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“I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew I had begun.” – Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Oh, Mr. Darcy. Will any flesh and blood man ever live up to tall, dark and fictional you?

If you’re a Pride and Prejudice fan, you will absolutely love this Mr. Darcy shirt from Katie’s Thornfield Hall shop on Etsy. All of her designs are hand screen printed using eco-friendly water-based inks and feature beloved literary quotes. This particular passage – one of our favourites – is from shortly after Elizabeth and Darcy become engaged in the book. They are talking about how they fell in love and she asks him when he first knew ... this is his answer.

Step it up, real life guys. Seriously.

Feasting on Romantic Comedy – The Walsh Family and Their Love for Cornettos

Oh how I adore the Walsh Family. They're quirky, eccentric and there is never, ever a dull moment in this Irish household.

The Walsh family, for those that don't know, are the rather fabulous creations of author Marian Keyes. I say creations, but I know they're real really. 

Mammy Walsh, Dad Walsh and five sisters.

Claire told her story through Marian Keyes's first novel, Watermelon. She was married and lived in London. Alas, just as she had finished giving birth to her first child, her husband James announced that he is leaving her. So back home Claire went, with baby, into the bosom of her family. 

In Rachel's Holiday, Rachel is living and partying hard in New York. But when she takes a drug overdose, and is suspected of doing so deliberately, she is brought back to Ireland from New York faster than you can say Cornettos. 

Maggie, in Angels, is the quiet, safe and reliable one in the family. She was a good girl. Some, i.e her sisters, might even consider her dull.  So when she decides to leave her husband and move to Hollywood everyone is a little bit shocked.

Novelicious Chats To...Sarah Vaughan

Sarah’s debut novel, The Art of Baking Blind, about the hunt to find a new Mrs Eaden – domestic goddess of the 1960s – explores why we bake. Here, she talks about her inspiration for the book and how other women writers have impacted her style.

Where do you find inspiration for your books?

The germ for the Art of Baking Blind came in the aftermath of the Great British Bake Off in 2011. The winner, an Essex housewife filmed making cricket teas for her sons, had a husband who was in prison for his part in a £60m money-laundering racket. I started thinking about the disparity between appearance and reality; about how everyone has a “back story” and how the darkest secrets may haunt the most apparently unassuming lives – something I knew from my old job as a news reporter for 13 years on Fleet St. At the same time, I was doing a lot of baking with my children, then six and nearly four. I wondered why I – and many other women I knew – invested it with so much emotion: I wasn’t just making a cake; I was nurturing my family. So, the inspiration came from a news report; a cultural phenomenon and some self analysis. It took a while before I summoned up the nerve to try and write about it though!

Book two is inspired by a certain place – an area of north Cornwall – and the emotions that it provokes in me. I’ve also dreamed the plot of a future book – again inspired by a news story that resonated with my own experience at university. Features in colour supplements, such as “What I’m really thinking” and “Experience”  in the Guardian weekend, or “Relative Values” in the ST magazine, are good sources of ideas but most of them come from just being inquisitive about what shapes people’s lives.

Can you tell us a little about your average writing day?

Both children are now at primary school so, after walking them to school, I try to work from 9.15 to 3, except on Tuesdays when I have a long day. In the immediate run-up to publication, I’ve been spending far too much time on social media, but usually I try to get a solid four to five hours of writing done, with a couple of swims a week thrown in to counteract sitting at a desk. Closer to deadline, I can see this won’t be maintained; the night before I submitted to publishers, I was filing changes up until midnight. At the moment, I’m also catching up with emails and social media in the evenings.

When you are writing, do you use any famous people or people you know as inspiration?

Famous people, not at all; people I know, I really hope not. In fact I’m paranoid people will see themselves in it and have consciously tried to ensure I’ve never written about anyone I know. Nora Ephron famously said: “Everything is copy” but everything is only potentially copy: you have a choice and a responsibility not to use details and incidents involving your family and friends. Having said that, there are elements of me in some of the characters, as is inevitable with any first novel, I guess.

What is your favourite Women’s Fiction book of all time and why?

