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Christmas Jewellery Advent Calendar Countdown 24pc 2024–Necklace, Earring, Ring
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The Romance Edit: October – Mills & Boon Blog
Welcome to the October issue of The Romance Edit, a monthly series where we share exciting information about brand-new books. The twist? You get to hear about the books from the authors who’ve written them and their Mills & Boon Editors.
Without further ado, let’s find out more about our October releases 📖👀
A few words from author, Adele Buck . . .
What’s more stressful than a new job? How about learning a new job during the hectic, demanding holiday season and finding that the guy who is tasked to train you is a seriously hot grump? Worst of all, it turns out he had a crush on you when you were in high school. Sprinkle in some family dysfunction, spicy romance and a weather disaster, and you have The Anti-Social Season from Mills & Boon Afterglow.
– Adele
Adele’s Editor, John says . . .
Adele Buck writes romantic comedies that feel like modern-day Meg Ryan films, with snappy pacing, witty banter, and the kind of chemistry that makes you believe her characters will stay together forever. Her engaging characters and their meddlesome families will steal your heart and live in their world.
– John
A few words from author, JC Harroway . . .
Do you love a gorgeous setting for a romantic story?
Who doesn’t love an enemies to lovers story? Add in some professional rivalry, a healthy dose of chemistry and the forced proximity of the gorgeous tropical setting of Fiji, and it’s no wonder sparks fly in my latest book, Forbidden Fiji Nights with Her Rival. But knowing that Della and Harvey want such different things when it comes to relationships, there’s no guarantee that a holiday fling can turn into forever…
– J C
JC’s Editor, Charlotte Says . . .
This story is a real masterclass of the enemies-to-lovers trope. JC has such a fabulous way of injecting humour into the delicious tension between her characters, which only heightens the romance! And she balances it so beautifully with the emotion. Readers really are going to be in for a treat with this one.
– Charlotte
A few words from author, Maggie Weston . . .
One Night with the Duchess is a light, heartwarming romance about love, fate, and – perhaps most importantly – choice. Isabelle and Matthew’s love may have been fated from that first scandalous meeting, but their decision to fight for each other despite potential ruin is what makes their story special.
– Maggie
Maggie’s Editor, Hannah Says . . .
If you are looking for a spicy historical romance to fill the Bridgerton void whilst you eagerly await the arrival of Season 4, then look no further than Maggie Weston’s debut for Mills & Boon Historical: One Night with the Duchess! Filled with scandal and seduction, this Victorian love story is sure to thrill readers!
– Hannah
A few words from author, Justine Lewis . . .
If you like mistaken identity, baby animals or swoon worthy castles in the Cotswolds then you’ll love Swipe Right for Mr Perfect. It’s about an art conservator and a secret duke, who are navigating the world of online dating, modern love and ancient obligations. It’s one of the most emotional books I think I’ve written, and I hope you love it as much as I do.
– Justine
Justine’s Editor, Binti Says . . .
If you’re looking for heartfelt, captivating stories, you’ll love Justine Lewis’s writing! Swipe Right for Mr Perfect hooks you in effortlessly right from the start, with vivid characters that are impossible not to root for. This touching story is filled with warmth, emotion and those special ‘all the feels’ moments that make Justine’s books such a joy to read. Perfect for anyone who loves characters that stay with you long after the story ends!
– Binti
A few words from author, Heidi Rice . . .
If you fancy an enemies-to-lovers story with an accidental pregnancy, a British bad girl, a Louisiana poor boy made good, seriously sexy times, a fake relationship (that isn’t fake for long!) and lots of drama set in stunning locations in Lake Como, SF and NYC then you will love After-Party Consequences. This is part 3 of the Billion-Dollar Bet series with Natalie Anderson’s Billion-Dollar Dating Game and Lucy King’s Boss with Benefits!
– Heidi
Heidi’s Editor, Bryony Says . . .
I love Heidi’s books! She’s so good at creating very warm, relatable heroines who meet super sexy heroes with off-the-scale sexual chemistry! Her stories are fast-paced, glamorous sexy romps and this one is one idyllic location after another, and an explosive drama fuelled by an alpha hero with a complicated past that is getting in the way of their happy ever after, so lots of emotion in this story too…
– Bryony
A few words from author, Susan Malley . . .
In One Big Happy Family, Julie is keeping a secret from her adult children – a six-foot tall, handsome, much younger new boyfriend. The kids had other plans for Christmas, so Julie was looking forward to spending Christmas alone with Heath. Then the kids change their minds and want Christmas at the family cabin. With unexpected guests and surprising twists, One Big Happy Family will fill you with the Christmas spirit.
– Susan
Susan’s Editor, Sophia Says . . .
Susan writes stories that feel like a comforting hug. In a Q&A with Mills & Boon, Susan said ‘You’ll see so deeply into the hearts and minds of my characters that they’ll come to feel like friends’ and I couldn’t put this better myself. Susan’s characters leap off the page and draw you into a world of family drama and mishaps, fiercely loyal and FUN friendships and romances that will make you believe that soulmates do exist. All wrapped up in dialogue that will make you cackle out loud and settings you’ll wish you could visit. One Big Happy Family has some of my favourite festive mishaps and a no-nonsense heroine you will immediately root for.
