It's Only One Month to Go! Countdown to Launch!

I can’t believe it’s only one month until THE MADEMOISELLE ALLIANCE is published in Australia, and six weeks until it’s published in North America!!! I don’t know about you, but I’ve officially moved into excitement mode. Especially after spending last night talking about the book to a roomful of booksellers, alongside three other incredible authors—Shelley Burr, Emma Pei Yin, and Rachel Paris—whose books you must all read when they come out in the next couple of months.

I’m flying to Melbourne today to talk to booksellers there and it’s so nice to get out from behind my desk for a couple of days to meet the people who recommend books to their customers, the people without whom authors would never reach any readers. It was also lovely to spend a couple of days with my daughter beforehand, and we spent a lot of time lunching, finding French-spiration in Sydney and antique shopping too.

I haven’t done much writing though! And that’s intentional. As you know, I submitted my 2026 manuscript, THE CHATEAU ON SUNSET, to my publishers a couple of weeks ago and my brain needs a break. Adequate rest time between editing and/or starting a new book is super important. So even though I’m not doing much in the way of writing, I consider this time to be doing the work of refilling my creative well, which is essential.

In today’s newsletter, I have a five star book recommendation, a little bit of info about what exactly I’m going to do next in terms of my own books and writing, a TV series recommendation, plus all the latest news about THE MADEMOISELLE ALLIANCE.

Let’s go!

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• For THE MADEMOISELLE ALLIANCE Book Tour Info: Click Here

• For THE MADEMOISELLE ALLIANCE Preorders: Click Here

• To Join THE BLIND ASSASSIN Group Read: Click Here

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Counting Down to Publication

So, there isn’t much to do in the month before publication, is there? The book is written, the hard work is done, so now I can just sit back and relax, right?!

I wish!

I’m doing lots of invisible work at the moment, the kind of work that has to happen behind the scenes so that everything runs smoothly once the book is out. But it’s work that nobody sees the fruits of for quite some time, work that’s part of the job of being a writer and that’s just as important as the writing of the book itself, even though when you look at writers’ newsletters or social media, we spend very little time talking about these aspects of the job.

For example, I’m writing articles about Marie-Madeleine Fourcade or about my inspirations and writing process, articles that will run in different media outlets. I’m being interviewed by journalists who’ll run reviews or articles about me or the book, and I’m talking constantly to my marketing and publicity teams about tour events, graphics for social media, requests from festivals for me to appear on panels. I’m responding to Q&As that will run on various online entertainment sites and asking some of my author friends to be the in conversation hosts for my tour events. I’m updating my website with booking links for all the different events and replying to reader questions about those.

The kind of head space you’re in when you’re jumping from task to task and email to email isn’t the right head space to be in when writing a book. But that doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about writing books. I am! I’m worrying and hoping about whether my editors will like the draft of THE CHATEAU ON SUNSET, I’m wondering how much work will be involved in the structural edit (the answer is usually: a LOT!) And I know that, at some stage, I’ll need to sit down and write another book—but I think I’ll leave that until after the book tour finishes!

Even though I might not start writing another book for a while, I still have to think about what that book might be. I’ll have to pitch the idea to my editors—in fact, I’ll probably pitch a couple of ideas because the book market is a bit all over the place right now and having more than one idea up your sleeve is a smart move. I don’t love that—I’m usually a one-idea-at-a-time kind of writer, but last time I actually managed to pitch SIX(!) ideas before we all decided I should write the idea that’s become THE CHATEAU ON SUNSET (thankfully they loved that one best because I did too).

This time, I’ll be pitching two ideas because that’s all I’ve got. And also because I’m confident that they’re both really strong ideas. When I pitched CHATEAU, it was a bit of crazy idea and different in many ways to what I’ve written before, so I thought I might need a few back ups in case my editors hated it!

But to pitch an idea, I need to have really spent some time thinking about it. I need to be able to encapsulate the essence of it, to make everyone say, wow, I love that! And that means letting it sit right back in my subconscious for weeks, even months, allowing it to grow bigger—letting it transform from a baby idea into at least a toddler, if not a teenager!

I think I’m at that point now. Next week I’ll probably start playing around with paragraphs, I might even write a few pages of each idea, see what voice, if any, comes the most naturally, see whether the characters feel right, see where it might all go. The answer to that is: usually not quite in the direction I was thinking it would!

I’ll keep you posted on how all of that goes over the coming months.

A Five Star Book

I saw Same As It Ever Was by Claire Lombardo around on quite a few “Best Of” lists last year and I was finally able to start reading it (I actually did this one on audio) a few weeks ago.

