no. My friends and I are a little busy with college.” Her hands rested on the waist of her deep indigo jeans as she watched Peri pretend not to fuss over the job she’d done. The stroller looked like a giant yellow banana. A wrinkled, torn banana. She sighed. Dakota was a striking young woman, with her creamy mocha skin and her mother’s height and long, curly dark hair. But she retained an element of gangliness, gave the impression that she was not quite comfortable with the transformation of her figure. At eighteen, she was still growing into herself.
“Thank God for that,” replied Peri, discreetly trying to peel the tape off the yellow paper so she could redo the edges. Whether it was operating the store or designing the handbags in her side business, she approached everything with precision now. Working with Georgia had been the best training she could ever have received for running a business—two businesses, really. Her own handbag company, Peri Pocketbook, as well as Georgia’s store. Still, Peri felt she had done a lot to keep things going since Georgia passed away, and now that she was pushing thirty, she was beginning to feel a desire to move. In what direction, she wasn’t sure. But there would be no more Walker and Daughter without her. Of that she was certain.
Sometimes it wasn’t very satisfying to work so hard for something that essentially belonged to someone else. It was hers but not really hers at all.
For one thing, Dakota had seemed less and less interested in the store during the last year or so, grumbling on the Saturdays when she came in to work, typically late and sometimes appearing to simply roll out of bed and throw on whatever clothes she could find. It was quite a change from her early teens, when she seemed to relish her time at the shop. And yet there were brief moments when her world-weary attitude would disappear and Peri could see the whispers of the bright-eyed, wisecracking little kid who loved to bake and could spend hours knitting with her mother in the store’s back office or the apartment they had shared one floor above the yarn shop.
The shop was located on Seventy-seventh and Broadway, just above Marty’s deli, amid boutiques and restaurants in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Only a few blocks from the green of Central Park, and the cool of the Hudson River in the opposite direction, it was a lovely part of the city. Oh, certainly there was lots of noise—honking taxis, the rumble of the subway underneath the streets, the sound of heels on the sidewalk and cell phone conversations swirling all around—but that was the type of commotion that had appealed to Georgia Walker when she moved in. She didn’t mind the beeping of the Coke truck at five a.m. bringing supplies to the deli on the street level. Not if it meant she got to live right inside the action, showing her daughter the world she had barely imagined herself growing up on a farm in Pennsylvania.
Of course, now Peri lived in the upstairs apartment that had been Georgia’s and the back office was no more. The wall had recently been blown out to make a separate showcase for the handbags she designed and sold; each purse was individually displayed on a clear acrylic shelf mounted onto a wall painted a deep gray.
The change to the store had come together after much discussion with Anita and with Dakota, and they’d consulted Dakota’s father, James, too, of course, though mostly for his architectural expertise. But it made financial sense: Peri had turned Dakota’s childhood bedroom in the apartment into an office so there was no need to tally up receipts in the shop anymore. Why waste the store’s valuable real estate? And there had always been the understanding—with Georgia and with James and Anita after Georgia died—that her handbag business would have the chance to flourish. She had reminded them of that while purposefully avoiding the one ultimatum she knew everyone most feared: She would leave the store if she wasn’t able to remodel. The concern hung in the air, and she saved voicing it unless it was absolutely necessary.
After all, what would happen to the store if Peri left? Anita, who had turned seventy-eight on her last birthday though she still looked just barely old enough to collect Social Security, certainly wouldn’t be about to take over. Though she continued to arrive two days a week to help out and keep busy, as she said, Anita and Marty spent a lot of their time going on quick trips, by train or car, to wonderful country inns in New England and in Canada. Those two were on a perpetual vacation, and Peri was happy for them. Envious, a little bit. Definitely. Hopeful that she’d have the same thing someday. And if that legal department coworker her pal KC kept mentioning was half as cute as he’d been described, who knew what could happen?
And then there was Dakota, who had nearly finished up her first year at NYU. It wasn’t as though she could step in to run the store—or that she even seemed to want to do so anymore.
Not everyone wants to go into the family business.
Peri’s decision to work at the yarn shop, and create her own designs, had not been popular within her own family. Her parents had wanted her to become a lawyer, and she’d dutifully taken her LSAT and earned a place at law school, only to turn it down and leave everyone guessing. Georgia hadn’t been cowed by her mother, who flew in from Chicago to pressure Georgia into firing her, and Peri had never forgotten that fact. Even when difficulties arose over the shop, Peri reflected on how Georgia had helped her and she stuck it out. Still, the work of two businesses took up all of her days and many of her evenings, and the past five years seemed to have moved quickly. It was as though one day Peri woke up and realized she was almost thirty, still single, and not happy with the situation. It was hard to meet guys in New York, she thought. No, not guys. Men. Men like James Foster. Peri had had a mild crush on the man ever since he’d come back for Georgia, and he remained, for her, the very epitome of the successful, confident partner she longed for.
Of course, James had only ever been interested in the store from the standpoint of keeping an eye on Georgia’s legacy to Dakota. And Georgia’s old friend Catherine was surrounded by crap up in the Hudson Valley, thought Peri, where she managed her antiques-and-wonderful-things-blah-blah-blah store. Besides, Catherine couldn’t even knit. And she and Peri had never really connected; it was more as though they shared several mutual friends but hadn’t quite managed, even after all this time, to get to know each other. Peri often felt judged whenever Catherine glided into the shop, soaking in everything with her perfectly made-up smoky eyes, every blond hair in place.
No, over the years the feeling had become more definite that either Peri would keep things going at Walker and Daughter or it would be time to close up the doors to the yarn shop. The desire to keep everything just as it once had been—to freeze time—remained very strong among the group of friends. So even as she advocated change, Peri felt guilty. It was almost overwhelming. Stemming from some natural fantasy they all shared but never discussed: that everything needed to be kept just so for Georgia. For what? To want to come back? To feel at home? Because making changes to Georgia’s store, without her presence or consultation, would mean things were really final. Wouldn’t it? That all the moments the members of the Friday Night Knitting Club and the family of Georgia Walker had experienced, the good and the bad, had truly happened.
