True Whit: Designing a Life of Style, Beauty and Fun – Whitney Port

True Whit: Designing a Life of Style, Beauty and Fun
Whitney Port

Fashion icon and MTV mega-star Whitney Port shares personal stories, beauty and fitness secrets and invaluable advice on everything girls need to know to start out their independent lives in style. Intimate, honest and funny, this is Whitney Port revealed. Whitney shares her philosophy on fashion, beauty, romance and careers, balancing it all in this conversational guide for twenty-somethings setting up on their own, something she knows plenty about…

MTV’s The City followed Whitney Port as she moved from Los Angeles to New York City and learned to navigate her new life in the Big Apple. From backstabbing co-workers and bitchy bosses to cheating boyfriends and a daring new career in fashion design, Whitney – the ‘everygirl’ – handled it all with grace and style. For the first time ever, through personal stories and private snapshots, Whitney shares the true reality of being an emerging fashion designer, including her creative process, sketches and fabrics. Beautifully illustrated with Whitney’s private photos, and with advice from her friends Lauren Conrad (star of The Hills) and Kelly Cutrone (The City), this book is everything a girl could possibly need to figure out what she wants from her life, and how to make it happen.

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Win Carole Matthews’ new book – Summer Daydreams!

Halfway through May and yet the weather is still more suited to ducks than a picnic in the park. Are you bored of hearing everyone moan about the “wettest drought ever”? Thought so! Here at JC, we’re more than ready to start the summer – so we’re kicking off the sunshine season with a little competition. (Now all we need is the sun…)

We’ve got 5 copies of Carole Matthews’ new book, Summer Daydreams, to give away. The novel was inspired by the true life story of Helen Rochfort, fabulous handbag designer and close friend of Carole Matthews. Helen was working in a chip shop before she decided to follow her dreams of designing. Her handbags are now a celeb favourite, seen on the likes of Holly Willoughby and Sienna Miller – but success isn’t always easy, and Matthews has turned her story into a fabulous summer read. Perfect for lying on the beach, or just relaxing in your garden with a cold drink…

What if you had always dreamed of something more…?

Nell McNamara has a happy life: her boyfriend Olly adores her, their four-year-old daughter Petal is the centre of their world and Nell has a steady job in the local chip shop. When the chippy needs a makeover, Nell jumps at the chance to unleash the creativity fizzing inside her.

Inspired by what she can achieve – and encouraged by the best friends a girl can have – Nell is determined to try something new. Waving goodbye to the chip shop, she starts up a new business making her own line of must-have handbags, which are soon flying off the shelves!

It seems Nell’s dreams are finally coming true, but her success doesn’t come without a price. Before too long, Nell has to ask herself if it’s really possible to have it all…

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Into the Darkest Corner – Elizabeth Haynes

Into the Darkest Corner
Elizabeth Haynes

Catherine has been enjoying single life for long enough to know a good catch when she sees one. Gorgeous, charismatic and spontaneous, Lee seems almost too perfect to be true. But there is a dark side to him and his erratic, controlling and sometimes frightening behaviour means that Catherine is increasingly isolated. Driven into the darkest corner of her world, she plans a meticulous escape.

Four years later, struggling to overcome her demons, Catherine dares to believe she might be safe from harm. Until one phone call changes everything…

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Taking Charge – Mandy Baggot

Taking Charge
Mandy Baggot

Is going back Robyn’s only way forward?

American-born Robyn Matthers is going home. With her dad in hospital, his roadhouse in ruins and the ice hockey team slipping down the league, she needs to take charge. But does she have the strength to do it?

Cole Ryan is a hockey player on a personal mission. He’s tall, dark, hot and Robyn’s noticed! But can she trust her feelings – or his? And what will Cole do when he finds out the truth about her?

With an ill father, a trailer trash step-mom and ex-boyfriend Brad desperate for another chance, does Robyn have time to contemplate a relationship? Can she start again? Does she really want to? And can two people really fall in love in three days?

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The Senator’s Wife – Sue Miller

The Senator’s Wife
Sue Miller

Maybe some people just like to keep things private. Secret, I guess you’d say.

