London Book Haul & More 📚

hi everyone welcome back to my channel for a book haul so a small apology for the fact that i haven't been able to upload as much in the past month month and a half it's just been so busy what with the release of my novel and the fact that i've been on deadline for my next children's book which i have now passed so i am hoping to film a little bit more in october and i thought i would kick things off by sharing with you all the books i've amassed in the past month and a half because there's quite a few i have been sent a ton by publishers i guess because this is the time of year where you get a real influx of releases september is one of the biggest months in the uk for book releases and arcs are starting to come out for um books that are released in early 2022 i also went to london with my boyfriend to visit some of my friends and family and i did end up picking up a few books while i was there so i have a bit of a london book haul as well as a uh publishing arc review copy book haul and i thought you know it's time to share them because the pile is growing and yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna show you them now because i have been rambling on for far too long already so i'm actually gonna start with the books that were sent to me by publishers or authors because i have a couple that i'm particularly excited about and really just want to like talk about first so the first one of those is this middle grade fairy tale collection spooky fairy tale collection as well so perfect for october which is the sister who ate her brothers and other gruesome tales by jen campbell and illustrated by adam de souza so this is a book i've actually had the pleasure of reading stories from already jen is one of my very very good friend she's one of my best friends in the whole world so sometimes i do you know get a little insight into her writing progress as it's going on and i have been so eagerly anticipating this novel or well short story collection ever since um she started writing it and started talking about it because ah these are such incredible fairy tales they span from across the world like we have fairy tales here that include inuit japanese irish spanish chinese german russian and quite a few others as well and they're all creepy which is something i love i love a kind of spooky creepy fairy tale and it sort of goes to show that there's all of these different sort of creepy fairy tales from around the world like this is a phenomenon that is very widespread and i know jen spent a lot of time picking them and then writing them in her own very eloquent style jen is a gorgeous writer and i don't just say that as her friend i say that as also a fan and then the fact that they've been paired with adam d'souza's illustrations is incredible because they just they match so incredibly perfectly i cannot tell you it is a stunning collection and i can't wait to now read them with the accompanying illustrations this is published by thames and hudson and it's actually out this week so you can either pre-order copy a couple of days in advance or get it on release date i think this is one that a lot of younger readers are going to enjoy i know i as um like a child in sort of the middle grade age range really adored creepy fairy tales but i actually think adults are going to enjoy this one a lot as well we then have a book that was sent to me by the author because it's self-published and that is torn by jasmine watson so this is a book i have been eagerly anticipating for a few months now i follow jasmine over on tiktok and she's been talking about um her novel for obviously a little while since she announced its um upcoming release and it's finally out it's here in the world you can buy it as well and let me tell you this just sounds absolutely spectacular i mean first of all beautiful cover let's just acknowledge that it's always really important this is designed by sarah oliver so yes sarah well done um but the book itself is the first in a series called the verse of grim and it's a book inspired by sort of like fairy tale elements about um a world separated into so there's a world where there is magic and there's a world where there is not magic and there is a young woman from the world of non-magic who is the only one that can save the world of magic um but she is in complete denial that that is in existence so it's about her i am traveling there encountering all these creatures and having this burden laid on her shoulders of having to you know save this entire realm and i am so excited the reviews have been coming in thick and fast and it sounds fantastic i really want to read it this month and share with you my own thoughts too okay but i did say i was saying a lot of books by publishers and that is true because i actually have this entire stack as well to show you so let's just go through them at random as they appear the first one is a thriller called the hiding place by jenny quintana this is published by pan mcmillan and i am so buzzed for this mainly because i am in such a thriller mood at the moment i have just binge read three thrillers back to back and adore them and i really want to find new favorite thriller authors so this is about marina who was abandoned as a baby in the hallway of a shared house in london nobody including marina herself knows anything about her past um but she is now an adult and has returned to the house where all started determined to find out who she really is i love that kind of premise i love thrillers where someone is trying to learn something about their past and it may lead them into a