That Georgia’s yarn shop was the place where an unlikely group of women became friends around the table in the center of the room. Where Anita, the elegant older woman who was Georgia’s biggest supporter, learned to accept Catherine, Georgia’s old high school friend, and cheered as Catherine rediscovered her own capacity for self-respect and left an empty and unfulfilling marriage. It was at Georgia’s that dour and lonely graduate student Darwin found a true friend in director Lucie, who had embarked on first-time motherhood in her forties, and that Darwin realized just how much she wanted to sustain her marriage to her husband, Dan, after a brief night of infidelity. It was at Georgia’s store that her employee Peri admitted she didn’t want to go to law school, and at Georgia’s store that her longtime friend KC confessed that she did. It was here that Georgia’s former flame, James, had walked back into her life and the two discovered their love had never lost its spark. And it was at the store that Georgia and James’s only child, Dakota, had once done her homework and shared her homemade muffins with her mother’s friends and flaked out on the couch in her mother’s office, waiting for the workday to be finished so the two of them could eat a simple supper and go on up to bed in the apartment upstairs.
And if that all had happened, then it also meant that Georgia Walker had fallen ill with late-stage ovarian cancer and died unexpectedly from complications, leaving her group to manage on without her.
For just over five years they’d all kept on just as they’d done—still meeting up for regular get-togethers even though KC never picked up a stick and Darwin’s mistake-ridden sweater for her husband remained the most complex item she’d ever put together—and Peri had left everything mostly the same in the store. Year after year, she resisted her impulse to change the decor, to redesign the lavender bags with the Walker and Daughter logo, to muck out the back office with its faded couch or to update the old wooden table that anchored the room. She kept everything intact and ran the store with the energy and attention to detail Georgia had demonstrated, had turned a profit every quarter—always doing best in winter, of course—and furiously created her line of knitted and felted handbags with every spare moment. She even found the energy to branch out in new lines, new designs.
Until, finally, she’d had enough working on her handbags late at night and never feeling rested. She put down her needles and jammed out an e-mail in the middle of the night. She required a meeting, she’d written, had broached the remodel. It had been an impossible concept, of course, the idea of changing things. And it took a long while for Anita and Dakota to agree. Still, Peri stood firm, and ultimately the wall came down, some new paint went up, and even the always serviceable chairs around the center table were replaced with cushier, newly upholstered versions. The shop was revitalized: still cozy, but fresher and sleeker. As a surprise—and in an attempt to woo Dakota’s emotional approval—Peri had asked Lucie to print an outtake from her documentary about the shop, the first film she had shown in the festival circuit, and had framed a photograph of Dakota and Georgia ringing up sales together, back when Dakota was only twelve and Georgia was robustly healthy. Appropriately, the picture hung behind the register, the Walker and Daughter logo next to it.
“She would have liked that,” Dakota said, nodding. “But I don’t know about the changes to the store. Maybe we should put the wall back up.”
“Georgia believed in forging ahead,” said Peri. “She tried new things with the shop. Think of the club, for example.”
“I dunno,” said Dakota. “What if I forget what it used to be like? What if it all just fades away? Then what?”
*
Tonight, for the first time, the entire group would see the updated store in its completed form. It was a pleasantly warm April night, and the Friday Night Knitting Club was getting together for its regular meeting. Whereas once the women had gathered in Georgia’s store every week, the combination of their busy careers and changing family situations made it more difficult to meet as often as they once did. And yet every meeting began with hugs and kisses and a launch, without preamble, into the serious dramas of their days. There was no pretense with these women anymore, no concern about how they looked or how they acted, just a sense of community that didn’t change whether they saw one another once a week or once a year. It had been Georgia’s final and most beautiful gift to each of them: the gift of true and unconditional sisterhood.
But if time had not changed their feelings for one another, it had not spared the natural toll on their bodies and their careers and their love lives and their hair. Much had happened in the preceding five years.
KC Silverman had made law review at Columbia, passed the bar with flying colors, and ended up back at Churchill Publishing—the very company that had laid her off from her editorial job five years ago—as part of in-house counsel.
“Finally, I’m invaluable,” she had told the group upon starting the job. “I know every side of the business.”
Her new salary was transformed, with some guidance from Peri, into a fabulous collection of suits. And her hair was longer than the pixie cut she’d had in the old days, shaped into a more lawyerly layered style. She’d experimented—for a millisecond—with letting her hair go its natural gray but she decided she was too young for that much seriousness at fifty-two and opted for a light brown.
“If I had your gorgeous silver,” she told Anita, “it would be a different story.”
Lucie Brennan’s documentary circulating on the festival circuit had led to a gig directing a video for a musician who liked to knit at Walker and Daughter. When the song went to the Top Ten in Billboard, Lucie quickly transitioned from part-time producer for local cable to directing a steady stream of music videos, her little girl Ginger lip-synching by her side in footie pajamas.
At forty-eight, she was busier and more successful than she ever imagined—and her apartment reflected the change. She no longer rented, but had purchased a high and sunny two-bedroom on the Upper West Side with a gorgeous camelback sofa that Lucie, still an occasional insomniac, would curl up on in the middle of the night. Only now, instead of knitting herself to sleep, she typically mapped out shots for the next day’s shoot.
And the tortoiseshell glasses she’d once worn every day had been joined by an array of frames and contacts for her blue eyes. Her hair, if left to its natural sandy brown, was quite . . . salty. So she colored it just a few shades darker than little Ginger’s strawberry blond, aiming for a russet shade.
Darwin Chiu finished her dissertation, published her very first book (on the convergence of craft, the Internet, and the women’s movement) based on her research at Walker and Daughter, and secured a teaching job at Hunter College while her husband, Dan Leung, found a spot at a local ER. They also found a small apartment on the East Side, close to the hospital and college, the living room walls lined with inexpensive bookshelves overflowing with papers and notes. Unlike other women, Darwin had hair free of gray though she’d hit her thirties, and she still wore it long, without bangs, making her look almost as young as her women’s studies students.
Peri Gayle, striking with her deep brown eyes, mahogany skin, and meticulous cornrows that fell just past her shoulders, ran the store, of course.
Anita Lowenstein settled into a happy arrangement with her friend Marty, although their decision not to marry came up now and again.
