I read Soldiers’ Wives in one delicious go, barely even pausing to take a sip of tea or check my Twitter feed. The tale of three women who are all trying to get to grips with army life, it’s pacy, entertaining and utterly authentic. Fiona Field (a successful novelist who has written 16 books under the names of Kate Lace, Catherine Jones and Annie Jones) is more clued up about ...keep reading
I’ve been a fan of Karen Wheeler’s books about her life in France for ages so it was a pleasure to meet her on Twitter. I loved her latest book, Tout Soul, and I’m an avid reader of her blog, Tout Sweet, too. Her stories of how she hung up her fashion editor’s high heels and left chic west London to start a new life in rural France make me want ...keep reading
My desk is piled high with review books right now. But there’s one particular novel that catches everyone’s attention. It’s Cox, Kate Lace’s latest book, which as well as the saucy title has an even saucier cover and strapline. Most important of all though, it’s a cracking story that deserves to fly off the shelves. Fabulous magazine wittily called the book “Jilly Cooper in a boat,” and it’s the perfect ...keep reading
The writer Kate Lace (aka Catherine Jones) is a great friend of mine. We met years ago at a drinks party thrown by Piatkus Books (who’d just published our first novels). We talked 19 to the dozen all evening, and 15 years later, we do exactly the same every time we meet. Kate has now written 14 novels (including The Chalet Girl and Gypsy Wedding) and two non-fiction books. She’s ...keep reading
Every Saturday the House With No Name blog features a few of the week’s highlights – and there have been plenty of those over the past seven days. My best discovery of the week is a gorgeous new shop in the pretty Oxfordshire market town of Thame. Actually, I can’t take the credit at all. It was my writer friend Kate Lace, author of Gypsy Wedding (a great read, by ...keep reading
I adore literary festivals. So I was over the moon when the organisers of the Chiswick Book Festival asked me to chair a talk on romantic fiction by bestselling writers Katie Fforde and Kate Lace. The session was called My Big Fat Summer of Love (an amalgam of their two latest titles – Summer of Love by Katie Fforde and Gypsy Wedding by Kate Lace) and covered everything from how ...keep reading
Romantic fiction often gets slated – largely due, as Joanna Trollope once said, to snobbery and the genre’s pink covers, embossed lettering and “cartoon drawings of cocktail glasses and handbags and ditsy girls falling off their designer heels.” But so much of the criticism is downright unfair. A total of 25 million romantic novels are bought by readers in the UK every year and romantic fiction boasts some of the ...keep reading