I don’t think I can narrow it down to anyone book. When I was nine, my mum gave me Jane Eyre, and I can remember that having a huge effect because Mrs Rochester was so vivid she terrified me. When I was ten, I won a writing prize and she made me buy a set of Jane Austen: I was about 13 before I read them and remember being bowled over by the satire; her use of free indirect speech (though I didn’t know it was called this at the time); and her confidence in creating sometimes-unattractive heroines: Emma, for instance, or Catherine in Northanger Abbey.

Review – After the Honeymoon by Janey Fraser

Reviewed by Susan Lobban

Your honeymoon is something you look forward to ... right? Well, not in the case of these two couples.

Emma has been with Tom for forever and doesn’t see the need to marry. Emma lives for their kids, so when Tom keeps on about being a complete family he may have a point. Just because they have kids together is no reason to get married though, then, to add to insult to injury, a surprise honeymoon has been organised – no kids allowed!

Winston, meanwhile, is a well-known breakfast fitness star, so when he marries Melissa after a whirlwind romance, he is determined to have a honeymoon away from prying eyes. Melissa is reluctant to leave her children behind, but surely they can manage without her for a week?

Rosie is the owner of Villa Rosa – the couple’s honeymoon destination. After fleeing England years ago, pregnant and alone, she has made a home for herself and her son Jack in Greece. Usually she welcomes her guests with open arms, but these couples may just ruin her peaceful idyll.

After the Honeymoon follows two couples on the lead up to their weddings, but instead of focusing on their big day, we are treated to what goes on during their honeymoon and beyond. Right from the start, cracks are shown in both relationships. Emma and Winston have doubts about their upcoming nuptials, but these are pushed aside to please one another and this eventually leads to disaster on what should be the most romantic holidays of their lives.

Liz Fenwick's Top Five Writing Tips

1. Enjoy the process. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that but it’s so important.

2. Read. Read. Read. And then read some more. Make sure you read widely from magazines (filling the well for women’s fiction topics), newspapers (filling that well again), your own genre and others – history, biography, literary and everything else. It’s all storytelling and it can teach you so much.

3. If you have been away from your work for a while, rewrite it by hand. It helps to connect you to the story again. I also write out tricky passages as well as some of my more descriptive ones by hand.

4. Listen to your work. I use text to speech software that reads the work to me – you can’t hide from a clunky sentence or a missing word that way. The computer only reads what is on the page. It also gives you the necessary distance to edit.

Manuscript Wishlist – Literary Agent Felicity Blunt of Curtis Brown

For today’s Manuscript Wishlist we’re welcoming Felicity Blunt, literary agent at Curtis Brown, who has the inside scoop on what she’s currently hoping to find in her slush pile.

I originally studied law and trained as a barrister before becoming an intern at Curtis Brown in 2005. I fell in love with the world of books and have worked there ever since, becoming an agent and building a list of debut writers. I represent both fiction and non-fiction clients but my non-fiction list is predominantly cookery. You can submit to me easily through the Curtis Brown website, we’ve hopefully made it easy for you to send in material and not fear it lost to the postman!

Fiction Clients: amongst them Rosamund Lupton, the Estate of Daphne du Maurier, Tamar Cohen, debut writers Renee Knight (Disclaimer) and Jessica Cornwell (The Serpent Papers) both to publish next year.

I find describing what I am looking for one of the hardest parts of my job. My taste, like every agent’s, is somewhat amorphous, ever-growing and subjective. I love reading a huge range of fiction and across many genres, from Hilary Mantel to Lee Child, and the authors I represent are all on my list because I think they write beautiful and compelling fiction.

I love working editorially with debut writers and am always on the look out for work that combines a distinctive voice with a strong and original story. I’m definitely drawn to books with a dark undertone. I’m lucky enough to work on the Estate of Daphne du Maurier and I think both Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel are masterclasses in how to reveal small details that build to an unsettling and disturbing whole. I love psychological suspense or thrillers, particularly where peril or risk is introduced to a domestic setting. Unreliable narrators are now, particularly since Gone Girl, a well-trodden thriller device but when used in original and different ways can create a richly multi-layered story telling experience. When I read Rosamund Lupton’s Sister for the first time I was completely immersed in Beatrice’s quest for the truth about her sister and in that case the twist in the narrative rather than being a trick played on the reader went to the heart of the main character’s sacrifices and how she had sustained herself till the end of her story. With a book like that you have both intricate and delicate plotting coupled with beautiful imagery and writing – something that elevates the story into a word-of-mouth reading experience.