“I’m living my life in reverse,” she told the group. “Now that my mother can’t do a damn thing about it, I’m rebelling against society’s expectations.” She’d been joking, of course. Moving in together was a simpler solution, quite frankly, in terms of estate planning and inheritance, and, as the movie stars say, neither she nor Marty needed a piece of paper to demonstrate their commitment.
“We’ll just call him my partner,” corrected Anita when yet another of her friends tripped over how to describe her relationship. “It seems overreaching to call him my boyfriend at this age.”
They had, however, purchased a new apartment together and moved out of the garden apartment in Marty’s Upper West Side brownstone, allowing Marty’s niece to incorporate that level into her family home. Anita was seventy-eight, though she’d lie about it if anyone ever asked, and certainly appeared younger, with her layered, silvery hair and her well-cared-for hands. Thanks to Anita, Catherine truly appreciated the value of high SPF.
Catherine Anderson’s little business flourished north of the city in Cold Spring, though many days she continued to take the train, spending some days in the tidy, expensively furnished cottage she’d recently purchased and others in the San Remo apartment that Anita had shared with her late husband, Stan.
It seemed that five years was about right for all that had happened to settle in, and for the urge to try something different to begin to swell.
“Not much of a surprise if the presents are all out there,” exclaimed KC at the entrance to Walker and Daughter as she wheeled in a red wagon filled with stuffed animals perched inside: a monkey, a giraffe, and two fluffy white teddy bears. Peri stopped trying to rewrap Dakota’s gift for a moment to wave hello.
“We should try to hide in the back office and then jump out and surprise her!” said KC, waving back even though she was mere steps away. “What do you say?”
She and Peri were from different generations—KC was twenty-three years older than Peri—but they were, as the volume-impaired and talkative KC explained to anyone who cared and often to those who didn’t, the very epitome of BFFs.
“We help each other get ahead,” KC explained when Dakota asked at one meeting why the two of them spent so much time together when, on the surface, they looked and acted so different from each other. “We gossip, we go to movies, she picks out my clothes, and I give her legal advice for her pocketbook business.” Their shared devotion to career—and KC’s years of experience—also kept up the connection. As proud as she was with her professional reinvention, KC had ultimately traded one workaholic lifestyle for another. Just as she’d put in long days at the office when she was an editor and followed it up with nights reading manuscripts, now she spent her evenings reading contracts on the sofa in the prewar rent-stabilized apartment on the West Side that had been her parents’ home.
But while Peri kept up with a steady crowd of pals from the design courses she’d taken, KC’s relationship with Peri filled a bit of the gap that had been left by Georgia, who had been a young assistant when KC met her. For a woman who would never describe herself as a nurturer, KC made it a practice to look out for others and to mentor them. And she had a deep fondness for Dakota, who seemed exasperated with her latest concept.
“For one thing, no back office anymore,” muttered Dakota, inclining her head toward KC and motioning her to take a look behind her. “So it wouldn’t work.”
“And for two, we have a no-scaring-pregnant-women policy,” added Anita, who was two steps behind KC and coming through the doorway. As she did every day, Anita wore an elegant pantsuit, and a selection of tasteful jewelry. The oldest and wealthiest member of the club, Anita was also—everyone would agree—the kindest and most thoughtful. In her arms Anita carried a giant hydrangea plant in blue; Marty carried a second one in pink. She nodded solemnly.
“The renovations are excellent, my dear,” she said, though Peri suspected her words were meant mainly to bolster Dakota’s uncertainty since Anita had checked on the shop’s progress repeatedly.
“I’m here, I’m here,” came a voice from the stairwell. It was Catherine, sweeping into the room with a bit of self-created fanfare and an armful of professionally wrapped presents in brightly colored paper and a large canvas bag filled with several bottles.
“Hello, darlings,” she said, blowing out enough air kisses that everyone in the room got three each.
“Hello, grumpy,” Catherine said to Dakota, lightly wrapping an arm around her shoulders as they surveyed the room.
“I was afraid I was late,” said Catherine. “Is she here yet?” The store phone rang as Lucie called to say she wasn’t able to get away from work and not to wait. Peri looked at her watch and let out a cry of concern. Quickly, KC pulled out a box of cupcakes from the bottom of the red wagon, and Catherine opened a magnum of chilled champagne without a pop.
“When I think of the Friday Night Knitting Club, I always think of plastic glasses,” said Catherine to Dakota. “It adds a certain je ne sais quoi.” She winked at Dakota, managed to charm a shrug out of her young pal. The two had forged a big sister–little sister bond since Georgia had taken her in years ago and let Catherine bunk on Dakota’s floor during her divorce; many times in the ensuing years since Georgia died, Catherine’s cynicism and over-the-top drama had been the perfect antidote to Dakota’s teenage moodiness. Anita remained Dakota’s source for unconditional love; Catherine was good at keeping secrets and seemed willing to become her partner in crime, if only they could think up a scheme.
“To Walker and Daughter,” said Catherine, taking one sip and then another. “To the reno, to my favorite kid, and to the club.” The rest of the women raised their glasses.
Even though the vague unease about the remodel persisted, Peri could tell it was going to be a happy night. Anybody could see that. The gang was all here, together again; the volume was already deafening as everyone spoke at once, trying to cram a month’s worth of news into a few minutes. She began to relax as she saw Dakota flop into one of the new chairs, throw her jeans-clad leg over the arm, and bum a sip of champagne off Catherine, the two of them glancing to see if Anita had noticed.
Tonight, the Friday Night Knitting Club would have made Georgia proud. They were holding a special meeting to throw a surprise baby shower for one Darwin Chiu, who was finally, after many long years of trying and hoping, expecting her first children.
Darwin and Dan were having twins.
Posted by Keris on September 29, 2008 in Book Extract | Permalink | Comments (0)
August 26, 2008 1:46 PM
BOOK EXTRACT: Feels Like Maybe
We loved Claire Allan's first book and we love Claire Allan, so we we're very excited to offer you an extract of her new book, Feels Like Maybe, which was published by Poolbeg yesterday!.
My father once told me that the more things change, the more they stay the same. I used to believe him. Now I wasn't so sure.
I don't know why I couldn't sleep. In theory I should have been exhausted. The Brighton sea air should have been enough to knock me out, especially when combined with the huge dinner Dan and I had shared and the several glasses of wine that had washed it down.
