Welcome back to Book Break! Today it is time for our february virtual book haul. If you
haven't seen one of these before, every month Elle, the other half of the Book Break team,
sends me a very exciting email filled with details of some of the most exciting books we've published
over the last month. I have no idea what's going to be in this email so let's open it up together.
Okay the first book in here is Daughters of Night by Laura Shepherd-Robinson. This is one I'm really
excited about. So Laura Shepherd-Robinson is a historical fiction writer, her last book was Blood
and Sugar, which was so so popular, and now she is turning her attention to the women. So what I know
about this book is it does have one of the same characters from Blood and Sugar - Caroline Corsham
is now our main character and she is trying to solve a murder. So a woman is found murdered
in Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens I believe, but the police aren't interested when it's revealed this
woman was a sex worker, she is the kind of woman that London society prefer to ignore. So it's up
to Caroline Corsham to take justice into her own hands. So this is a feminist historical fiction,
it sounds fantastic. Okay the next book is A Place for Everything by Judith Flanders.
So this is the paperback release of a non-fiction which sounds so quirky and fun. I actually talked
about this one before in a video we made last year on the most weird and wonderful nonfiction books.
So this is the history of alphabetical order - something that I had never thought about before
before seeing this book. Like why are the letters in that order? Why was this invented in the first
place as a system of ordering things, and what did they do before we had alphabetical order?
There are so many interesting questions that I bet you'd never considered before.
Next we have The Art of Losing. I've been looking forward to this one, so this one is finally out.
This is one of those multi-generational novels, it sounds really really moving.
Let me just bring up the description. So this is about a woman who is born and raised in France,
always having known that her family came from Algeria but not really feeling that
much connection personally to Algeria. But now in this book she's going to go back,
the first time since the family left that anyone from the family has gone back, and she's going
to discover about the loss of their country, of their identity, so it sounds brilliant.
Next in here is Can You See Me Now by Trisha Sakhlecha. So I have just talked about this
one in a video we made last week on the best dark books by women. I haven't read this one yet but I
have read her last book Your Truth or Mine which was fantastic, so I'm very excited about this one.
This is another thriller but it's about three girls who meet at this elite boarding school in
India, so dark academia vibes in there maybe, but we're kind of looking back on this from the future
when our main character is now a cabinet minister in the Indian government, and the secrets from her
past are coming back to the surface. Then we've got The Darkest Evening, an Ann Cleeves book,
in here. These are always so popular on the book hauls. So this is the paperback release of a book
that was very buzzed about over Christmas, it's set in the snow which is pretty perfect, a lot of
us are still in the snow right now. So it's part of the Vera series. DCI Vera Stanhope is driving
home in a blizzard when she sees an abandoned car with a young child left in the car. So she rescues
this child, drives on until she sees this amazing grand manor with a party clearly going on inside,
and a woman lying dead outside in the snow. So many things to connect there. I have not read this
one yet but I really want to know what all the puzzle pieces of that mean. Then, oh, we have a
beautiful picture book in here. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland illustrated by Julia Sarda. And a
fun fact that I just learned about this one: you will notice that Alice on the cover does not look
like the Disney blonde Alice we are used to. She is actually instead based on the appearance of
the real life Alice who inspired Lewis Carroll to write the story. So I think that's really lovely.
Next we have, oh, a lot of people will be excited about this one, Liberte. I don't know
if I'm pronouncing that right, I have absolutely no French skills. This is the sequel to Enchante
which was the first book in this series. So it's a magical YA series set in Paris I believe,
in a Paris where magic has been outlawed. So just reading the description here, we have magic,
betrayal, sacrifice. In this new Paris, where allegiances shift and violence erupts, the answers
Camille seeks set her on a perilous path: one that may cost her the boy she loves and even her life.
Well I know a lot of people have been waiting for that one. Next we have Nightshift by Kiare Ladner.
Again I know this is one that has been really buzzed about, really anticipated on BookTube,
on Bookstagram. I actually have my copy right here, so I'm gonna grab it. Here she is.