Love came late to Meri, but in a rush: she met Nathan at thirty-six, he moved in a month later, and they married a month after that. Now they are moving to New England and a house of their own – a new life that Meri is not sure she even wants. She loves her husband, but feels there may be trouble ahead.

Nathan, however, is boyishly excited that their next-door neighbour is the eminent Senator Tom Naughton, a political hero of his, now in his seventies. The Senator is nowhere to be seen, but Meri strikes up an unexpected friendship with his wife, the elegant Delia, sensing that she has much to learn from her – about marriage, love and motherhood. But soon she comes close to a terrible breach of trust that could ruin everything.

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Kissing the Cotton Clouds – Michela O’Brien

Kissing the Cotton Clouds
Michela O’Brien

When arty Livy falls for her sister’s boyfriend, she knows her dreams are unlikely to come true…

Sensitive Seth thinks he has hit the jackpot when the girl of his dreams finally looks his way…

While laidback Aidan is every girl’s hero.

Fast forward twenty-five years as carefree youth turns into adulthood responsibilities, relationships begin and end, music and fashion change, and life moves on with its successes, failures and heartaches. As the friends grow up, they discover life rarely turns out the way you imagined it at fifteen.

The rites of passage through years are eerily familiar to every 1980s teenager in this moving, heartfelt novel.

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The Love Letter – Fiona Walker

The Love Letter
Fiona Walker

Can fate be signed, sealed and delivered?

When Allegra North parted from first love Francis after a decade together, she poured all her regret into a letter. He didn’t reply. A year later, her job brings her back to the beautiful Devon coast where romance first blossomed and she hopes that they can start a new chapter.

As summer storms circle, the exes juggle rebellious parents, vengeful family members and a very reluctant celebrity author who holds the key to everybody’s future…

The Love Letter is a wonderfully warm comedy of mistaken identities, new loves and old flames.

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Swallow the Swell – Keddy Flett

Swallow the Swell
Keddy Flett

Meet Keddy Flett, a beer-bellied twenty-six year old man who needs change in his life. Desperately. And so, with more neuroses than Woody Allen to his disadvantage, Keddy and his Chinese girlfriend Poppy Lin flee Sydney, Australia, in favour of South America.

However, Keddy is about to encounter his demons in the most awkward, tense and socially paralysing way possible – manifested in ‘Bathroom Anxiety’ – in the fear that, at any second, his body will give out and he’ll be stuck in the middle of shitstorm.

Swallow the Swell invites you to hitch a ride in the distorted, sarcastic and hilarious crevasses of Keddy’s brain as he unlocks the mystery to his uncommon condition.

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The Thoughts & Happenings of Wilfred Price, Purveyor of Superior Funerals – Wendy Jones

The Thoughts & Happenings of Wilfred Price, Purveyor of Superior Funerals
Wendy Jones

Everyone has to make decisions about love. Wilfred Price, overcome with emotion on a sunny spring day, proposes to a girl he barely knows at a picnic. The girl, Grace, joyfully accepts and rushes to tell her family of Wilfred’s intentions. But by this time Wilfred has realised his mistake. He does not love Grace. On the verge of extricating himself, Wilfred’s situation suddenly becomes more serious when Grace’s father steps in.

Up until this point in his life, Wilfred’s existence has been blissfully simple, and the young undertaker seems unable to stop the swirling mess that now surrounds him. To add to Wilfred’s emotional turmoil, he thinks he may just have met the perfect girl for him. As Wilfred struggles in an increasingly tangled web of expectation and duty, love and lies, Grace reveals a long-held secret that changes everything…

Wendy Jones’s charming first novel is a moving depiction of love and secrecy, set against the rural backdrop of a 1920s Welsh village, and beautifully told.

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Pear Shaped – Stella Newman

Pear Shaped
Stella Newman

If you found yourself glued to David Nicholls’s One Day or belting out the lyrics to Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black then you’ll love this book.

Girl meets boy.
Girl loses boy.
Girl loses mind.

