The Overflowing Library

  Wynter’s Trees is the home of Christmas. For the people of Wynmouth it’s where they get their family Christmas tree, and where Christmas truly comes to life. But for Liza Wynter, it’s a millstone around her neck. It was her father’s pride and joy but now he’s gone, she can’t have anything to do with it. Until her father’s business partner decides to retire and she must go back to handle the transition to his son Ned. When Liza arrives, she discovers a much-loved business that’s flourishing under Ned’s stewardship. And she’s happy to stay and help for the Christmas season, but then she has other plans. But will the place where she grew up make her change her mind? And can it weave its Christmas cheer around her heart…? Once again I am delighted to be part of the blog tour to celebrate the release of Heidi's latest book. I love Heidi's book. They ooze charm and an afternoon spent with one is always a treat. I picked this up after a particularly rubbish week and reading it just...

 I am really pleased to be taking park in the blog tour for Penny Parkes new book home. As you'll see below I really loved this book so much so it is a strong contender for my book of the year. Anna Wilson travels the world as a professional housesitter – stepping into other people’s lives - caring for their homes, pets and sometimes even neighbours. Living vicariously.   But all Anna has ever really wanted is a home of her own – a proper one, filled with family and love and happy memories. If only she knew where to start.   Growing up in foster care, she always envied her friends their secure and carefree lives, their certainty and confidence. And, while those same friends may have become her family of choice, Anna is still stuck in that nomadic cycle, looking for answers, trying to find the courage to put down roots and find a place to call home. My thoughts I love Penny Parkes books. I pretty much binge read her previous series back to back and was therefore incredibly...

This past month there have been four stand out reads for me in a month. I loved them all. The sight of you by Holly Miller Joel is afraid of the future. Since he was a child he's been haunted by dreams about the people he loves. Visions of what's going to happen - the good and the bad. And the only way to prevent them is to never let anyone close to him again. Callie can't let go of the past. Since her best friend died, Callie's been lost. She knows she needs to be more spontaneous and live a bigger life. She just doesn't know how to find a way back to the person who used to have those dreams. Joel and Callie both need a reason to start living for today. And though they're not looking for each other, from the moment they meet it feels like the start of something life-changing. Until Joel has a vision of how it's going to end . . . This book was incredible. It is one of those books that I can't even really say that much about because I worry about spoilin...

Long time readers might have noticed that I've struggled to get on here and blog about much for a good long while. Last year was obviously an awful one for everyone. I am very lucky in a lot of ways that my family and friends have all remained safe over the pandemic but I did lose one of my lovely friends under the saddest circumstances last summer and it has and continues to hit me hard. Added to that the usual pressures that come with my day job have just intensified exponentially over the last year. All of those things combined has led to me struggling to keep to any kind of decent sleep pattern and thus my ability to plough through books and write about them in any kind of coherent fashion has severally diminished compared to the halcyon days when I started blogging and was getting through and reviewing 200+ books a year. So here we are in 2021 and into my 11th year of blogging and I'm hoping this is a new start and with me making a proper return to my little blog and findi...

 I am delighted to be taking part in the blog tour for Heidi's latest book today. Fliss Brown has grown up living with her mother on the Rossi family’s Italian fruit farm. But when her mother dies, Fliss finds out she has a family of her own, and heads back to England with Nonna Rossi’s recipe for cherry and almond tart and a piece of advice: connect with your family before it is too late… Fliss discovers that her estranged grandfather owns a fruit farm himself, on the outskirts of Wynbridge, and she arrives to find a farm that has fallen into disrepair. Using her knowledge gleaned from working on the Rossi farm and her desire to find out more about her past, Fliss rolls her sleeves up and gets stuck in. But what will she discover, and can she resurrect the farm’s glory days and find a taste of home…? Heidi's books are the sort of books that I have come to crave over the past few years. You start a new one knowing from the outset that they are going to be lovely and whilst they...

 Today I am delighted to have a guest post from author Joe Brady talking about the inspiration for the brilliant new graphic novel No Country The reasons for writing No Country were the situation with refugees from Syria, the nativist reaction to it in the UK and elsewhere, and what I felt was a general empathy deficit around the whole crisis. The stories of refugees have filled the news in the UK for years, and they are so powerfully compelling. But when looking at them from our perspective, they all have the same narrative bias: people fleeing somewhere far away to come here. In this light, even the most sympathetic news stories could be read as saying to viewers that the UK is the destination. It establishes the illusion that this is the good place, and other places are falling apart. It creates an ‘us’ and a ‘them’ with a clear hierarchy - it makes us seem better than them, more successful than them, and gives us a permission structure to feel superior to other nations, and the...