So this is about a young girl who has just moved to London and she meets another woman and becomes
kind of infatuated with her. And this other woman Sabine works a nightshift. So our main character
decides to also get onto the same night shift, meaning that she has to give up
all of her connections to her normal life: her boyfriend, her relationships, the daylight - she
sacrifices all of that to spend more time with this woman. So it's a story of obsession. Can
Meggie really lose herself as she tries to become someone else? Okay going back into my email. The
next book we have is The Animals at Lockwood Manor by Jane Healey. This is the gorgeous paperback
cover. So this is a really fun Gothic mystery, queer love story, it's about a woman called Hetty
who is put in charge of overseeing the evacuation of the entire mammal collection from the Natural
History Museum during the Blitz. So they have to move them out of London and they move them to this
amazing manor house in the countryside owned by a rather hostile unpleasant man,
and strange things start to happen. The animals seem to be moving in the night, and the beautiful
daughter who lives at this manor seems to be haunted. So it's slightly supernatural hints,
it's very dark and gothic, it's really fun and I love this new cover. Then The Cambridge Code. So
this is a really interesting one, lots of people have been talking about this in the office. So
this is a test to uncover your personality, much like the Myers-Briggs test, the enneagram test,
but this one goes a lot deeper. So if you get the book it includes access to doing this really
in-depth personality test, and you can learn so much about yourself. And it says you can improve
your life, your work, your relationships, parenting skills, your well-being, all by really
unlocking the key to who you actually are. I love finding out more stuff about myself so I'm really
interested in this. Next is The Promise by Lucy Diamond. Lucy Diamond is a massive bestseller,
so let me just bring up the description. Oh yeah I remember this description now actually.
So when faced with the sudden death of his brother, Dan's mission is clear:
he puts together a project to help pick up the pieces and support his grieving sister-in-law Zoe
plus her young children. This is Dan's promise: to ensure his family's happiness and try to live up
to the man his brother was. It's a really really sweet idea, but while tying up all the loose ends,
a shocking secret is brought to light that calls everything Dan thought he knew about his brother
into question. Next in here is Kololo Hill by Neema Shah. So we have talked about this one,
we made a video on the books we think will be big on BookTube in 2021. This was definitely
one of them. So I guarantee you're going to be seeing this all over BookTube very very soon,
if you haven't already started seeing it everywhere. I mean firstly just look how beautiful
that cover is! So this book begins in Uganda in 1972, when all Ugandan Asians were ordered to
leave the country in 90 days and take nothing with them - just what they could carry - give up all
of their money and never return. So we follow this one family moving to Britain and explore
what this loss of their country means to them, and at the same time a terrible secret hangs over
the family. Next, If I Can't Have You by Charlotte Levin. I've talked about this book quite a lot on
this channel before, because I just loved it, it's so much fun. And this is now the paperback cover
which came out perfectly in time for Valentine's Day. This is kind of an anti-Valentine's day book.
It is about love gone wrong, love that turns into obsession. Our main character Constance
meets a man through work and starts up a very ill-fated relationship. And she is the most
relatable and likable character to ever do such terrible things, to make such bad decisions,
and go so far down the wrong path, but the whole time you find yourself on her side because
whatever she's doing, he's even worse. This is a fun one: Beauty and the Bin by Joanne O'Connell.
This one is a middle grade story about a girl whose family are all massive eco warriors, and
she never quite fits in at school, but then there is a young entrepreneur competition at school and
she decides to make her own eco-friendly beauty products and bath products. So it sounds like a
really sweet story and one that incorporates all of the things about the middle grade
books that I grew up with that I loved: about friendship, about trying to fit in at school,
about being embarrassed of your family, but with this new modern twist making it all about being a
young eco warrior, something that so many young people now will relate to which is fantastic.
Brown Baby has been another very very buzzed about book. This is the memoir from Nikesh Shukla who
was the editor of The Good Immigrant. So this is described as a memoir of race, family, and home.
Nikesh Shukla actually wrote this book for his daughters as a way of teaching them about the
world that they are going to grow up in, being girls, being brown, all of the challenges that
they are going to face. But also really wanting to fill them with a sense of hope and optimism
and wonder about the world that they're being born into. You can also listen to the Brown
Baby podcast where Nikesh Shukla invites different parents of brown children onto the podcast to talk
about how they navigate that difficult balance - so really amazing. Then we have Writers and Lovers
by Lily King. So this is the brand new paperback cover and I love that. I really really enjoyed
Writers and Lovers when I read the hardback last year. It's the story of a girl in her late 20s,
early 30s, kind of navigating that part of adulthood when you're no longer the youngest,
newest kind of adult anymore, but you still don't feel like you have your life together. It's got
elements of a love triangle in there, so she meets these two different men who can offer her very
different futures, very different paths, and that's part of the story, but it also goes a lot
deeper. It explores her own grief, the recent loss of her mother, it explores her writing,
her passion for writing, and it's really very very relatable. It's all about that sense of finding
who you want to be and what the possibilities are that you could be. Now we're moving into some
children's books. My Magical Leprechaun - this looks so much fun. This is another of the Campbell
books which are really really interactive, loads of things to push and pull and slide
throughout them. We also have My Magical Easter Bunny, perfect for Easter coming up. This is a
sparkly sticker activity book, I really want to play with that, it's got over 400 stickers inside.