kind of dangerous situation so i'm really looking forward to reading this we then have a proof of a book which is out later this month and that is under the whispering door by t.j cloon so everybody adores tj clean i know this he has raved about across the book big talk where have you and i haven't actually read any of their books yet so i'm really really excited to have a proof of their new book especially given that their previous book will i think they've written a few but um the one that's been super duper popular and the house on the cerulean sea something along those lines is the uh book that my patreon book club and i have chosen for the next three months so if you're interested in buddy reading that and then also um engaging and watching a discussion video that i'll be filming about it at the end of the year then i'll link my patreon down below but yeah so i am now going to be hopefully binging a little bit of tj clinton because i'm so sure i'm going to love his work it's meant to be very like hope punk very hope filled um very like adult and serious but also just with these undercurrents of joy and that is exactly what i want for my fantasy at the moment i don't want grim dark although this is one that definitely deals with grief and the afterlife so it is going to be like i said serious in touch with more serious issues but i think with that kind of writing which is just like full of warm fuzzies so can't wait we don't have another thriller but this time a y a thriller and that is the woods are always watching by stephanie perkins so i know a lot of you probably know stephanie perkins from her anna and the french kiss series which i never read because i'm not really that into why contemporary but i have read steffi perkins other y thriller and i really enjoyed it it was a really fast-paced slasher horror novel a little bit like a scream film and therefore when pan macmillan offered to send me a copy of her latest book i of course i am absolutely jumped to the chant this is actually with two friends who recently left high school and now are in university which i think is fantastic so don't read a lot of why a or um new adult that deals with that age range anyway as you can tell from the cover in the title this is about some creepy woods the two friends go on a hike and end up encountering some dangerous potentially spooky creatures as a paranormal is it not i don't know angry robot were then very kind enough to send me the cabinet by unsu kim which is a translated korean novel and the translator is sean lynn halbert i am so excited for this this sounds so interesting and i am always always on the hunt for more translated korean literature in particular so the blurb reads cabinet 13 looks exactly like any normal filing cabinet except this cabinet is filled with files on the symptomers people whose weird abilities and bizarre experiences might just mark the emergence of a new species does this sound a little bit x-men already i'm here for it but to mr kong the harried office worker who spends his days looking after the cabinet the symptoms are just a headache from the woman whose doppelganger broke up with her boyfriend to the man with a gingko tree growing from his fingertip and then there's that guy who won't stop calling asking to be turned into a cat a richly funny and fantastical novel about this strangeness at the heart of even the most ordinary lives from one of south korea's most acclaimed novelist that just sounds so good and i am so excited to read it plus stunning cover again always worth noting we then have a short story collection which was sent to me by canongate this one comes out on the 28th of october and it's called cosmogramma by courtia newland this is a collection of speculative sort of sff short stories which envisage an alternative future as lived by the african diaspora which i just think sounds really interesting i love a bit of a speculative short story collection so looking forward to checking this one out then from piccador i have crying in each mark by michelle's honor a memoir so this is a non-fiction book of memoir obviously i'm about the author who grew up asian-american straddling the boundaries of both her cultures her parents expectations um and also the expectations of the country that she lived in as well as the grief and loss uh she went through when her mother had cancer so i think this was going to be quite an emotional memoir but i hear wonderful things about the writing and i'm really keen to read it then we have one i know you're all going to be super excited for because i definitely was and that is the 25th anniversary special edition of the song of achilles by madeline miller now not only am i super excited to have this because i adore madeleine miller and i adore greek myth retellings but i didn't actually own a copy of this book so i now do and i own obviously a very beautiful one now so i'm very very grateful to bloomsbury for having sent me this it's stunning and it even had a lovely little note from madeleine miller inside it which was lovely you may or may not know that i actually interviewed madeline miller about her book cersei on my podcast she was so incredible to talk to so insightful and um hearing her speak really added extra layers to that novel for me so if you're interested in that i will again link it down below and i will also mention that my podcast season five is actually starting up this month so stay tuned um but i'm really excited to have this beautiful beautiful copy of um the song of achilles which is obviously a greek myth retelling of the trojan war and focusing in on achilles and