– Sophia
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Anna Aslanyan | Bicycle Thieves
The Pickwick Bicycle Club first met on 22 June 1870, a fortnight after Charles Dickens’s death, at a hotel in Hackney. The club continues to function and the building still stands on the edge of Hackney Downs.
One evening a few years ago, walking across the park, a friend and I saw a woman lying on the path next to her bike. A group of youngsters jumped out of nowhere, she told us, knocked her off and ran away. We helped her to the nearest bench – her ankle was badly hurt – and stayed with her until a policeman arrived. He took our details but didn’t sound very hopeful about catching the culprits.
The number of bike journeys in London increased this year to an estimated 1.33 million a day. My current bike has been my main means of transport for the past four and a half years. Days after I bought it someone tried to drill through the D-lock but a neighbour chased them off. Various parts of it have been stolen; replacing them has cost me more than I paid for the machine in the first place.
‘Thieves are getting smarter,’ a bike mechanic told me. ‘They know what’s expensive and they look for these parts.’ He showed me a pair of gear shifters worth £900, which could be removed relatively easily: you just need to unscrew the stem bolt and cut through the brake cables. That’s what happened to my bicycle last year (my shifters would have fetched much less than £900). The mechanic never parks his bike outside: ‘I don’t even have a lock.’
Reasonably priced parts are increasingly hard to find (Brexit doesn’t help). Someone I know recently spotted a man carrying a bike, its wheels locked together, across a road in North London. He took pictures of the man, who put on a balaclava and went over to a group waiting nearby. ‘There were lots of cars around,’ my informant said. ‘No one intervened.’ He contacted the police but never heard back.
Another mechanic told me that he and his colleagues check the BikeRegister database when they think a bike brought to them might have been stolen. The red flags include mismatched parts, such as an expensive frame with cheap handlebars. Several bicycles have been returned to their owners this way.
One person I spoke to told me that his cargo bike was stolen from a ‘secure’ storage space below his apartment. While he is ‘privileged enough’ to be able to replace it, he said, cycling should be affordable for everyone. ‘Londoners are still much more likely to cycle if they are white, male, non-disabled, younger, from higher income households or live closer to central London,’ according to the latest communication from the London Cycling Campaign. The campaigners are calling on the mayor and councils to ‘make a bike available to every Londoner’ in 2025.
I locked my bike outside Euston Tower before going to see 20,000 by Cameron Griffin, an installation whose title refers to the average number of bikes reported stolen in London every year. Griffin used a selection of distorted locks, as well as his own bicycle, attached to a tall metal structure with a light at the top. Researching the project, he photographed mangled bicycles and collected statements from people who’d had theirs stolen. They spoke of feeling ‘heartbroken’, ‘angry and upset’, ‘saddened and shocked’. (After visiting the exhibition I found my bike intact where I’d left it.)
Losing your bike in London is not the end of the world; having a cycling accident can be. While the number of road fatalities in the city has been decreasing, individual deaths – six cyclists this year – cannot be subsumed in statistics. In September 2023 Harry Webb and Gao Gao were killed in Hackney within days of each other. Transport for London aims to eliminate deaths and serious injuries by 2041. New standards for lorries, which are involved in half of cycling fatalities in London, were introduced in October to improve visibility.
The LCC maintains a map of the capital’s twenty most dangerous junctions. Pembury Circus in Hackney doesn’t make the list though it’s notorious among local cyclists. The council has come up with what Hackney Cycling Campaign calls a ‘dangerous redesign’. The campaigners’ own proposal, supported by Webb’s parents, was rejected. Garmon ap Garth, the campaign co-ordinator, said the approved design ‘prioritises aesthetics over safety’. Rob Coates, who worked on the alternative proposal, described the council’s argument that ‘they need to maximise the “placemaking” at a junction which will carry over ten thousand vehicles per day’ as ‘ludicrous’.
A London policeman is unlikely to ask: ‘Is it about a bicycle?’ One Met officer told me they take bike theft seriously but admitted that most such crimes go unsolved. They sometimes stop people with bikes that appear ‘too expensive’, she said (in other words, people who appear ‘too poor’), and visit shops that ‘look dodgy’, though there isn’t much you can prove about a secondhand bike.
At a webinar last month, Mike Daly of the Met’s Cycle Safety Team referred to a survey conducted among women cyclists in London. More than 90 per cent of respondents have been abused by other road users. Daly encouraged everyone to report any incidents to help the police ‘identify hotspots’ and reallocate resources.
London cyclists are long used to road rage. In a History of the Pickwick Bicycle Club (1905), ‘the Hon. Mr Crushton’ describes an incident from 1876 to demonstrate ‘the feelings of bitter animosity with which riders of cycles were regarded by drivers of horses’. Two cyclists, Mr Gee and Mr Mitchell, tried to overtake a coach. The driver ‘commenced driving across and across the road to prevent Gee passing, and … laid into him with a whip’; the guard ‘was worse still, for this diabolical miscreant was armed with a murderous weapon, consisting of an iron ball attached to the end of a cord, intended no doubt for the destruction of cyclists in general’. Gee escaped unharmed, but ‘Mitchell … and his machine were hurled to the ground, and both dragged for some distance.’ The book doesn’t say where it happened, but it could have been Pembury Circus.