He was snoring beside me. Gorgeous, naked, looking like he didn't have a care in the world, and yet here I was sitting up in bed, staring at the illuminated digits on the hotel clock and counting the hours 'til morning.
This bed was huge. Dan had joked that we would have had room to invite a couple of friends in for an orgy and still had room to sleep well all night if we had been so inclined. I had laughed, pulling him close to me, and had told him I wanted him all to myself. He had kissed me then, and for the first time in months I felt like he really and truly meant it.
I knew he loved me. I didn't doubt that for one second. It was just that lately acts of physical intimacy had become about much more than just being in the mood for a snog or a romp between the sheets.
I shook the thoughts from my head and got out of bed, padding to the bathroom. I could not allow those thoughts in my head now. This was not going to help. I had to stay positive, remain calm and relaxed and not, under any circumstances, get myself into a whole state about how my world was about to change and how everyone was about to learn just what a complete bitch I really was.
Aoife hadn't planned to get pregnant. I knew that. The rational side of my brain – which I do have despite being an airy-fairy-head-in-the-clouds type most of the time – knew that this was not in her plan. Her relationship with Jake had never been secure. I'd given up trying to warn her off, learning that sometimes it is better to stay quiet about a relationship than risk destroying a good friendship over it. I had been supportive. I'd even held her hair back when she threw up in the shop toilet as waves of morning sickness swept over her. I had chosen the most gorgeous pram I could find for the baby and had helped design and decorate a nursery for it. I had even offered to hold her hand when she gave birth, something I knew could happen at any time.
Dan thinks I went a little overboard, but perhaps he doesn't realise just how much I was trying to convince him, and myself, that I was absolutely 100% okay with the fact that Aoife got pregnant with the drop of her knickers while I . . . well, I didn't.
***
Apparently twenty-three months is not that long, really, to be trying for a baby without success. I'm pretty sure a man came up with those statistics. After a year we had gone to the finest consultant money could buy and had a series of invasive and painful tests. (Well, mine were invasive and painful, Dan's simply involved a porn magazine, a plastic cup and his hand – he had been mortified but at least he didn't have to expose his undercarriage to complete strangers.)
They couldn't find a reason. Our infertility (how that word hung over my head like a badge of shame) was unexplained. I got really, stupidly excited that month. If there wasn't a reason then surely it was going to happen for us any time now. I imagined Aoife and me shopping for prams together, rubbing our expanding bellies and secretly I planned hiring a nanny to work for us both to share the childcare costs. And of course the nanny would bring our babies to Instant Karma every day so we could coo over them. Two proud mums together.
I cried for two days when my period arrived that month. Aoife never knew. I phoned in sick with a stomach bug and spent two days in bed, berating the unfairness of it all.
I'd come over all melodramatic and told Dan to leave me for a woman less barren and he had smiled and pulled me close.
"There is no reason why we can't have a baby," he soothed, "so you are stuck with me, Betsy."
He then fed me chocolate and Nurofen until the worst of my hormonal surges had passed and promised to shag me senseless for the coming month. This was not going to defeat us.
***
I sat in the bathroom of our hotel in Brighton and took deep breaths. Maybe this month it would happen. After all there was nothing wrong with us. Nothing at all.
Look out for a review of Feels Like Maybe coming soon!
Posted by Keris on August 26, 2008 in Book Extract | Permalink | Comments (0)
June 11, 2008 11:05 AM
BOOK EXTRACT: The Secret Shopper's Revenge
The Secret Shopper's Revenge is Kate Harrison's fifth novel (her fourth, The Self Preservation Society, is out in paperback) and has just been released this week. It has a fabulous book cover, with the green slip cover designed like a little bag.
Over the cut is Chapter One. Enjoy!
At Christmas we need to seduce the shopper all over again, like a spouse trying to reignite the flame. The temptations elsewhere are multiple - we can't expect fidelity. So we must convince her that we are the only ones who can make her dream come true...
From the Art and Science of Seducing Shoppers: a Seasonal Guide for Retailers
Chapter 1
Emily
Once upon a time there was a country bumpkin who dreamed of moving to London.
(That’s me, in case you hadn’t guessed.)
From the attic bedroom she shared with her very ugly sister in their parents’ haybarn (21 Haybarn Close, Rowminster, Somerset) the young bumpkin imagined the city in every detail. A world away from the cowpats and cornfields (and the tacky annual carnival and the swearing, scrumpy-drinking teenagers).
In London, there would be Swarovski crystal Christmas lanterns lighting up the night sky. There would be black chariots to sweep her from one enchanted store to the next. There would be elegant shop assistants inviting her to try on their designer goods or taste their gourmet foods. By association, she would become elegant herself: shopping would transform her.
In time, the dream faded, as dreams do. The bumpkin settled down to real life with a charmer called Duncan Prince, a job in the bank, and a little pink line which appeared on a magic wand she weed on first thing one cider-crisp autumn morning. London was further away than ever.
Then one day, the fairy godmother recruitment consultant called up charming Mr Prince and offered him the job of his life-assurance fantasies.
In London.
And so – as if by magic – here I am.
Garnett’s Department Store (‘The Greatest Goods on Earth Brought to the Greatest Store on Earth’) is the most gorgeous shop in the world. Back in April as we packed our belongings into orange crates for the big move, I imagined shopping here for our first Christmas. I’d order a black chariot . . . well, a cab, to take me to Oxford Street. I’d stock up on last-minute treats for a festive extravaganza chez me and Duncan, in our extensively refurbished Victorian cottage in West London. My shopping list would be as lavish as Nigella’s: light-as-air Panettone with chocolate chestnut filling, spicy German tree-shaped biscuits with silver balls in place of fairy lights, orchard fruit mince pies with all-butter shortbread pastry, a tub of pine-nut-and-clementine stuffing for our pre-ordered organic turkey, and the essential watermelon-sized truckle of red-waxed Cheddar cheese to remind me of home.
My Burberry-lined willow shopping basket (as modelled by Kate Moss) would be tucked under my arm, crammed with more goodies: a vintage lace angel to grace our twelve-foot spruce, a periwinkle blue cashmere cardigan and an organic fleecy rabbit for our new baby, a perfect white shirt and miniature Vespa cufflinks for Duncan. Assistants dressed in Garnett’s crimson uniform would giftwrap each item so you could barely see the paper for bows.