petroglyphs love story then we have a play by k tempest called paradise so k tempest is one of my favorite poets of all time and they also have written novels and um plays for the stage and this is their latest play it was sent to me again by piccador and to top it all off it's a retelling of greek myth so k-tempest has dealt with themes of greek mythology in a few of her previous and poetry collections and plays so i know from experience how skilled they are at working with those themes and this is the story of philoctitis who lives in a cave on a desolate island so yeah really excited to read this one and i would love to see it performed hopefully one day then we have a proof copy of yinca where is your husband this one actually doesn't come out until march next year so it's a little while to wait but i plan on reading it before then so i can share with you my thoughts because it sounds brilliant let me just read the back for you because i think that's what sold me on it husband a male partner in a marriage eg yinka's younger sister kemi is married to uchi 2. a non-existent man in a non-existent marriage whose whereabouts is often asked about usually by nigerian moms and aunties to single british nigerian women eg soyinka tell me where's your husband ah you're 31 now so i believe this is about um a young nigerian british woman who is uh 30 years old and everyone has these expectations of her to marry at this point but she's not she's not there yet she's living her life and i think this would be considered a sort of comedic contemporary novel about um a young nigerian woman in britain's life so i'm really excited to read this one i can't believe i'm still not through all of the books i've seen by publishers but there's only two more the next one is a middle grade fantasy novel which i have been eagerly anticipating and that is fireborn book one in the 12 and the frozen forest series by ashling fowler so this was sent to me by harper collins and it is about a young woman named 12. i don't know if that's like her birth name or just the name she takes on when she takes on a new role in this fantasy society which is to learn and train to fight monsters and keep the people in her sort of walled city safe so she joins this guard effectively but she ends up going against the grain and what the guard is supposed to do when she decides to set off adventuring to find a missing girl that was abducted by a monster so everyone else just wants to let it go but she refuses to and it's about her journey i am very excited to see what this sort of like wolf made out of rock is all about as well the sort of fantastic imagery on the front front here has me super excited and i love middle grade fantasy then last but not least for a big sent to me by publishers we have this non-fiction book which was sent to me by thames and hudson called black artists shaping the world by sharna jackson so this is as the title explains um a look at various different black artists across the world right now and their art and how it is sort of you know taking inspiration from past culture but also sort of doing new and innovative things for the modern day so these are some of the artists included in here and there's so many different styles like i've had to flick through this and i love the diversity and variety in the art in here it's gorgeous i do adore books like this i think having been raised by a mother who went to art college and is really into art and has a lot of art books i do really gravitate towards books like this and i think this is just going to be a really nice one to pour over and discover new artists myself and learn a little bit about what they're doing right now um in in in the modern world so yeah i'm super excited to flick through this and i think this is going to be a really nice christmas present so this may be get putting aside for the christmas gift gift then that brings me to the books i actually bought well actually i have one book i didn't buy myself because it was a gift so i'll share that with you this one was a gift from my lovely boyfriend uh when we were in london together he spotted this and forbidden planet sneakily sort of took it to the tail and bought it without telling me then gave it to me which was so kind of him because this is just everything i look for in a book and he knows me well it's called damnable tales a horror anthology selected and illustrated by richard wells and it's pretty self-explanatory these are creepy folk tales as retold by a variety of different um authors so we have shirley jackson in here we have emma james we have robert louise stevenson we have fiona mcleod lots of recognizable authors in the horror genre all collected together in one place so i am so excited for this because i know i already love some of these authors like shirley jackson but i'm also probably going to discover new authors via this collection which i always love then i confess myself to having gone a bit ham and forbidden planet so i really miss the london forbidden planet it is huge and it has this massive selection of sci-fi and fantasy books especially ones that are sometimes not published in the uk so they'll have like us editions i have books and i just don't see other places in store so i always want to take advantage of it plus they had a bunch of discounts on books i was interested in so i think every single book here had money off it which meant i just couldn't leave it behind i had to like fulfill that and forbidden planet love whilst i had the chance because it's probably going to be a while before i visit again uh the first one i picked up is the winter