My Writing Room by Matt Dunn

While I can (and do) write anywhere – cafés, trains, park benches, and aeroplanes (where I’m generally the most productive given the lack of internet access), the only place where I have an actual writing room (well, study, though as you’ll see from the photo, it’s actually more of an open cupboard) is in my flat in Barcelona. I spend part of the year here (the city was the inspiration for my short story in Sunlounger 2), and in between running along the nearby beach, the occasional game of tennis, or enjoying Barcelona’s fabulous weather/architecture/shopping/bars and restaurants, this is where my real work gets done (and by real work, I include time spent on Twitter and Facebook etc. It’s marketing, right?).

The Secret Dreamworld of An Aspiring Author – How Do You Plan Yours?

By Anna Bell

Having finally submitted my work in progress to my editor, I now get to start on a brand new series of books. Yes, the rational person inside me says I should probably take a holiday, but the writer inside me got excited by the prospect of a blank page and couldn’t wait to dive in. Whereas I’d usually sketch a rough plan of my work and get cracking, this time, now that I’m trying to negotiate a new contract, I’ve got to plan my novel in a lot more detail.

When an author comes to the end of a book deal with their publisher, there is usually a clause which gives the existing publisher an exclusivity period to consider the author’s next work. Unlike when you're submitting your unpublished work, this time a publisher doesn’t expect you to have written the book. Instead, they tend to request a full detailed synopsis. Given how much I hate writing synopses, I’d almost rather give them a finished book.

10 Novels to Lose Your Audiobook Virginity To This Summer (plus a giveaway!)

Most readers experience their audiobook conversion on long car journeys, especially during the summer holidays when lengthy road trips, ‘are we there yets?’ and backseat brawls are at their peak. With the mere click of a button, your expedition can be transformed by good, old-fashioned family listening time and some lively book discussion once the story is over, too.

Think you don’t have time for audiobooks? Here are our favourite ways to listen to novels – even when we’re not driving – as well as our top ten picks for summer (and a competition!).

 1.  While exercising

 2.  Cooking dinner

 3.  Washing dishes

 4.  Folding laundry

 5.  Cleaning

 6.  Showering and getting ready for the day

 7.  Food shopping

 8.  Gardening

 9.  While working on craft projects

10. On long, pretty countryside walks or while window shopping in town

Sold? Ready to put some of your untapped reading time to good use?

The Book That Changed My Life: Victoria Fox Picks The Magus by John Fowles

Victoria Fox is the author of bestselling bonkbusters and her latest novel, Power Games, is out now. She told Novelicious why The Magus by John Fowles had such a big impact on her, and why it made her realise what - as a writer - she wanted to offer her readers. 

When I was 14, I won some book vouchers in an English competition. Mum and I went shopping and one of the books I chose was The Magus. I chose it because it looked different to everything else I’d read, I liked the fact it was massive (it made me feel intellectual) and it was set in Greece. Because it was massive, I put off reading it for some time, and finally got to it a year later. I was at boarding school, and my abiding memory of The Magus is of pretending to be asleep when the house matron came in, then flicking the lamp back on as soon as she’d left. I was addicted to this book. This book is addictive.

It’s about human psychology. Nicholas, a teacher, moves abroad to escape his problems and meets the enigmatic Conchis, whose slippery Kurtz-like conduct creates a twisting, turning labyrinth of second guesses and red herrings that soon forces Nicholas to question the line between reality and imagination – if indeed there is a line. Before The Magus I didn’t realise that a book could be both action adventure and philosophical drama. Fowles raises themes that blew my 15-year-old mind, but it’s all wrapped up in a nail-biting spider’s web of a plot.

Ten Books...Beach Reads

Hurrah! Holiday time is finally upon us so I've been scrolling through the #bookadayuk hashtag, which is now being hosted by Doubleday Books UK, for some inspired beach reads. From books that are long enough to last the entire holiday to shorter books about summer romantic adventures, there are a variety of novels to choose from. I do love this hashtag. It provides so much bookish inspiration – perfect for us book nerds. 

