Bookends Gets Floral!

To celebrate the glorious floral festivity of this week’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show, we’ve taken inspiration from the gorgeous gardens and fabulous flower-beds to create a list of our favourite flowery reads…

Whether you’re a green-fingered plant-lover, or just a fan of floral finishes – we’ve got a flower-themed book sure to tickle your fancy!

How Not to Kill Your Plants by Nik Southern

Hands up if you’ve ever killed a plant?

Yep, me too.

It’s no secret that we’ve all become plant obsessed, but do we really understand how to look after them?

How Not To Kill Your Plants is about taking the hocus-pocus out of plants and flowers, and enabling you to understand a plant’s needs in order to know where to place and how to style them… but most importantly, how to keep them alive.

Watering can down – it’s time to go back to the roots.

The Lavender House by Hilary Boyd

Nancy de Freitas is the glue that holds her family together. Caught between her ageing mother Frances, and her struggling daughter Louise, frequent user of Nancy’s babysitting services, it seems Nancy’s fate is to quietly go on shouldering the burden of responsibility for all four generations. Her divorce four years ago put paid to any thoughts of a partner to share her later years with. Now it looks like her family is all she has.

Then she meets Jim. Smoker, drinker, unsuccessful country singer and wearer of cowboy boots, he should be completely unsuited to Nancy. And yet there is a real spark. But Nancy’s family don’t trust Jim one bit. They’re convinced he’ll break her heart, maybe run off with her money – he certainly distracts her from her family responsibilities.

Can she be brave enough to follow her heart? Or will she remain glued to her family’s side and walk away from one last chance for love?

The Wildflowers by Harriet Evans

‘I adored The Wildflowers. A sweeping, epic, moving read’ Marian Keyes

RICHARD AND JUDY SUMMER BOOK CLUB PICK 2018

The new novel by Sunday Times bestseller Harriet Evans will transport you to a Dorset beach house, where you can feel the sand between your toes. Enter the home of Tony and Althea Wilde – the Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor of their generation and with a marriage every bit as stormy. This glorious tale of tangled family secrets and lies will leave you warm and glowing.

The Cactus by Sarah Haywood

People aren’t sure what to make of Susan Green – family and colleagues find her prickly and hard to understand, but Susan makes perfect sense to herself, and that’s all she needs. At 45, she thinks her life is perfect, as long as she avoids her feckless brother, Edward – a safe distance away in Birmingham.

Yet suddenly faced with the loss of her mother and, implausibly, with the possibility of becoming a mother herself, Susan’s greatest fear is being realised: she is losing control.

As Susan’s perfect life starts to unravel, she finds help in the most unlikely of places – and real life in all its messiness shows her that it’s never too late to bloom.

Sunset Over The Cherry Orchard by Jo Thomas

Jo Thomas’s new novel invites you to a special cherry orchard in Spain, where sunshine, romance and family secrets are the order of the day. Perfect for fans of Jill Mansell and Carole Matthews, SUNSET OVER THE CHERRY ORCHARD is a heartwarming, hilarious tale that is ‘like the best kind of holiday’ (Lucy Diamond).

Trying by Emily Phillips

Olivia and Felix are trying for a baby. They even moved to the suburbs in anticipation of their future family. But despite approaching her cycle and their sex life with military precision, there’s still no sign of what felt like the sure next step, whilst friends’ broods seem to be growing by the week. Meanwhile, vying for a promotion at work under the (very attentive) watch of a new boss sends Olivia down a dangerous road of risking it all. Does a happy ever after, she starts to question, even have to include a baby?

The Wedding Promise by Emma Hannigan

Does a rambling Spanish villa hold the key to love?

No. 1 Irish bestseller Emma Hannigan returns with her heartwarming new novel. If you like reading Cathy Kelly and Patricia Scanlan, and enjoyed the film UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN, you will love this.

‘Brimming with hope and joy’ Sunday Independent 

The Keeper of Lost Things by Ruth Hogan

Meet the ‘Keeper of Lost Things’…
Once a celebrated author of short stories now in his twilight years, Anthony Peardew has spent half his life collecting lost objects, trying to atone for a promise broken many years before.

Realising he is running out of time, he leaves his house and all its lost treasures to his assistant Laura, the one person he can trust to fulfil his legacy and reunite the thousands of objects with their rightful owners.

But the final wishes of the ‘Keeper of Lost Things’ have unforeseen repercussions which trigger a most serendipitous series of encounters…