You know how you get a selection box at Christmas, with all those favourite chocolates or sweets in, that you can certainly polish off before new year? What if you could get one which was full of stories from one of your favourite authors? Well if Katie Fforde is one of your favourites then this is the book for you.
This book contains everything you need for the Christmas Feast. Of course you have fizz and small eats and you are delighted with four short stories, when I say short they are short, the sort that feature in a magazine. Of course they all have the lovely women that Katie Fforde creates and there is plenty of Christmas cheer to be had for all. It shows you there is no such thing as a perfect Christmas.
As you sit down for your starter, you are invited to read a longer short story – The Undercover Cook. It can be bought separately but you have it in this book too. Emily a journalist has gone undercover to find out what it is really like working with famous chef Theo Milton. She enjoys strangely the cooking but it could be perhaps that the chef is enjoying her – but does he know the real Emily?
Another of Fforde’s short stories, From Scotland with Love takes us into the mains. We need something warm and substantial if we are going out into the snow in Scotland with a grumpy author and a dog about to have puppies.
Staying Away at Christmas is the perfect palate cleanser with the cheeseboard course. Two families thrown together at Christmas because of a double booking. It looks like they are all going to have learned some new Christmas traditions.
Pudding is always one of my favourite course and this year it is with a new short story A Christmas Feast. Imogen moves into her new house just before Christmas and thinks that she will have a perfect quiet time on her own. However, it seems that the Village has other ideas and she ends up having to entertain the village ‘witch’, Miss Wentworth on Christmas Day. It also seems that Miss Wentworth’s nephew decides to spend Christmas with her. It is going to make an interesting Christmas.
If you have room for Coffee and Chocolates, and quite frankly who doesn’t at Christmas this book ends with some more of the magazine style short stories.
Yes this book is a compilation of a lot of Katie Fforde’s shorter stories, but so what. It does contain a sneak preview of her new novel out in 2015, but I have not taken the plunge and read any of that as I otherwise I would be wanting to read it all! This book with it’s contents is all packaged together and makes an excellent gift either to introduce someone to her work or as a gift for yourself. It is not exclusively on kindle either you can hold a real paperback copy too! And that can be wrapped up and placed under the tree.
Thank you to netgalley for a copy of this for review.
Published 4th December in paperback and on kindle.
The Book Jotter 