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Billy Lindon - Editorial Expert
Lily Lindon (Billy) is a writer, editor, and bookseller living in London. Their queer romcoms Double Booked ('the bisexual novel of your wildest dreams' DIVA magazine) and My Own Worst Enemy ('read for fun, charm, and butch lesbian romance' Kate Davies) are published by Bloomsbury. They host the Queer Joy podcast and are on instagram @billylindon.
I ABSOLUTELY BLOODY LOVED THIS BOOK.
Sometimes you read a book and you feel like it was written just for you. In fact, I was terribly jealous I didn’t write it myself. I don’t know what it says about me that for me, that is true of this book – about a lesbian professional clown with a thing for MILFs. It has the most insanely ballsy (pun intended?) opening chapter to any novel I’ve ever read – we meet Cherry Hendricks in the back room of the children’s party, at which Cherry ... View Full Review
Look, it isn’t the first time we’ve read a novel about a woman who is unsatisfied with her career and relationships, struggling with her mental health, drinking too much and dating rubbish men, only to then work things out better and find upturns in each – and I highly doubt it will be the last. But that isn’t to say No Hard Feelings isn’t a good book. It’s a classic character arc for a reason. I think a lot of late-twenties/early-thirties women can find this book relatable. I was ... View Full Review
A fun difference to this guide compared with other travel guides I’ve read is the way that the guide recommends each of its 20 destinations through a resident queer person, interviews which combine personal anecdotes with practical tips and broad-ranging recommendations. It has more of a friendly feel, and as a hopeless romantic I also was an absolute sucker for the chapters written by a couple or pair of friends who wrote about the experience of first travelling or living in the place together (I literally cried at the story of a couple just talking about how accepted they ... View Full Review
Patrick ‘Patch’ Simmons (he’s decided a nickname will make him more unique and attractive, but he’s struggling to make it stick) is a 16-year-old boy whose two urgent aspirations in life are to 1) get a boyfriend, and 2) get the main role in the upcoming school production of Sweeney Todd. Armed with his mother’s self-help books and his straight-best-friend Jean, he will stop at nothing to make these happen.
Truly one of the line-by-line funniest novels I’ve ever read. Yes, the main character is a 16-year-old gay boy attending a rural ... View Full Review
Ali becomes involved with the edges of the stand-up scene while being ambiguously involved with Ed, and those readers involved in comedy or theatre will enjoy its well-grounded settings in comedy venues and the Edinburgh fringe. But this is not so much a book about stand-up as a novel about manipulative men in a deeply problematic industry — which does not punish its perpetrators, but survives on the whisper network of women.
I found this engaging and compulsive to read, with the reader always suspecting the awful things that will occur. It saddened me a little that the plot ... View Full Review
One of my favourite things about reading magical stories like this one is the imaginative ways that storytellers find to make magic work – what are the laws and rules of magic governing this new world? I loved that in this story, the cost of using magic is memory – and naturally this has different impacts on the different personalities of the characters, which then feels a really strong way to understand and believe those characters. We are introduced to the three Perdita sisters, for example, whose mother was magically forgetful to the point of amnesia, unable to care for ... View Full Review
This toolkit includes pages on subjects from the scientific roots of anxiety in adults, children (and even animals), but also practical advice and tips, including how to break up with a social media or screen addiction, and techniques for getting out of spiralling or distraction, like the Pomodoro technique and 3-3-3. I don’t know if I exactly learned something ‘new’ from reading this, and it isn't appropriate for more debilitating or clinical levels of anxiety, but there is something about its format which makes it appealing especially for someone at the beginning of researching anxiety ... View Full Review
I associate the short story collection as a genre with stories like these — uncanny or supernatural morality fables, though they may often side more with the underdog monster or old, dark magic than the voice of ‘normal society’. Garland’s collection gives us snapshots of werebeasts and ghosts, delusions and scales finally falling from eyes. Something that struck me as being different from comparable collections however is that they were not AS often about the intimacies of sex or desire between people, leaning more towards exploring other worlds, or relationships between strangers, or accidents. In setting ... View Full Review
Head of a matchmaking company, Logical Love, Carla is due to marry the man she had a high 84% match with in a few weeks time. Yet when her superstitious family get her a tarot reading which seems to show her reuniting with an old flame in Europe, Carla is filled with doubt. Carla will go travelling round the world, retracing her younger self’s steps as she tries to find a man who is not just the correct man, but one she feels fully for too.
It’s a classic question and motif in romance stories — ... View Full Review
Kelsey is convinced life would be better if only her best friend Lewis would finally come round to being in love with her. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be happening — instead he’s mysteriously moving further apart from her. What does she need to do differently?
You don’t often see this kind of relationship represented in stories — or at least, I haven’t read many — of, spoiler alert, friendships where they may have been in love with the other at some points but where the moral is that they are not ... View Full Review
The novel alternates between two time-lines, the events leading up to Esme’s disappearance a year ago, and the ‘present day’, on the night of that event’s anniversary. Both timelines have their own twists and adrenaline (and dramatic murders!) Following a downbeat journalist and a cold-case online celebrity, the book is both an homage and critique of modern true crime obsessives and armchair investigators.
Chilton’s story combines cinematic set-pieces — like the sinister Jack Daw crow costume which a historic murderer wore at the local village fete 30 years ago — with relatable ... View Full Review
So firstly, it’s a brilliant premise. When I’ve been pitching this book to my friends, as I already have been, I describe it along the lines of: ‘on a lesbian retirement resort at the end of the world, a woman decides to throw one last party before she dies, and invites the long lost love of her life. Will they be able to have a happy reunion before it’s all over?’ And the writing delivers — it sparkles with linguistic playfulness, inventive metaphors and believable quippy dialogue.
I read the first ... View Full Review
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