This week I came across these books:

Love All by Elizabeth Jane Howard. This is her first new novel in nine years! I’m a bit late “discovering” it as it was published in hardback last October, but the paperback is due out on 7 August. It’s set in the West Country in the 1960s with a group of people orgainsing an arts festival. I loved her Cazalet books and have her memoir Slipstream (tbr), so I’ll be looking for Love All in the bookshops.

We Are All Made of Glue by Monica Lewycka was published a couple of weeks ago. I heard her talking about the book with Mariella Frostrup last Sunday on Open Book. It sounds good, covering some serious issues with added comedy and romance. Georgie, a failed novelist becomes a contributor to an adhesives publication. Her husband has left her and she meets her elderly Jewish neighbour Mrs Shapiro. Mrs Shapiro lives in a crumbling, filthy house along with a load of incontinent cats. We Are All Made of Glue combines together such disparate strands as the Arab-Israeli conflict, care for the elderly and different types of glue that binds us all together.