I Know How This Ends

An imaginative romance about a 36-year-old faced with rebooting her shattered life in unexpected ways. 

Are we in control of our destinies? Or does fate cast the die of our lives? Those two questions inspire I Know How This Ends, an inventive, thought-provoking romance by Holly Smale (Geek Girl, Cassandra in Reverse).

The story is told by down-on-her-luck, 36-year-old Margot Wayward, a British-Australian who is enduring the fall-out of a broken, ten-year romance and her losing her job, in a terminal way, as a meteorologist. With her life unmoored, Margot has settled back into her old hometown of Bristol where she struggles with ‘what’s next?’ for her life.  

Enduring a string of no-spark, going-nowhere dates, disillusioned Margot starts to experience supernatural visions that offer glimpses of a future she cannot envision for herself. When she crosses paths with Henry--a sweet-natured single dad and widower; a waiter at the Italian restaurant where all her dates end in disaster--Margot's heart reawakens.  But after everything she’s been through, is she really ready to live--and love--again?

A compelling premise, a strong narrative voice, and a quirky supporting cast permeate Margot’s hopeful journey that will delight readers with tinges of time-travel and magical realism. 

I Know How This Ends by Holly Smale

Mira Books (HarperCollins, Harlequin), $30.00 hardcover, 9780778368632, 368 pages

Publication Date: August 12, 2025

To order this book on Bookshop.org, link HERE

 

Link HERE to learn more about author Holly Smale

Iona Iverson's Rules for Commuting

An uplifting, immensely entertaining novel about how strangers on a commuter train becomes unlikely friends via a shared near-death experience. 

In the world today, many people tend to live anonymously, in their own personal microcosms. However, in Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting, British author Clare Pooley brings people together--strangers--in such a fun, spirited way that it’s bound to spark readers to expand their worldview.

 

This endearing novel, told from the points of view of an ensemble cast of vividly drawn characters, starts on a London commuter train. At the center of it all is Iona Iverson, a vibrantly quirky, 57-year-old magazine advice therapist--an observant creature of habit with job security issues--who leaves Bea, her significant other, and sets off to work with her beloved French bulldog, Lulu. Every day, Iona and Lulu sit in the same carriage--usually in the “seventh aisle,” seat “number three”--as the train traverses ten stops over 36 minutes from Hampton Court to Waterloo Station. In her mind, Iona assigns clever pet names to the seasoned commuters with whom she daily co-exists, but never speaks to. This includes “Impossibly-Pretty-Bookworm” and “Mr.-Too-Good-to-beTrue.” The other passengers, likewise, do the same—Iona is referred to by one as “Rainbow Lady” and another as “Crazy Dog Woman.”

 

One fateful day, a man who doesn’t normally ride the 8:06 a.m. train--whom Iona bills as a “Smart-But-Sexist-Manspreader,” who talks too loudly on his mobile phone and refers to his wife as “the ball and chain”--boards Iona’s carriage. He dresses exquisitely but has his look “ruined” because he displays an “extraordinary sense of entitlement which only really comes with being white, male, heterosexual and excessively solvent.” When he starts choking on a grape from his fruit salad, the normal, everyday order of the commute is upended. A medically capable oncology nurse, Sanjay--who has the hots for the “Impossibly-Pretty-Bookworm” but lacks romantic confidence--performs the Heimlich maneuver on the “Manspreader.” Sanjay’s heroic, life-saving act serves as a catalyst that suddenly transforms the travelers from strangers into friends. Over the course of the story, the soul-filled truth of each person connected to the near-death experience is revealed. The stereotyping of appearances can be very deceiving.

 

As in her previous novel, The Authenticity Project, Pooley’s grasp on the constraints and longings of the human condition proves immensely entertaining. Readers will be charmed by this uplifting, hopeful story rife with tender insights. Traveling with Iona Iverson is a literary journey well worth taking.