At home, Duncanwould be busy preparing a supper party for our new neighbours: city lawyers on one side, a theatrical agent and an award-winning documentary maker on the other. Canapés courtesy of Tesco (with the packaging hidden in the compost bin, so you might be fooled into thinking they’re from Harrods). Wine from our new-found supplier (instead of that evil scrumpy from Duncan’s dad’s off-licence). Ripe French cheeses, rich as clotted cream, with charcoal crackers that stain your tongue black. On the CD player, an up-and-coming girl singer would be in mid-lament. Our real fire sizzles with sustainable smoke-free wood, topped with orange peel for festive aromas. Our baby stirs, watching Daddy with gurgling alertness, while in town, Mummy eyes up silk pyjamas that skim her Pilates-toned-virtually-untouched-by-childbirth body. She hesitates, trying to choose between the lavender and the aqua silk, before putting both in her basket, with gloriously guilty pleasure. A treat to herself for putting in place the ingredients for the perfect family celebration.
‘Oi. Is the kid yours?’
‘Eh?’ I am in Garnett’s, sure enough. But something’s changed. I look at the purple face of the woman standing next to me, and follow her gaze to the child in the pushchair.
Freddie. Freddie! Shit. ‘Yes, yes, sorry, that’s my son. Is everything OK?’ Though even as I speak I know it’s not OK. Not even remotely OK.
I feel a sharp elbow in my back as a frazzled businessman forces his way through, tugging half a dozen glossy Garnett’s bags behind him. The purple-faced woman holds up a distinctly non-organic, not-fleecy-for-a-very-long-time rabbit in a deathly shade of grey. ‘He dropped this.’
I take it from her, and wedge it into the nest of carrier bags in the Fredster’s pushchair. Pull yourself together, Emily. You’re turning into that pop-art poster – I LEFT THE BABY ON THE BUS.
As if sensing my appalling amnesia – it can only have lasted a millisecond, surely? – Freddie begins to bawl his adorable head off. The store PA system plays In the Bleak Midwinter and it’s all I can do not to bawl along with my son.
Garnett’s is pretty overwhelming for a thirty-year-old, so it must be terrifying for a six-month-old. The singing snowmen are aggressively camp, and the in-store Santa is being played by last year’s X-Factor winner (and I thought it was just policemen who were getting younger).
This is the Christmas I’d dreamed about. I am stocking up on last-minute items for our first Christmas in our unconverted upper floor maisonette in the arse end of Shepherds Bush, a place we bought because the estate agents randomly added ‘village’ to the name of the main street and we thought Lime Village sounded lovely. Which presumably makes us the Lime Village Idiots.
In my plastic folding plaid holdall (as modelled by sheikhs’ wives trying to buy up the entire contents of the Marble Arch branch of M&S), I have a mini-panettone, the German tree-biscuits, and a Cheddar truckle the size of a Granny Smith. But no stuffing: my Turkey Breast for One comes pre-stuffed.
The newly purchased angel – a little large for our four-foot plastic tree – already looks the worse for wear. Freddie somehow got hold of her and gave her a damned good chew. Her lacy wings are now earthbound with carrot and spittle.
Last Christmas, just after the appearance of the little pink line, everything was blissful. ‘Next year,’ Duncan kept saying as he patted my still-flat stomach, ‘next year we’ll give Junior the best Christmas a kid can have. We’ll pull out all the stops, Em.’
Duncan is, no doubt, pulling out all the stops at this very minute. Lighting candles, or preparing a supper party for the new neighbours.
Except his new neighbours are Swiss, because his new neighbourhood is Geneva. The gluhwein will be flowing and the Gruyere cheese will be bubbling away in the fondue pan. And new lover Heidi, who also happens to be his boss and ‘intellectual equal’, has probably let down her flaxen plaits in recognition of the holiday season. I’ve no proof that she plaits her hair, or that it’s flaxen, but it’s little things like that that get me up in the morning.
And I am holding up the size 14 silk pyjamas – which represent a third of this month’s mortgage payment – trying to second-guess whether they have a hope of circumnavigating my thighs. And I’m wondering why I let myself be side-tracked from the Food Hall into this stupid Cinderella-themed Gift Grotto for Adults (‘. . . because it’s not only the little ones who deserve the greatest gifts from the Greatest Store on Earth’).
Garnett’s is, admittedly, the Greatest Store on Earth blah blah blah. It’s just that, right now, that world-famous magic seems as hollow as a hand-blown tree bauble.
‘Can I help you?’
I doubt it very much. The shop assistant is doll-sized and her skin is dewy and I’d spend the rest of this month’s mortgage payment on whatever wonder serum she’s been using if I thought it would change things. But her smile is forced, the upper half of her face paralysed by indifference. Or possibly Botox. ‘Um . . . I’m browsing.’
She looks around her and raises one fine-tuned eyebrow (so it can’t be Botox – her forehead is simply unravaged by life. I remember how that felt). No one in their right mind would browse in the week before Christmas. Then she resurrects her smile: after all, even if I am certifiable, I might still have a credit card.
‘Aren’t they beautiful?’
It’s a killer question. No woman could honestly deny it. Everything about these jim-jams smacks of understated elegance. A woman wearing these will sneak down to steal the Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference Amontillado sherry left for Father Christmas and his reindeers. She’ll place stockings on the bedposts of her softly snoring children before donning stockings of her own for a bout of athletic, silk-pyjama-induced sex with her six-packed husband.
‘And,’ the assistant whispers, ‘Selfridges are charging forty pounds more for exactly the same design.’
‘Well . . .’ I don’t need them. I have pyjamas. Not silk ones, but who is going to know the ruddy difference? There’s no one at home to stroke them, or tease them off.
‘Like it says on the sign,’ she says, pointing, ‘we grown-ups deserve the greatest gifts too. And we can never rely on the men in our lives to get it right, can we?’ She laughs, and her boobs wobble above the top button of her crimson waistcoat. Her badge tells me her name is Marsha: I bet Marsha and her breasts receive an endless array of perfect presents from small armies of Unwise Men.
‘The thing is . . .’ but my voice is quieter now and she sees weakness.
