This is the laugh-out-loud love story you need to read this summer
Summer is fast approaching and as well as a new wardrobe, jazzy set of sunglasses and copious bottles of Whispering Angel, we're looking forward to adding a good book to our summer shopping list.
And one book that everyone's talking about RN is Laura Jane Williams's Our Stop - a witty and laugh-out-loud summer romance novel that even Dolly Alderton is devouring.
Here, Laura shares an extract from summer's most talked-about book.
Love books? Also check out our list of the best feminist books and the summer books as recommended by your favourite authors.
Daniel Weissman couldn’t believe it. As they’d pulled up at Angel she’d skidded around the corner and he’d held his breath as he’d held the door, like a Taylor Swift lyric about an innocuous beginning and a happy ending and love that was always meant to be. Not that Daniel meant to sound soft that way. He just got weird and jittery and soppy when he thought about her. She had that effect on him. Daniel found it hard not to let his imagination get carried away.
He tried to catch sight of her from his position by the doors – she’d snaked around to the middle of the carriage. He could just about make out the top of her head. She always had hair that was messy, but not like she didn’t care about herself. It was messy like she’d just come from a big adven¬ture, or the beach. It probably had a name, but Daniel didn’t know it. He just knew that she was very much his type. It was so embarrassing, but in the sponsorship advert in between every ad break for The Lust Villa, there was a girl who looked just like her, and if Daniel hadn’t seen her in a while even that – a bloody advert! – could make him nostalgic and thoughtful. It was shameful, really.
The Lust Villa was Daniel’s summer reality TV fix, full of romance and seduction and laughing. Daniel acted like it bugged him that the TV had to be on at 9 p.m. every evening for the show, but he was always in the living room at 8.58 p.m., as if by accident, just settling down to his cup of tea in the big armchair with the best view of the widescreen. His flatmate Lorenzo pretended that he didn’t notice the co- incidence, and they happily watched it together every night. Neither said it out loud but they were both looking for some¬body to settle down with and it was quite informative watching what women liked and didn’t like via a daily show that featured genuine relationships. Daniel used it as a way to get his confidence up, taking notes and learning lessons; last night, the bloke that was obviously there as a bit of an underdog had finally found his match, and now here Daniel was in this moment, today. He didn’t want to be the underdog in his own life. That show made him feel like he owed it to himself to at least try with this woman.
Daniel couldn’t help but admire the serendipity of the morning. What were the chances she’d stagger right past him on the morning the advert got published? They’d only been on the same train at the same time on a handful of occasions, including today. He forced himself to breathe deeply. He’d done it – sent off the Missed Connection – to maybe, hopefully, finally get her attention, but he was suddenly terrified she’d know it was him. What if she laughed in his face and called him a loser? What if she told everyone at work – her work, or his work – how he was pathetic, and had dared to think he was good enough for her? Maybe she’d go viral on Twitter, or post his picture on her Instagram. On the one hand, he knew she was too nice to ever be so awful, but on the other, the tiniest voice in the back of his mind told him that’s exactly what would happen. He shook his head to try and rid himself of the thought. Love was sending him crazy. Or was it that he was crazy in love?
‘Mate, this isn’t love,’ Lorenzo had told him, not even taking his eyes off the telly to issue his damning verdict. ‘You just wanna bang her.’
Daniel did not just want to ‘bang her’. That wasn’t it at all. He probably shouldn’t stare at her silently and from afar, though. That was a bit weird. It was just – well . . . The politics of hitting on a woman seemingly out of the blue were so blurred and loaded. He could hardly approach her cold, like some train psychopath she’d have to shake by ‘pretending’ they were at her stop and then slipping out and onto a different carriage.
But he also knew that if any blokes in his life told him they were trying to seduce a woman they’d never directly spoken to by putting an advert in the paper and then staring at her stealthily somewhere beyond Moorgate, he’d gently suggest that it probably wasn’t the most ethically sound plan. He was trying to be romantic, whilst also saving face. He hoped he’d got the balance right.
My Sister The Serial Killer, Oyinkan Braithwaite, Amazon
Release Date: 3 January, 2019
Genre: Kitschy Thriller
You'll like this if you loved: Dexter
Synopsis: When Korede's dinner is interrupted one night by a distress call from her sister, Ayoola, she knows what's expected of her: bleach, rubber gloves, nerves of steel and a strong stomach. This'll be the third boyfriend Ayoola's dispatched in, quote, self-defence and the third mess that her lethal little sibling has left Korede to clear away. She should probably go to the police for the good of the menfolk of Nigeria, but she loves her sister and, as they say, family always comes first. Until, that is, Ayoola starts dating the doctor where Korede works as a nurse. Korede's long been in love with him, and isn't prepared to see him wind up with a knife in his back: but to save one would mean sacrificing the other...