garden which yes drew me in because of the cover it's beautiful and this is a fantastical novel about beatrice on the nighttime mother dies eight-year-old beatrice receives an invitation to the mysterious winter garden a place of wonder and magic filled with all manner of strange and sublime flora and fauna the garden is her solace every night for seven days but when the garden disappears and no one believes her story beatrice is left to wonder if it was truly real eighteen years later on the eve of her wedding to a man her late father approved of but she does not love beatrice makes the decision to throw off the expectations of victorian english society and search for the garden when both she and her closest friend rosa receive invitations to compete to create a spectacular pleasure gardens with the prize being one life-changing wish she realizes she may be closer to finding it than she ever imagined now all she has to do is now all she has to do is win that just sounded so fantastic and like nothing i've read before i love victorian historical novels with a fantastical twist and i think it'll be interesting to see how this manages and the friendship between the two characters given that they're being pitted against one another so yes i cannot wait for this we then have one that was literally in the sale it had been reduced from 12.99 to 4.99 and it's a fairytale retelling so i thought hey i'm going to pick it up this is by sarah pinbar who i believe has written a bunch of sort of wicked dark retellings of fairy tales and i've never read any so i decided to pick this one up which is poison and this is a retelling of snow white but with a very dark twist it's not very long so i'm hoping to read this one soon and hopefully i'll enjoy it because i do love a fairy tale detailing we then have a book i've never heard of but it sounded absolutely brilliant this is a y novel called the lost girls a vampire revenge story by sonja hartel so this and this just sounds fantastic is about a girl who falls in love with a boy and lets him turn her into a vampire thinking they're going to spend the rest of eternity together but after a few months he ditches her and she goes looking for him only to discover she is not the first girl he's done this to so he's just been living for centuries falling in love with girls turning him into vampires and then chickening out and running away and leaving them as vampires and they decide to band together to take revenge and this just sounds so brilliant it's like a fun take on vampires as well as an exploration of um sort of toxic relationships and female friendship and i cannot wait to read it then we have a super weird one which i'd never heard of but couldn't resist which is called um mrs caliban by rachel ingalls and this is published by faber it had a pound off so that was another good excuse and this is about dorothy who is a grieving housewife in the california suburbs mourning the death of her young son and a recent miscarriage her husband is unfaithful but they are too unhappy to get a divorce one day she is doing chores when she hears strange voices on the radio announcing that a green-skinned sea monster has escaped from the institute for oceanographic research but little does she expect him to arrive in her kitchen muscular vegetarian sexually magnetic and excellent at housework larry the frogman is a revelation and their passionate affair takes them on a journey beyond their wildest dreams tell me this does not remind you of the shape of water like that has made your shape of water vibes to me and i love shape of water so i can't wait to read this we then lastly for forbidden planet bargains have in the watchful city by s koilou and this is one of the torah novellas from the tornavella series so i adore the tour novella series it's a series of novellas in the sff genres that tore published quite often um by sort of new and debut authors but they do continue to publish authors who are published elsewhere as well and i have discovered some of my favorite science fiction and fantasy officers through that series so i wanted to pick up a new one and this one sounded particularly intriguing it's about anima who is an extra sensory human tasked with surveying and protecting aura's citizens via complex living network called gleaming although air world is restricted to what a can see and experience through the gleaming anima takes pride and comfort in keeping aura safe from harm when a mysterious outsider enters the city carrying a cabinet of curiosities from around the world with a story attached to each item anima's world expands beyond the borders of aura to places and possibilities a never before imagined to exist this also features a non-binary protagonist which i'd love to see and i have to say the tour novella series is fantastic for being very inclusive of the lgbtq plus community across that range of letters and beyond so i'm super excited to read something with a non-binary protagonist because i don't find a lot of sff novels that do feature that naturally i also had to pay a visit to one of my favorite bookshops of all time and that is gay's the word where i picked up two books so first of all we have a book which i keep thinking is called queer poets of colour but strangely the large text is actually the subtitle the title is nipantla an anthology editor edited by christopher soto with the subtitle queer poets of colour but i guess this tells you more what you're getting so that's why it's larger and this is a collection of poetry i'd be meaning to pick up for ages my friend jen raves about it and i thoroughly trust her