‘You look like you deserve a treat. Not to mention a sit down. Why don’t you try them on? The changing rooms are right here, and we’re laying on complimentary hot white chocolate. There’s room for the little one, too,’ she says, with a final faked smile in the Fredster’s direction. He seems dazzled by her. Maybe it’s her boobs.
Like father, like son.
But the hot chocolate clinches it: a tiny vestige of that fantasy London I’d pictured as we set off up the M4 in the removal van, hope in our hearts, bugger all in our joint account. OK, so I’d imagined sipping the hot chocolate after a bracing skate on the rink at Kew Gardens, me in pink-and-white fake fur like a chic marshmallow, Duncan dashing in soft greys, pulling our baby round in circles in a silver child-sized sleigh from Daisy and Tom.
I follow her into the themed changing rooms, a Garnett’s speciality. This one is like Cinderella’s carriage, with liveried mice stencilled round the edges, spiced pumpkin candles in storm lamps, and a purple velvet banquette. Freddie peers up from his pushchair, suspicious of all the girliness.
I begin to undress, avoiding my reflection in the curlicued mirror. As I pull my sweater off, I realise how musty it smells. The flat has always been damp anyway and since the drier gave up tumbling, nothing ever quite dries out.
I leave my bra and pants on rather than risk a glimpse of my boobs or bottom. My English rose complexion has turned porridge grey, and no part of my body is unaffected by carrying Freddie for nine months. If I were a true high-maintenance West End girl, I’d have a weekly salon appointment to be detoxified and airbrushed Fake-Bake brown. But given that I can’t even manage to dry my jumpers, I am a lost cause.
The lavender silk feels like the cool touch of soft hands as I pull the pyjama pants up my legs. I draw the tie-waist tight, then put on the top half: the tiny buttons are edged in silver, with opaque blue-grey glass in the centre the exact shade of Freddie’s eyes. I begin at the bottom, and with each button, become more convinced that I must have this pyjama set, that somehow everything else will fall into place when I take it home: the drier will tumble again, Freddie will have a perfect first Christmas, and Duncan will ditch horrible Heidi and fly home on the Santa Express to the bosom of his family.
But when I reach my bust, I realise it’s hopeless. The button won’t do up, the tumble drier’s fatally injured, and there’s no reason on earth that Duncan would return to this particular bosom, when he can enjoy perfect Swiss peaks.
Freddie senses the change in my mood and begins to grizzle. Why did I let myself be seduced by a stupid shop and a stupid idea that a pair of pyjamas will make me feel better?
I hear the machine-gun rattle of approaching high heels, and Marsha pokes her head round the purple flock curtain. ‘Oh that colour is so you,’ she says, averting her eyes from my gaping cleavage.
‘The top’s too small,’ I say. Freddie stares at Marsha and the grizzling turns to a howl.
'Hmmm . . .’ She hands over the hot chocolate, in a polar bear mug. ‘These are great stocking fillers, by the way. Nineteen ninety-nine for this one and a matching penguin. I can get you size sixteen pyjamas if you like. Though when you’re not wearing a bra it’ll probably be less of a problem.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well,’ she says, giving me a ‘you asked for it’ frown, ‘frankly, most women who’ve had children will experience a little droop in the cleavage area, sans support. So your boobs will hang down . . . er, be more evenly distributed and voila, the top won’t gape.’
‘Thanks a bunch.’ Freddie’s cries are now of the outraged variety, daring to express what I can’t. ‘You know, I’m not sure about them. And they are expensive for what they are. Even if they are cheaper than Selfridges.’
‘Oh, if that’s what’s worrying you,’ she says, her face steely, ‘and of course, we all find things tight at Christmas, the Garnett’s Red Carpet Card gets you a fifteen per cent discount. And nothing to pay till February. I’ll get you a form.’
‘I really don’t think—’
Freddie lets out a howl of sympathetic anguish.
‘Do you think you can quieten him down?’ Marsha asks. ‘It sounds like he’s being thrashed.’ And she sounds like she’d love to do the thrashing herself.
I sigh and wish her five years of sleepless nights when she produces heirs for some wealthy banker. I reach over and undo the buggy straps to release Freddie. He continues to howl as I hold him tight, trying to stop him shaking with rage. ‘Ordinarily he’s a very even-tempered child,’ I find myself saying, though her sceptical expression makes me wish I hadn’t bothered. And, to be fair, six months ago the same sound would have turned my stomach too.
Finally, the shaking stops and I hold my son’s raging purple face up to mine. ‘There’s a good Freddie, there’s a good boy—’
He opens his mouth for what I hope will be his final howl…but there’s something ominous in his eyes as the remainder of his lunch is propelled from inside that tummy with the force of a mashed carrot tornado.
Why was I so keen to experiment with solids?
Within microseconds, Freddie’s face returns to placid loveliness. I hesitate before daring to look down at the pyjama top.
‘Ah.’ The orangey stain stretches from the collar to the hem, and has even spattered the waist-ties and tops of my legs.
Stupid, stupid Emily for trying the bloody things on, stupid for believing they could make any difference, stupid, stupid for marrying Duncan and getting pregnant and coming to London and thinking a life of silk pyjamas and ice-skating could ever be in my grasp.
I remember I’m not alone, and look up. In the tiny moment before Marsha rearranges her face into can I help you blandness, I see disgust, and then satisfaction.
‘So,’ she says finally, ‘how exactly would you like to pay?’
It all goes rather quickly after that. I just know that the price of the pyjamas will be the straw that breaks the back of my Mastercard, so I agree to apply for a Garnett’s card, without realising that the form will add insult to injury: are you married? Technically. Number of adults in the household: one. Monthly income: as much as Duncan decides to send over from sodding Switzerland. Estimated monthly outgoings: always more than my monthly income.
It’s no great surprise when Marsha comes back looking sour and announces that the card company has turned me down. When I explain I’ve no other means of paying, her manager appears, a tall black woman who looks younger than me, but wears the stern expression of a tough-but-fair headmistress. She introduces herself as Sandie Barrow, Section Head, and asks me how much cash I have on me.
I take out my purse and count notes and coins out onto the banquette in little piles, like a child playing shop with chocolate money. My humiliation is now complete: the gap between my fantasy Christmas and the reality couldn’t be wider.