The Flight of Cornelia Blackwood, Susan Elliot Wright, Amazon
Release Date: 21 February, 2019
Genre: Tragedy Fiction
You'll like this if you loved: The Keeper of Lost Things by Ruth Hogan
Synopsis: From a supremely talented storyteller, The Flight of Cornelia Blackwood is a powerful novel of motherhood, loss and loneliness and how we can make damaging choices when pushed to our emotional edge.
Adèle, Leïla Slimani, Amazon
Release Date: 7 February, 2019
Genre: Literary Fiction
You'll like this if you loved: The Nanny by Leïla Slimani
Synopsis: Adèle appears to have the perfect life. A respected journalist, she lives in a flawless Parisian apartment with her surgeon husband and their young son. But beneath the veneer of 'having it all', she is bored - and consumed by an insatiable need for sex, whatever the cost. Struggling to contain the twin forces of compulsion and desire, she begins to orchestrate her life around her one night stands and extramarital affairs, arriving late to work and lying to her husband about where she's been, until she becomes ensnared in a trap of her own making.
The Flower Girls, Alice Clark-Platts, Amazon
Release Date: 27 January, 2019
Genre: Psychological Thriller
You'll like this if you loved: My Sister's Grave by Robert Dugoni
Synopsis: The Flower Girls. Laurel and Primrose. One convicted of murder, the other given a new identity. Now, nineteen years later, another child has gone missing. And the Flower Girls are about to hit the headlines all over again...
You Know You Want This, Kristen Roupenian, Amazon
Release Date: 15 January, 2019
Genre: Short Stories about sex dating and modern life
You'll like this if you loved: The viral hit, Cat Person, by Kristen Roupenian
Synopsis: These are stories of women’s lives now. They also happen to be horror stories. In some, women endure the horror. In others, they inflict it.Here are women at work, at home, on dates, at the doctor’s, with their families and with their friends. Here are women grappling with desire, punishment, guilt and anger. These are stories that make you feel fascinated but repelled, scared but delighted, revolted but aroused.
The Chestnut Man, Soren Sveistrup, Amazon
Release Date: 10 January, 2019
Genre: Scandi Noir
You'll like this if you loved: The Hypnotist by Lars Kepler
Synopsis: One blustery October morning in a quiet Copenhagen suburb, the police make a terrible discovery. A young woman is found brutally murdered with one of her hands missing. Above her hangs a small doll made of chestnuts.Ambitious young detective Naia Thulin is assigned the case. Her partner, Mark Hess, is a burned-out investigator who's just been kicked out of Europol. They soon discover a mysterious piece of evidence on the chestnut man - evidence connecting it to a girl who went missing a year earlier and is presumed dead; the daughter of politician Rosa Hartung. But the man who confessed to her murder is already behind bars and the case long since closed.
Soon afterwards, a second woman is found murdered, along with another chestnut man. Thulin and Hess suspect that there's a connection between the Hartung case and the murdered women. But what is it?
Thulin and Hess are racing against the clock, because it's clear that the killer is on a mission that is far from over . . .
Black Is The Body, Emily Bernard, Amazon
Release Date: 5 February, 2019
Genre: Memoir/Essays
You'll like this if you loved: The Girl Who Smiled Beads by Clemantine Wamariya
Synopsis: She writes in Black Is the Body how each of the essays goes beyond a narrative of black innocence and white guilt, how each is anchored in a mystery, and how each sets out to discover a new way of telling the truth as the author has lived it. "Blackness is an art, not a science. It is a paradox: intangible and visceral; a situation and a story. It is the thread that connects these essays, but its significance as an experience emerges randomly, unpredictably . . . Race is the story of my life, and therefore black is the body of this book."
And what most interests Bernard is looking at "blackness at its borders, where it meets whiteness in fear and hope, in anguish and love."
On The Come Up, Angie Thomas, Amazon
Release Date: 7 February, 2019
Genre: Contemporary YA
You'll like this if you loved: The Hate You Give by Angie Thomas
Synopsis: The award-winning author of The Hate U Give returns with a powerful story about hip hop, freedom of speech – and fighting for your dreams, even as the odds are stacked against you.Bri wants to be one of the greatest rappers of all time. As the daughter of an underground hip hop legend who died right before he hit big, Bri’s got massive shoes to fill. But when her first song goes viral for all the wrong reasons, Bri finds herself at the centre of controversy and portrayed by the media as more menace than MC. And with an eviction notice staring her family down, Bri no longer just wants to make it – she has to. Even if it means becoming the very thing the public has made her out to be.