I’ll be honest—at the start I thought yes, this is amazing. It’s going to be a five star read. Then there was a section that had me wondering whether it would end up being five stars and I began to get a little worried, but then it turned again and was solidly a five star read and will definitely end up on my list of Best Books for this year.

It’s a big, big book, both in terms of the number of pages and the ground it covers. Julia is the main character and she’s fifty-seven when we meet her, married to Mark and with two children. The eldest, Ben, is in his early twenties and her daughter, Alma, is in her final year of high school. Throughout the book, we flashback to see Julia as a child, as a teenager, as a young woman falling in love with Mark, as a new bride, as a new mother to Ben and as a woman trying to find both her feet and herself in the years between giving birth to Ben and getting pregnant with Alma. So we cover a lot of Julia’s life by the time we reach the final page.

Now, Julia isn’t always easy to like. And that’s deliberate, I think, on the part of Claire Lombardo and it’s actually pretty masterful. It reminds me of what author Claire Messud once said to an interviewer who asked her whether she was worried readers would find her protagonist too unlikeable. She shot back by saying (and I’m paraphrasing here) that the interviewer was asking the wrong question. That what mattered wasn’t whether a character was likeable, but whether a character was alive. And yes, that’s it exactly.

Julia is fully alive in this book; she’s contrary and complex and vulnerable and occasionally annoying and often very loveable and she makes mistakes, huge mistakes. She’s far from perfect and you’ll find yourself irritated by her at times. So, she’s just like every other person we know in our lives.

And Lombardo really tests us as readers in this novel. We become aware very early on that Julia’s self-esteem is pretty low. She doesn’t assess people or situations the way someone might typically (although is there a typical way to do that? I’m not sure.) Because of that, she can seem cold occasionally, or self-absorbed; sometimes you want to shake her and say, Good Lord, Julia; everybody in the world is not against you. Lighten up! But instead you keep reading, or I did, because something just doesn’t add up about the way Julia responds and I wanted to find out why—what had happened to Julia to make her this way.

And while Lombardo hints at what that might be, that Julia’s mother wasn’t an especially stable or supportive presence, it isn’t until much later that you understand the full magnitude of this. Now, a different writer might have started with these later scenes between Julia and her mother because they would have been sure to make the reader sympathise with Julia’s situation and with Julia as a character. But it’s so much more interesting to come to know Julia slowly over time the way you might get to know a person in real life. You see her surface first and perhaps you judge her for it, but you spend more time with her and you see everything that she carries inside her and then you want to weep.

And I was weeping at the end. Wow. I truly loved it. If I had one minor criticism, it would be that Julia’s husband Mark was just a little too perfect, gratingly so at a couple of moments. I didn’t always believe in him as much as I believed in Julia. But that was a small matter in an extraordinary book. I’ll be thinking about it for a long time.

Have you read it? What did you think?

A Five Star Watch

You’ve probably all already watched Black Doves but I watch so little TV and I watch so slowly that I’m always late getting to all the good stuff. And this is good stuff!

I would watch anything that Keira Knightley starred in and she’s fabulous in this as the wife of the British Minister for Defence, a woman who also has a completely separate and secret life as a Black Dove, a very specific type of spy. The supporting cast are wonderful too, and for a series about spies and the British government and double lives, there are plenty of laughs. Ella Lily Hyland and Gabrielle Creevy who play two female assassins are perfectly cast and provide some of the comic relief as well as a bit of tenderness, especially towards the end.

So if you find yourself with a few hours to spare and don’t know what to watch, give this series a try. Who else loved it?

A Goodreads Giveaway

Firstly, apologies to those who don’t live in the US. Goodreads only runs giveaways for US residents, which is great for my US-based readers, but not so great for everyone else.

However, if you are in the US, then you might want to enter because Goodreads is giving away 20 copies of THE MADEMOISELLE ALLIANCE, meaning that if you win, you get a copy of the book before everyone else, which is pretty special! Click here to enter. And good luck!

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Once again, this newsletter has turned into an epic narrative so I’ll stop there. I hope I see you at one of my events on tour, some of which are selling out fast. Thanks so much to those of you who’ve already booked tickets—it’s so wonderful to have your support.

And if you’re interested in joining the group read of Margaret Atwood’s THE BLIND ASSASSIN that I’m hosting here on Substack, it’s not too late to start. We’re only reading the first set of chapters now, so please join us. We have people from Argentina, Spain, France, Canada, the USA, Australia—it’s truly a big, international group read with almost fifty people in the group at last count.

Otherwise, I hope you all have a wonderful week—can you believe it’s March in just a few days? Where is 2025 going?!

Please pop into the comments and let me know what you’ve been reading, or anything else that you’d like to comment on from this week’s newsletter. I look forward to hearing from you!