‘I need that for the bus home,’ I explain, setting aside two pounds.
Marsha tuts. ‘Only a fool pays cash. Haven’t you heard of Oyster cards?’
‘Thank you, Marsha,’ Sandie says sharply. ‘I’m sure you’re needed back on the shop floor. I can handle this.’
Marsha flounces off, and Sandie watches as I continue to count. I used to pity women like me, the ones in the supermarket queue who had to hand back tins and packets till the total fell within budget. Except I can hardly ask Garnett’s to sell me a sleeve, which is all my cash would buy me.
Sandie sits down on the banquette. Close up, she looks less stern: she’d actually be rather beautiful if she smiled and let her hair grow out of that severe crop. She’s used so much spray that her hair looks ever so slightly like a helmet and her deep-brown eyes are bloodshot with tiredness. But she seems a hundred times more human than Marsha. ‘Not been your day, then?’ she says.
‘Not been my year. I didn’t want the bloody pyjamas. I mean, they’re lovely, but I can’t afford them and I knew that so I don’t know why I tried them on when there’s so much else I should be spending what little money—’ I stop. The shame of describing my sorry domestic state is too much to bear: I wonder if there’s an equivalent of restaurant dish-washing for customers who can’t pay the bill? Clearing out the stockroom, maybe, or sweeping the floor.
But even though she doesn’t know the full sob story, Sandie Barrow looks at me as if she understands. Her face is softer, and I get this utterly irrational feeling that things are going to be OK. ‘We can’t sell these now anyway. Don’t worry about it; I’ll mark them down as shop-soiled.’
‘But . . .’
‘My gramma always swears by bicarbonate of soda. Tub costs under a quid from the supermarket. They’ll be as good as new. If any of Garnett’s thousands of customers today deserves a bit of a treat, I reckon it’s probably you.’ Her slight Brummie accent suddenly sounds like the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard.
She leaves the cubicle and waits while I get changed. When I emerge, she gives me another mug of hot chocolate and takes the pyjamas away and returns a few minutes later with them wrapped in tissue paper. ‘I got rid of the worst of the debris,’ she says.
It’s only when I get home to Lime Village and open the crimson Garnett’s carrier bag that I realise she’s added a pair of lavender slippers. On a note, she’s written: ‘These have a slight pull in the silk, so we were going to return them to the manufacturer, but I thought you might like a matching set. Merry Christmas from all at Garnett’s.’
I haven’t believed in Father Christmas for years, but as I poke my cold toes into the softest slippers I’ve ever owned, like Cinders trying on her glass slipper, I let myself believe that angels might exist.
Copyright © 2008 by Kate Harrison. All rights reserved.
Posted by Helen Redfern on June 11, 2008 in Book Extract | Permalink | Comments (0)
June 9, 2008 11:57 AM
BOOK EXTRACT: Daisy Dooley Does Divorce
Anna Pasternak writes a Daisy Dooley Does Divorce column for the Daily Mail and now the column is available in book form.
If you're a fan of the column, you'll probably know this already. If you've never heard of it, then hop over the cut and read our extract!
The PDD
(Post-Divorce Date)
There's only one thing worse than being thirty-nine and single: being thirty-nine and divorced. The biggest upside to getting married was the relief of never having to date again. The subtext of "I do" was: Thank you, hubby, from the bottom of my heart, that I do not have to scan men at parties anymore, I do not need to fire up my married friends' search engines for "eligible" or "available," nor suffer the angst of "will he call or won't he?" A trip to the altar in Jamie's family tiara put paid to that. Or so I thought. Yet here I am, three years after I hurled my bouquet in the air—as if celebrating a win at sports day—about to go frog kissing. Again.
Turns out Jamie Prattlock wasn't my prince after all. I wanted the marriage to work—every woman does—but he was incapable of blowing my heart right open. On the honeymoon, I asked myself, How long does it take for it to feel right? After a year of being Mrs. Prattlock, I wondered, How long do you wait for it to feel right? I stayed for another six months. In the end, it wasn't so much that I was unable to live with Jamie. I was unable to live with myself and the gnawing sense that something was missing. Something so much more.
My oldest school friend, Jess, claims that even as a child I was overly sentimental. If we played near a blossom tree, I'd scoop up handfuls of pink petals and fling them over her, shouting, "It's your wedding!" (She's nudging forty and single. By choice—not chance or lack of it, because with her lofty libido every man is a potential fuck, or even better, a willing fuck buddy to add to her Rolodex of sex.) These days Jess blames my addiction to self-help tomes for my fractured state. My chaste diet of soul-stirring, female-empowering, self-esteem?boosting best sellers has, she believes, completely skewered my expectations. But it can't be unreasonable to dream that your husband views you as a pivotal player in his dreams, or to dream that he views you, period. And anyway, doesn't it say everything about Jamie's blocked-off plight that I openly devoured Should I Stay or Should I Go? before I left him?
My new bible is the Little Book of Dating Dharma. This precious gem guides me through the post-divorce date, or PDD. I don't enjoy being a relationship statistic now that I've got more emotional baggage than Heathrow handles in a day, but I press on because I know my soul mate exists. Otherwise I couldn't possibly be this lonely.
When my marital dreams went up in smoke, humiliatingly, I boomeranged back home to the country to Mum. Not only couldn't I afford to replicate our marital pad in town, I couldn't face purchasing a flat on my own, to live in alone, when all my girlfriends were looking to expand their properties along with their pregnant waistlines.
Mum is a dotty divorced dog breeder—her slogan is "Dooley's Dachshunds: Long and Strong." When she dropped me off at the station to go to London for my first PDD, she pulled up alongside a dishy bloke on a motorbike. My ring radar immediately alerted me to the fact that he wasn't wearing one and I was about to try a pre-PDD flirty smile when Mum shouted out, "Remember, Daisy, nice girls and divorc?es don't." He gaped in our direction while Mum continued brazenly, "And don't forget, princes get warts too."