Ruin Beach, Kate Rhodes, Amazon
Release Date: 21 February, 2019
Genre: Thriller
You'll like this if you loved: Broadchurch, the TV series
Synopsis: Ben Kitto has become the Scilly Isles’ Deputy Chief of Police. As the island’s lazy summer takes hold, he finds himself missing the excitement of the murder squad in London. But when the body of professional diver Jude Trellon is discovered, anchored to the rocks of a nearby cave, his investigative skills are once again needed.At first it appears that the young woman’s death was a tragic accident, but when evidence is found that suggests otherwise, the islanders close ranks. With even those closest to the victim refusing to talk, it seems that plenty of people might have had reason to harm her. As the islanders remain guarded, Ben Kitto suspects a killer is on the loose in Tresco.
Everyone is a suspect.
Nobody is safe.
Oculus, Sally Wen Mao, Amazon
Release Date: 1 February, 2019
Genre: Poetry
You'll like this if you loved: Bury It by Sam Sax
Synopsis: In Oculus, Sally Wen Mao explores exile not just as a matter of distance and displacement, but as a migration through time and a reckoning with technology. The title poem follows a girl in Shanghai who uploaded her suicide onto Instagram. Other poems cross into animated worlds, examine robot culture, and haunt a necropolis for electronic waste. A fascinating sequence speaks in the voice of international icon and first Chinese American movie star Anna May Wong, who travels through the history of cinema with a time machine, even past her death and into the future of film, where she finds she has no progeny. With a speculative imagination and a sharpened wit, Mao powerfully confronts the paradoxes of seeing and being seen, the intimacies made possible and ruined by the screen, and the many roles and representations that women of colour are made to endure in order to survive a culture that seeks to consume them.
Black Leopard Red Wolf, Marlon James, Amazon
Release Date: 28 February, 2019
Genre: Fantasy
You'll like this if you loved: A Brief History Of Seven Killings by Marlon James
Synopsis: 'The child is dead. There is nothing left to know.'Tracker is a hunter, known throughout the thirteen kingdoms as one who has a nose - and he always works alone. But he breaks his own rule when, hired to find a lost child, he finds himself part of a group of hunters all searching for the same boy. Each of these companions is stranger and more dangerous than the last, from a giant to a witch to a shape-shifting Leopard, and each has secrets of their own.
As the mismatched gang follow the boy's scent from perfumed citadels to infested rivers to the enchanted darklands and beyond, set upon at every turn by creatures intent on destroying them, Tracker starts to wonder: who really is this mysterious boy? Why do so many people want to stop him being found? And, most important of all, who is telling the truth and who is lying?
Marlon James weaves a tapestry of breathtaking adventure through a world at once ancient and startlingly modern. And, against this exhilarating backdrop of magic and violence, he explores the fundamentals of truth, the limits of power, the excesses of ambition, and our need to understand them all.
Bangkok Wakes To Rain, Pitchaya Sidbanthad, Amazon
Release Date: 21 February, 2019
Genre: Dystopian Fiction
You'll like this if you loved: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Synopsis: In the restless city of Bangkok, there is a house.Over the last two centuries, it has played host to longings and losses past, present, and future, and has witnessed lives shaped by upheaval, memory and the lure of home.
A nineteenth-century missionary pines for the comforts of New England, even as he finds the vibrant foreign chaos of Siam increasingly difficult to resist. A jazz pianist is summoned in the 1970s to conjure music that will pacify resident spirits, even as he's haunted by ghosts of his former life. A young woman in a time much like our own gives swimming lessons in the luxury condos that have eclipsed the old house, trying to outpace the long shadow of her political past. And in the submerged Bangkok of the future, a band of savvy teenagers guides tourists and former residents past waterlogged landmarks, selling them tissues to wipe their tears for places they themselves do not remember.
Time collapses as their stories collide and converge, linked by blood, memory, yearning, chance, and the forces voraciously making and remaking the amphibian, ever-morphing city itself.
My Name is Anna, Lizzy Barber, Amazon
Release Date: 10 January, 2019
Genre: Crime
You'll like this if you loved: The Rumour by Lesley Kara
Synopsis: Two women – desperate to unlock the truth.
How far will they go to lay the past to rest?ANNA has been taught that virtue is the path to God. But on her eighteenth birthday she defies her Mamma’s rules and visits Florida’s biggest theme park. She has never been allowed to go – so why, when she arrives, does everything seem so familiar? And is there a connection to the mysterious letter she receives on the same day?
ROSIE has grown up in the shadow of the missing sister she barely remembers, her family fractured by years of searching without leads. Now, on the fifteenth anniversary of her sister’s disappearance, the media circus resumes in full flow, and Rosie vows to uncover the truth. But will she find the answer before it tears her family apart?