1. The Lemon Grove by Helen Walsh – If you're online, and you must be to read this, chances are you've heard of this book. There has been a massive buzz about it. It follows the story of a married woman who falls for her stepdaughter's boyfriend while on a family holiday in Majorca.

2. One Summer: America 1927 by Bill Bryson – A forgotten summer of 1927. The summer with a booming stock market, which saw the birth of talking pictures, plus a devastating flood of the Mississippi and a sensational murder trial. All brought back to life by Bill Bryson.

3. Ice Cream Girls by Dorothy Koomson – When Poppy and Serena were teenagers they witnessed a tragic event and were consequently given the title of The Ice Cream Girls by the media. Now, as adults, Poppy wants to set the record straight however Serena wants to keep the past in the past. But some secrets don't want to remain hidden...

4. Casting Off by Emma Bamford – This is a memoir about a journalist who decided to escape the rat race and go off on an adventure. Having answered an advert on the internet for 'crew wanted', she flies to Borneo to live on a boat with a man she had never met before. And his cat. This is the book about her subsequent adventures.

5. Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres – This novel is set in the early days of the Second World War. Captain Antonio Corelli is an Italian officer in command. It isn't long before he and the doctor's daughter, Pelagia, are having an affair. 

News – JK Rowling Reveals Crime Books are to Outnumber Harry Potter Series

JK Rowling has revealed plans to write more crime novels, published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, than she did for her beloved Harry Potter series.

Speaking on stage at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival with fellow author Val McDermid, Rowling was asked whether it was true that was going to write seven books under her alias.

“It's not seven,” she replied. “It's more. It's pretty open ended.”

This is quite different to her Harry Potter series, which was always set to culminate with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Firmly embracing her male crime writer nom de plume – with a brand new website, social media accounts and suit and tie for special appearances no less – the author has already penned two crime novels to acclaim. The second of the Cormoran Strike detective novels, The Silkworm, was published in June as Galbraith, a pseudonym originally utilised to keep her real identity secret.

Write Your Novel – Concerning Subplots

I read this on Neil Gaiman's tumblr last week:

I’m not sure I believe in subplots. There’s just the story. Sometimes it’s a big thing that moves forward; sometimes, like a river, it has streams running into it. But it should all be part of the same story, or what’s the point?

Despite the unusual start ('Subplots – The New Unicorns'), his point is an excellent one. You shouldn't think of subplots as something different or separate in your book. If they aren't an intrinsic part of your story then they don't belong.

In my first attempt at a novel, I didn't think much about subplots, I wrote the story instinctively and my only goal was to finish. It was dreadful for many reasons, but the lack of thought-out subplotting was the least of them.

In my second novel, I consciously added three subplots. I had been studying novels and novel-writing enough by then to know that I ought to have them so in they went. One of the (many) problems with that book was that the subplots didn't support the main story. You could take them out and the book wouldn't have been poorer for it, merely shorter.

During the planning, dreaming and first draft stages, try to stay flexible about what constitutes your main plot and what is a subplot. Rather than thinking in terms of 'minor characters' and 'major' or 'main plot' and 'subplot', try to think of the story in its entirety as a living and breathing entity. Every person, every detail and every event as vital and alive.

Review – OMG Baby by Emma Garcia

Reviewed by Victoria Sutton

I was immediately struck by the beautiful glossy pink cover of OMG Baby! and then, when I noticed the author was Emma Garcia, I was so thrilled having previously read, reviewed and loved her debut Never Google Heartbreak. It was only once I had started reading that I realised OMG Baby! was actually a follow up to her first book and I was about to find out what happened next in the story of Viv and Max…

Viv and Max return from Spain, together at last, but with an unexpected baby on the way. This is really going to test their fledgling relationship as they battle with money worries, work pressures and Viv’s crazy mother. Are our much-loved hero and heroine going to make it? I must admit that it was with some trepidation that I read on, unwilling to believe in anything other than ‘happy ever after’…

It isn’t long before we are reintroduced to some faces from the past in the shape of Viv’s old work colleagues. There is Christie, who is setting up business with after the success of their ‘Ou est Max’ campaign, and internet genius Mike, who Viv became unlikely friends with in Never Google Heartbreak; he is helping them with the technical side of things. Viv’s nana, Eve, is touring the world as a newlywed and although she is away we do hear from her through her letters and phone calls with Viv.