 

Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting: A Novel by Clare Pooley

Pamela Dorman Books (Penguin Books), $27.00 hardcover, 352 pages, 9781984878649

Publishing Date: June 7, 2022

To order this book on INDIEBOUND link HERE

 

NOTE: To read this review as published on Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade (April 14, 2022 ), link HERE

 

NOTE: To read a condensed version of this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (June 6, 2022), link HERE

 

The Locked Room

A police investigation during the Covid-19 pandemic--a quest to solve a series of stymying suicides--unearths the past and puts a noted forensic archaeologist and her 11-year-old daughter in grave danger.

Dr. Ruth Galloway is a (fictional) forensic archaeologist--a smart, captivating British heroine created by author Elly Griffiths--who always finds herself embroiled in murder and mystery.

Over the course of 13 novels, this bright, British amateur sleuth and college professor has dealt with discoveries such as child remains (The Crossing Places), unidentified corpses from WWII (The House at Sea’s End) and secret underground tunnels (The Chalk Pit) ... among other life and death dilemmas. She’s traveled to Italy (The Dark Angel) and despite being an avowed atheist, she’s even dealt with aspects of religion (The Woman in Blue). Readers have grown along with Ruth Galloway, seeing her through life changes and challenges that have included romance, motherhood, grief and loss. It’s most fitting, then, that Griffiths has set her latest Ruth Galloway mystery, The Locked Room, (the 14th in the series) during the early days of the Coronavirus pandemic. 

 

Just as Covid-19 is about to turn the entire world upside-down, Ruth and her 11-year-old daughter, Kate, are suddenly forced into lockdown at Ruth’s old childhood home, a cottage in Norfolk, where Ruth had been trying to tie up unresolved fragments from her late mother’s life. Forced into isolation, mother and daughter are befriended (at a safe distance) by a seemingly kind, nurse neighbor, Zoe, a frontline worker. In the midst of them all sheltering in place, Ruth’s on-again, off-again love interest, DCI Harry Nelson (and his team) enlists Ruth’s help in trying to solve clues from a decades-long investigation of stymying suicides by local women. Amidst the investigation--and limitations imposed by the lockdown--clues from the past, including prior ties to an old pandemic and spooky folklore, weave their way into dark danger that ultimately puts Ruth, Kate--and Zoe, a woman who might not be all she appears to be--deep into hot water.

 

A cast of recurrent, familiar characters and their dramatic personal dilemmas--along with chillingly authentic details of pandemics, past and present--add to the suspense of Griffiths' well-conceived, brilliantly executed cozy that delivers a shocking plot twist.

 

The Locked Room: A Ruth Galloway Mystery Series (Book 14) by Elly Griffiths

Mariner Books, $18.99 paperback, 9780358671398, 384 pages

Publication Date: June 28, 2022

To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE

 

This Time Next Year

A lively rom-com about two Brits--born on the same day, in the same hospital--who meet after 30 years and are forced to reconsider their lives and shared history.

Sophie Cousens's first novel, This Time Next Year, is a clever, offbeat romantic comedy about two young Brits whose lives play out in vastly different ways.

Minnie Cooper--whose mother, Connie, had the audacity to name her daughter after the car--always had a challenging life. On the day of Minnie's birth, New Year's 1990, her mother had her heart set on naming her Quinn. However, when Connie's roommate in the maternity ward, Tara Hamilton, gave birth a minute before Connie, Tara stole the name, bestowing "Quinn" upon her own baby, a son. Connie is forced to go with her second choice--a watershed moment in the lives of the two newborns and their emotionally wounded mothers.

Minnie grows up taunted by peers and comes to believe nothing good ever happens on New Year's. This self-fulfilling prophecy, further propagated by her mother, plays out in extraordinary ways on New Year's 2020, which also happens to be Minnie's 30th birthday. When Minnie's beau drags her to a party thrown by one of his coworkers, Minnie loses her coat, gets vomited upon and then is locked in a bathroom overnight. Ugh! On New Year's Day, Minnie is finally freed from the loo by none other than Quinn Hamilton. The Quinn--born on the same day, a minute before Minnie, at the same hospital 30 years before. 