LSE RB year in review: The 12 most popular posts of 2024
What were you reading on LSE Review of Books in 2024? We count down the top 12 most popular posts (nine book reviews, two author Q&As and one reading list) published this year on the blog.
12. Review: The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World. David Graeber. Allen Lane. 2024.
This book is a selection of writings spanning two decades by the renowned anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber. According to Danny Dorling’s review, the book revealed both Graeber’s original, profound impact on anarchist thought and the limitations of his idealist vision for a better society which lacked a practical roadmap for its realisation.
11. Review: The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule. Angela Saini. Fourth Estate. 2024.
Angela Saini explores the origins of patriarchy, debunking biological determinism and highlighting the role of nation building, social norms, and violence in embedding gender inequality into societies. Nicoleta Ciubotariu deemed Saini’s well-argued, comprehensive history of patriarchal power structures is essential reading for sociologists, historians and gender studies researchers as well as more general readers.
10. Q and A with Jonathan White on In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea. Profile Books. 2024.
In the Long Run investigates how changing political conceptions of the future have impacted societies from the birth of democracy to the present. Speaking to Anna D’Alton, author Jonathan White unpacked the impetus for the book which aims to show how beliefs about the future shape expectations of who should hold power, how it should be exercised, and to what ends.
9. Review: Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War. Branko Milanovic. Harvard University Press. 2023.
Branko Milanovic examines how major economic thinkers in the past two centuries – from Smith and Marx to Kuznets – have conceptualised and engaged with inequality. Aleksandr V Gevorkyan found the book a groundbreaking and essential contribution to the history of economic thought and inequalities studies.
8. Review: The Inequality of Wealth: Why it Matters and How to Fix it. Liam Byrne. Bloomsbury. 2024.
Liam Byrne examines the UK’s deep-seated inequality which has channelled wealth away from ordinary people (disproportionately youth and minority groups) and into the hands of the super-rich. While the solutions presented – from boosting wages to implementing an annual wealth tax – are not new, Vamika Goel thought the book synthesised them into a coherent strategy for tackling this critical problem.
7. Q&A with Sam Friedman and Aaron Reeves on Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite. Harvard University Press. 2024.
Drawing on years of extensive research into the complete Who’s Who database, Born to Rule examines the make-up and political views of those with power, influence and extreme wealth in Britain over the past 125 years. Speaking to Anna D’Alton, Sam Friedman and Aaron Reeves explained the findings and trends that emerged through their research, including the great continuity in elite power despite the appearance of movement towards meritocracy.
6. Review: In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea. Jonathan White. Profile Books. 2024.
Jonathan White examines how changing political conceptions of the future have impacted democracy, arguing that contemporary challenges like economic slowdown and climate change have led to reactive politics and short-termism. Though the book proposes ways to revitalise democracy, Aveek Bhattacharya posited we may need to seek beyond our political institutions for strategies to build a more open future.
5. Review: Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis. Alberto Toscano. Verso. 2023.
Alberto Toscano unpacks the rise of contemporary far-right movements that have emerged amid capitalist crises and appropriated liberal freedoms while perpetuating systemic forms of violence. Dimitri Vouros recommended Toscano’s penetrating, theoretically grounded analysis, deeming it an essential resource for understanding and confronting the resurgence of reactionary ideologies.
4. Review: Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises that Shaped Globalization. Harold James. Yale University Press. 2023.
Harold James explores major market crashes from the last 170 years, examining their causes (whether they were demand or supply crashes) and their impacts on globalisation. Kyle Scott felt the book shared valuable, engaging analysis of these economic crises, though its apparent aim to appeal to both general and specialist audiences fell somewhat short.
3. Reading List: Seven recommended reads on integrity in climate action
As COP29 kicked off in Baku, Azerbaijan in November, Policy Analyst the LSE Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment Tiffanie Chan compiled a list of seven eye-opening books that reveal why integrity is essential for meaningful climate action.
2. Review: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth. Ingrid Robeyns. Allen Lane. 2023.
In the face of soaring wealth inequality, Ingrid Robeyns calls for restrictions on individual fortunes. Stewart Lansley judged that Robeyns puts forward a strong moral case for imposing wealth caps, though how to navigate the political and practical hurdles involved remains unclear.
1. Review: The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, and Warps Our Economies. Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington. Penguin Press. 2024.
Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington claim that our overreliance on the consulting industry has negative consequences for society, inhibiting knowledge transfer and corporate and political accountability. Ivan Radanović recommended the book for exposing how consultancies’ goal of “creating value” may not align with addressing major issues such as climate change and its convincing call for greater transparency and a revitalised public sector.
Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image: Andrii Yalanskyi on Shutterstock.
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