I had my friends Lucy and Edward Primfold to credit or blame for setting me on this blind date. I clearly wasn't thinking straight when I went to stay with them a couple of months after my divorce from Jamie came through. What was I thinking? I had chosen them knowing that they had the best stocked guest bathroom in all of London, but towels as thick as telephone books were small comfort when I'd broken the blood vessels beneath my eyes sobbing over my unhitched and childless state. Visiting a picture-perfect family with angelic twin girls was pure insanity—or pure masochism.
It was nursery tea when I arrived and the twins, Tabitha and Lily, age six and dressed up as flower fairies, were tucking into homemade carrot cake and crudités. Edward, a suave public school type who moves through life with the languor only breeding and masses of inherited money afford, put his arm around me as he led me into the kitchen. "Chaos as usual," he said, gesturing to the girls quietly eating. They smiled up at me as if I was the photographer for a center spread in the Mini Boden catalog. Click. It was a Kodak moment of such domestic harmony that the bile of jealousy instantly rose in my throat.
Lucy was at the end of the table, stunning in a crisp white shirt and Chloe jeans, her short blond hair expensively highlighted. I'd met Lucy at a freshers' drinks party in our first week at university and have marveled at her composure ever since. Lucy never looked like a student even when she was one, whereas I can still pass for a disheveled student on a bad hair day. You always knew that Luce was going to waltz off campus and into the City, marking time until she fell into the eager embrace of a prospective husband, because even when she was single she had the aplomb of a married woman.
"Darling Daise," she said, hugging me. Walking into a scene of such purity and innocence made me want to rip off my own failure-riddled skin. I wanted to bury my face in her smooth scented neck and scream. Why me? As Lucy poured me a cup of tea, I stared at the parrot tulips billowing out from a crystal vase in the center of the table and I wondered how come she got it so right? How did she sign up for the right life story at birth and manage to hit the bull's-eye ever since? With her rock-steady marriage, her über-earning hubby, and her angelic, well-adjusted kids, there was no need for her to obsess over what-ifs. She had nothing in her past to regret, only well-rounded decades to reflect on with happiness and pride. If she weren't such a loving and generous friend, I'd truly hate her.
"Sorry to hear about the divorce coming through," Edward said, breaking through my private musings. "I always thought Prattlock was okay."
"Okay isn't always enough," I sighed. Really, when had Edward ever settled for okay? The Chelsea townhouse with access to communal gardens was a sight better than okay. His collection of Old Masters, including a Veronese and a Frans Hals: were those merely okay oils to hang on his drawing room wall?
I forced myself to listen to his chatter and before long, Edward happily let slip that he had bumped into Jamie at some arse-numbingly boring charity bridge tournament where Jamie had boasted about his new girlfriend. Talk about kicking a dog—or a divorcée—when she's down.
"So?" Lucy said gamely. "Men always pull straight away to prove that they don't have a problem. It's just comfort sex at the end of a relationship."
"You should try it," Edward said, winking at me. "Got a mucker who's recently moved back here from Bahrain. Troy Powers. Bright bond trader, successful, stinking rich, and recently divorced. So at least you will have one thing in common."
Yup. We both know what it is to feel irremediably broken inside.
A few weeks later in her South London bachelorette pad, Jess opened a pack of fags as she helped me prepare for the date—she's an extremely pragmatic general practitioner. As I stared at my reflection in the mirror, she stood behind me blowing smoke rings. With her liquid green eyes, strawberry-blonde Pre-Raphaelite curls and lightly freckled skin, she has an attractiveness and easygoing charisma that eludes me. It's not that I'm ugly; I'm just not a natural beauty either. I'm the type who's referred to as "striking" when I'm all done up. My large brown eyes are probably my strongest point—even if they look sufficiently bulbous when I'm tired that my mother keeps asking me if I have a thyroid problem. Worse, I have an intensity that frightens men; I don't do lighthearted, particularly when it comes to flirting. (That's also partly due to Mum, who wouldn't let me flick my fringe around when I was a teenager because she said it would make me look thick and my hair look thin.) Jess radiates sexuality because her agenda is upfront and uncomplicated. With the teensiest hint of a smile, her message reads, "We both know that we want it so why pretend?" whereas my attempts at a light "come hither" grin seem to send men running.
Infuriatingly, even though Jess lives like an errant teenager, smoking, rarely exercising outside the bedroom, drinking hard alcohol, and eating sugary food late at night—Krispy Kreme doughnuts are her favorite postcoital snack—she looks not exactly younger but decidedly fresher than me.
Angst is terribly aging, I thought as I smeared a face pack on, carefully avoiding the crêpe-like skin around my eyes. Mind you, boredom is another zest zapper and while it's difficult to reconcile it with her personal irresponsibility, Jess thrives on the demands of her job. She is highly respected in her practice—and presumably reaping its financial rewards as well. I, on the other hand, had injudiciously thrown my once-promising future in publishing away when I got married and now had little left to show for it. After all, you can hardly have your marriage license framed or inserted in your r?sum? by way of explanation for a lengthy career dip, can you?
Eyeing the razor I held at my shin, Jess exclaimed, "No shaving, Daisy! You'll be tempted to reveal too much, too soon." Wise though she might be, I got busy with the Bic anyway. An insurance policy, just in case. I started cream bleaching my mustache, which Jess pooh-poohed as too high maintenance, but small beer when you consider that in New York they are into pre-date butthole bleaching. "I can't do this anymore," I said, wiping the creamy gunk off my upper lip.
"Good, because he's unlikely to inspect your facial hair with a magnifying glass."
"No, this!" I gestured to the beautifying paraphernalia spread around the room. Then, forgetting about my carefully applied, nonwaterproof mascara, I got weepy. Nearly twenty years, minus my fleeting marital break, of wondering if tonight's the night, made me churn with despair. "It still hurts that Jamie didn't fight for our marriage. I wanted him to fight for us."
"No," Jess said softly. "You wanted him to fight for you."
And there's the rub. I may be a born-again single, I may be dolled up and drinking Rescue Remedy for Dutch courage, but I can't override the fact that I feel like a failure and a fool. I turned to Dating Dharma, held it against my chest, and opened it at a random page. "Everyone's story is completely different yet exactly the same. Isn't everyone searching for the same thing? To end up in the arms of the right partner?"
I got my coat.
Copyright © 2007 by Anna Pasternak
Posted by Aigua Media on June 9, 2008 in Book Extract | Permalink | Comments (1)