opinion on when it comes to poetry um plus it's always just really nice to read more queer poets and this obviously specifically collects together queer poets of color and i always find anthologies a great way to discover new favorite poets because although with any anthology you may not love every poem the likelihood that you'll love some is there and that means you have places to go next and poets to learn about and research and dive into so cannot wait to read this then a completely random book which i'd never heard of before but loved the sound of i found this in the lesbian section of gays the word although i think it's probably better described as just like the women loves women section of gays the word because they're not all books by lesbian summer by summer pan um and this is dead dead girls by nakessa affia a harlem renaissance mysteries this is set in 1920s harlem about a young flapper who ends up having to solve a mystery and who's also queer wit yes i am so here for then we have a book i didn't pick up in london but i pre-ordered because i was super excited about it and that is lord of eternal night by ben alderson and i absolutely love everything ben does but this is also his first like truly smutty novel which i'm very excited about it is a retelling of beauty and the beast but with gay vampires and like do you need to know anything else but that it sounds brilliant and he has been talking about it for a while online and getting me really excited so i know i'm going to be reading this one very very soon i did actually pre-order one other book that was coming out in september and that is the women of troy by pat barker nobody's surprised i pre-ordered this i adored pat barker's previous greek me myth retelling which was silence of the girls and this is the second of her greek myth retellings this one is i'm more focused in on the events of europeans trojan women and about how the women of troy experience the defeat of their city and are enslaved by the greek men and i cannot wait to read this i know it's going to be so evocative and emotional and raw and really really insightful like i found her other book so insightful both as a reader but also as an ancient historian i thought it was an incredible work of literature and again i interviewed pat barker my podcast about the silence of the girls so if you're interested i will have that linked down below then i swear we're almost there but i picked up one other book in london which is my dangerous duke by galen foley a book in the infernal club series so this is a historical romance book in a series and by an author i've never read before and i'm always on the hunt for more historic romance authors i can fall in love with because you know i'm going to run out of tested air books soon so i picked this up in the big water stones at piccadilly which i think is if not the biggest bookstore in europe definitely the biggest bookstore in the uk and what that means is an incredible range of books including a whole romance section which i think is so rare to find in physical bookshops actual dedicated romance sections sure you get sff sections and sometimes horror sections and crime sections but you never seem to get romance sections it is so underrepresented by bookshops despite the fact that's a massively popular genre and i do think some of that just stems from literary snobbery so it was just such a pleasure to find an entire section dedicated to romance i knew i wanted to find something that i didn't know of and could try for the first time that i wouldn't have discovered any other way and this was the one that appealed to me and last but not least i actually paid a visit to the newest bookshop in edinburgh which is rare birds so very recently rare birds have opened a bookstore in stockbridge in edinburgh which is dedicated to selling books by women so rare birds were previously a book subscription service and they are still a big subscription service but they also have a physical store which is so wonderful and i'm so pleased that they have come to edinburgh i actually most recently uploaded another book shop tour of edinburgh sharing some of my favorite book stores including rare birds so if you're interested i will link that down below as well while the description of this video is going to be chock-full and i had to pick up a book so i picked up how to kill your family by bella mackey which just sounds brilliant the back literally just reads on a sticky note to-do list kill my family make a claim on their fortune get away with the above and adopt a dog which was it that was all i needed to sell me plus this is actually the book club read for my friends and eyes book club on zoom so a few friends and i read a book together every six weeks or so and this is one we're going to be reading together so i can't wait to read that with them and that i promise brings us to the end of this book haul yes we've gotten through all the books somehow i need to fit these all on my bootcases but i'm very pleased to have them all here and i'm excited to read them all so hopefully you have enjoyed this video let me know if you've read any of these books or are planning on reading any of these books and what you think about them or if there are just any other books that have come out recently that you're super excited for and you think i should know about until next time go happy reading and i'll see you again soon bye everyone

Channel: Jean Bookishthoughts

Views: 10,884

Rating: 4.9627905 out of 5

Keywords: booktube

Id: fRwb0CRjnR4

Length: 24min 57sec (1497 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 04 2021