Cousens's colorful, quirky cast becomes embroiled in big, memorable scenes that capture and unravel the histories of both Minnie and Quinn. Rom-com readers will revel in Cousens's wry, lively story, which probes themes of self-discovery, acceptance and forgiveness, and the abiding nature of friendship.

This Time Next Year: A Novel by Sophie Cousens

Putnam, $16.00 Paperback, 9780593191200, 352 pages

Publication Date: December 1, 2020

To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE

 

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (December 8, 2020), link HERE

  

The Authenticity Project

This is a fun, clever, very modern story offering a poignant message of hope!

A notebook created for the purpose of confessing intimate, personal truth turns British strangers into friends as they form an unlikely bond of trust.

Online, everyone's lives look happy and perfect, which makes Clare Pooley's (The Sober Diaries) charmed novel, The Authenticity Project, a fresh, welcome and necessary change of pace.

Monica is a single, 37-year-old Brit who gave up her corporate law to open a London café. She discovers a simple exercise book left behind in her coffee shop, with three words etched on the cover: "The Authenticity Project." The first page reads: "Everyone lies about their lives. What would happen if you shared the truth instead...? Not on the internet, but with those real people around you?"

Intrigued, Monica learns the book was initiated by 79-year-old Julian Jessop, who committed his truth to its pages. Julian expresses the deep-seated loneliness he's experienced for five years, since the loss of his wife, Mary, whom he appreciated only once she was gone. Julian created the Authenticity Project to purge his own feelings and deliberately left the book with his story behind, hoping that whoever read his entry would be inspired to share their own story in its pages and then leave the book for others to do the same.

Monica searches for Julian online and discovers he is a famous portrait painter. In the meantime, she leaves the notebook, with her entry added, in a local wine bar. It lands with a cocaine addict, Hazard, who takes it with him as he sobers up on a remote island in the South China Sea. What ensues is a clever story of how the notebook travels from person to person, six strangers who ultimately discover each other and form bonds of commonality, friendship and love.

The Authenticity Project: A Novel by Clare Pooley

Pamela Dorman Books, $26.00 Hardcover, 9781984878618, 368 pages

Publication Date: February 4, 2020

To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review as published via Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (February 7, 2020), link HERE

To read the longer form of this review as published on Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade (January 7, 2020), link HERE

Would Like to Meet

Who can resist lively rom-coms in the vein of Nora Ephron? 

An aspiring talent agent sets out to prove to an Oscar-winning screenwriter that people can fall in love just as they do in the movies.

Debut author Rachel Winters hits all the right notes in Would Like to Meet. Single Londoner Evelyn Summers once dreamed of becoming a screenwriter. But she has settled into being the "longest-serving assistant in the industry," working for William Jonathan (Monty) Montgomery, an eccentric, high-powered, old-school talent agent. Things take a turn, however, when Monty reassures production duo Sam-and-Max that Evie can light a fire under screenwriter Ezra Chester and convince him to finish a script for which he's been contracted. Evie perceives Ezra--an "Academy Award winner, charitable heartthrob, and industry darling"--to be an "arrogant, insufferable arse." The stakes are raised when a possible promotion to agent is dangled before Evie. The problem, however, is that Ezra believes "Oscar winners... don't write rom-coms."

In order to get Ezra to fulfill his commitment on deadline and convince him to stop being so "short-sighted about the genre," Evie agrees to serve as his inspiration and "living proof." She proposes that she can meet a man the way it happens in rom-coms.

What ensues is a lively, laugh-out-loud story filled with raucous scenes of Evie's madcap meetings and zany mishaps in fulfilling her end of the bargain--from road trips to holidays to chance encounters. Everything that can go wrong does, including Evie making a child vomit, leaving her name and number in random books around London, and accidentally joining an erotic book group. Would Like to Meet is a fun and lively millennial rom-com with a heartfelt message that cleverly plays off tropes from a host of contemporary romance movies.

Would Like to Meet: A Novel by Rachel Winters

G.P. Putnam’s Sons, $16.00 Paperback, 9780525542315, 368 pages

Publication Date: December 3, 2019

To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (December 10, 2019), link HERE