I remember sticker books, they were so much fun, I want this! Then, oh suddenly a lot darker after
our sparkly Easter book, this is City of Vengeance by D.V. Bishop. So this is a historical fiction
book set in Florence in 1536. So it's a conspiracy theory, murder mystery, historical thriller, and
we have mentioned this book once before actually in our LGBTQIA+ books in every genre video, which
I will link to below because this is a book that does explore and address the lives of gay people
in a time when that was definitely illegal. Next in here is The Library of the Dead by T.L.
Huchu. This one sounds really fun. It's a slightly supernatural mystery set in Edinburgh. It's about
a girl who works as a ghost talker: her job is to listen to messages from the dead and pass them on
to the living. But from one of these messages she uncovers a whole mystery which leads her to an
occult magical library. It's going to be a whole series so you definitely want to get started now.
And then we're going back into Easter territory with The Rhyming Rabbit by Julia Donaldson and
Lydia Monks. This pair are massively massively popular and this looks gorgeous. I love all the
different patterns in the writing on the front. And equally gorgeous - A Poem for Every Spring
Day. So these poetry collections are so beloved by you guys, and this one is particularly gorgeous I
think. So these are all lovely little paperbacks taken from the book, edited by Allie Esiri, A Poem
for Every Day of the Year. This takes out each season as gorgeous little collectible paperbacks,
and they're all so perfectly seasonal but I think this might be my favourite so far. Little Bunny’s
Easter Surprise, love that, with fabulous flaps to lift. This looks like another really fun one.
So many cute Easter children's books, I wonder what the Easter surprise is gonna be. And then
oh okay very different tone here, Mother for Dinner by Shalom Auslander. Let's hope that
wasn't the Easter surprise from the last book. So this is described as an outrageously tasty comedy.
I've heard a lot about this book so far, it sounds hilarious and outrageous I think is a good word
for it. So I'm just looking at the description here because I don't think I'll be able to do
it justice. Seventh Seltzer has done everything he can to break from the traditions of the past,
but in his overbearing narcissistic mother's last moments, she whispers in his ear the two words he
always knew she would: “eat me”. So it turns out that this family are cannibal Americans,
a once proud and thriving ethnic group. But for Seventh it raises some serious questions of
practical concern: she's six foot two and weighs over 30 stone. Even divided up between Seventh
and his 11 brothers that's a lot of red meat! And it just gets worse. Second keeps kosher, Ninth is
vegan, and Sixth is dead. So this is a satirical dark comedy about identity and inheritance and
the things that we owe our families versus the things we owe ourselves. It sounds very funny,
maybe an acquired taste. Sorry for saying the word taste after that. Okay a few more still in here.
We have The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah. So Kristin Hannah is the author of Firefly Lane,
you may have been watching on Netflix. This is her new book The Four Winds. So I'm just opening
up the description because I don't know the plot of this one, I just know that just like Firefly
Lane it's about the strength and resilience of women and the bonds between them. So this is set
in texas in 1934. Elsa Martinelli had finally found the life she'd yearned for: a family,
a home and a livelihood on a farm on the great plains. But when drought threatens all she and
her community hold dear, Elsa's world is shattered to the winds. So that sounds wonderful and so many
other authors have praised this. Delia Owens, the author of Where the Crawdads Sing, loved this one.
Kate Morton called it a rich compelling novel of love, sacrifice, and survival - sounds fantastic.
One more children's book in here: Our Jungle by Rod Campbell, with a fold out jungle surprise
apparently. So Rod Campbell is the author of Dear Zoo, that very very beloved children's book.
And this is his first book about jungle animals. So you get to meet loads of animals along the way
and there is a big fold out surprise at the end. And then finally one more book in here is Bridget
Jones's Diary and Other Writing. I again have this one, let me just grab my copy off my shelf.
Here it is. I absolutely love this new cover with Bridget Jones's famous pants front and
centre. This book is so good. I actually made a whole video dedicated just to this book
and to why Bridget Jones is still such an icon today 25 years later, so I will link to that video
below so you can go check it out. This book is just as funny as ever, just as relatable as ever,
and it's got loads of extra writing at the end from Helen Fielding. So you get things like
little extracts from her own diary, articles that she wrote, and just her thoughts looking back on
Bridget Jones 25 years later. So I absolutely loved this one. So that was our Feburary book
haul. I would love to know which of those books you are the most excited about so do leave us a
comment below. And I will also link here to a playlist of all of the other book haul videos
that we've made in the past, so you can click through and have a browse. See you next time!