Sophie Klein walks into a bar one Friday night and her life changes. She meets James Stephens: charismatic, elusive, and with a hosiery model ex who casts a long, thin shadow over their burgeoning relationship. He’s clever, funny and shares her greatest pleasure in life – to eat and drink slightly too much and then have a little lie down. Sophie’s instinct tells her James is too good to be true – and he is.

An exploration of love, heartbreak, self-image, self-deception and lots of food. Pear Shaped is in turns smart, laugh-out-loud funny and above all, recognisable to women everywhere.

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Win Fiona Walker’s new book – The Love Letter!

The Easter weekend is nearly upon us, we’re celebrating with a little giveaway! As a thank you to all our wonderful visitors and subscribers, we’re giving away  5 copies of Fiona Walker’s new book, The Love Letter.

Fiona Walker has been described as the “Jilly Cooper of the Cosmo generation”, writing consistently popular novels that include large casts, multiple twists, lots of action and plenty of comedy. The Love Letter isn’t released until May 3rd, but our five winners will get their copy before anyone else. Lucky!

When Allegra North parted from first love Francis after a decade together, she poured all her regret into a letter. He didn’t reply. A year later, her job brings her back to the beautiful Devon coast where romance first blossomed and she hopes that they can start a new chapter.

A family crisis fans the old flames from the start, and sparks fly when a chance encounter makes Allegra question whether Francis was ever really on the same page. As summer storms circle, the exes juggle rebellious parents, vengeful family members, and a very reluctant celebrity author who holds the key to everybody’s future.

Just when Allegra thinks she can’t blot her copy book any further, she finds herself held to ransom by her own love letter. Should she read between the lines, or is the writing on the wall?

If you love the sound of the book, Walker has also released a short ebook as a prequel to the story, called Sealed with a Kiss. It explains the back story behind Allegra and Francis, and is the perfect taster before you get lost in The Love Letter…

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99 Reasons Why – Caroline Smailes

99 Reasons Why
Caroline Smailes

99 Reasons, 11 endings, your pick.

Kate isn’t like other 22 year olds. She’s got a job to do for her Uncle Phil. Each day, she spies on The Kevin Keegan Day Nursery across the road from her bedroom window, writing down all of the comings and goings in her notebooks. That’s how she spots her little girl in the pink coat. She likes her, and it isn’t long before Kate asks her mam to get her for her. Plans are made.

But then, quite unexpectedly, Kate flashes her breasts out her bedroom window at the little girl’s father. And that’s the reason that nothing will ever be the same again…

There is no one ending to Kate’s story, instead there are eleven possible outcomes, 9 of which you can navigate through your e-reading device. Each is different, and each exposes a little more of Kate’s utterly wonky world.

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Call The Midwife – Jennifer Worth

Call The Midwife: A True Story Of The East End In The 1950s
Jennifer Worth

Jennifer Worth came from a sheltered background when she became a midwife in the Docklands in the 1950s. The conditions in which many women gave birth just half a century ago were horrifying, not only because of their grimly impoverished surroundings, but also because of what they were expected to endure.

But while Jennifer witnessed brutality and tragedy, she also met with amazing kindness and understanding, tempered by a great deal of Cockney humour. She also earned the confidences of some whose lives were truly stranger, more poignant and more terrifying than could ever be recounted in fiction.

Attached to an order of nuns who had been working in the slums since the 1870s, Jennifer tells the story not only of the women she treated, but also of the community of nuns (including one who was accused of stealing jewels from Hatton Garden) and the camaraderie of the midwives with whom she trained.

Funny, disturbing and incredibly moving, Jennifer’s stories bring to life the colourful world of the East End in the 1950s. Continue reading »

Out of Oz – Gregory Maguire

Out of Oz
Gregory Maguire

Years have gone by and the once peaceful and prosperous Land of Oz is knotted with social unrest. The Wicked Witch has long passed into legend, her boy Liir and his wife are in exile, and their daughter Rain in hiding. Even Galinda Upland is under house arrest and the Cowardly Lion on the run from the law. Then there is the matter of Dorothy, and the rumours of her return. The Emerald City mounts an invasion of Munchkinland and chaos reigns. Rain must come of age; it is up to her to take up her broom – and her legacy – in an Oz wracked by war.

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