The Best Things: The joyous Sunday Times bestseller to hug your heart

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So I went on a @netgalley requesting spree again despite saying that I was so over it!! I saw this book by Mel Giedroyc and as I have always loved her on TV I thought why not? I have purely read Christmas themed books since November so I guess it was time to have a change. Previous works Two other Thursday Murder Club books, Richard Osman’s House of Games, A Pointless History of the World, The World Cup of Everything: Bringing the Fun Home. It took me ages to get into the book. The first few chapters seemed really slow and "wordy" and the story just seemed to takes ages to get going, but as I perservered I found myself wanting to find out what happens. As I said I really like Mel, shes always funny on TV alongside Sue Perkins so I expected a lot of humour from this one and I wasnt disappointed, there were some really funny moments in the book. I found some of the characters a bit one dimensonal and stereotypical, and Frank Parker was really annoying and I was quite glad when he went bankrupt! The saving grace was Mikey, the 11 year old daughter who seems to save the family and be pretty much the most sensible one. I also liked the dog groomer who has a crush on Sally and is always there to help her! Who should buy this book? Fans of The Great British Bake Off, especially fans who have just started to notice how wobbly the show has got without her. The Bullet That Missed by Richard Osman Cyril has no relationship with his adoptive father. Then you learn that he's struggling with his sexuality, so he's growing up in an Ireland that’s still really strict.

Main character The story is told from the perspective of all four characters, although the main one is Grace, a woman approaching her 90th birthday with the same energy that most approach their 30th. We meet her on a beach, snapping at a patronising do-gooder, and things progress from there.

Previous works An autobiography (And Away…) and a Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing tie-in gift book. I found this did not have any flow at all - one minute we were looking at Sally and the next one of her four children or someone else seemingly random. This meant, for me, I found it really hard to keep up with and was a bit lost at times. I did not feel any empathy towards the characters, even though they had lost everything and just found it all a bit odd. Everything happened quite fast, but in a way it was very slow to get into. Nowadays, she feels “old enough not to give a monkey’s what people think of me. Things fall into place: you realise you’re not the centre of the universe. And it’s a release. In your 20s and 30s, all you think about is yourself. That goes out the window… And as a writer – oh God, I’ve said it!” And she laughs and affects an affected voice: “ As a writer – invisibility is a superpower. Invisibility…oh my God, that’s the best thing.” Mel Giedroyc’s first novel, The Best Things, is published on April Fools’ Day. It was her family that pointed this out. “I’m such a dolt, I hadn’t cottoned on,” she laughs – although, comedian that she is, she thinks the date well chosen. April has always been important to her: it is the month when filming used to start for the BBC’s The Great British Bake Off, which she co-presented with her chum Sue Perkins (“Perks”), along with their other greatest hits such as Mel & Sue and Light Lunch. While she has no regrets about the decision to leave Bake Off, she will admit to “a pang” every spring: “As soon as the daffodils are out, especially on cold mornings when you’re hit by a nice patch of sun, I think of Mary, the tent, the excitement of meeting a new batch of bakers…” It starts off with a lady called Catherine, who is 16 years old and she gets pregnant. She's from a strict Catholic family in Ireland. It's all about society and attitudes.

This is Mel Giedroyc's debut novel and is about Sally & Frank Parker. Frank is a successful businessman and he family live in a luxurious home seemingly having it all. Unfortunately Frank loses everything on the same day he finds out he has narcolepsy which leads to some very dramatic changes to the Parker lifestyle. Underneath this haze of self-deprecation, there is a through line of an absolutely solid determination to be up there on stage, showing off. When she was a kid, growing up in Leatherhead with a Polish father and English mother (her dad was an engineer and, for his second act, a Latvian medievalist), her pattern was that she’d try for the school play, not get a part, “and I’d say: ‘Maybe I could write a little prologue?’ And I’d write something really long, and end up with quite a big part. Such a showoff.” Writing style Norton, it turns out, is a magnificent novelist. The story of Forever Home is a simple one, but it hinges on a big twist halfway through. A lesser writer would have hurried to get to the big moment sooner, or at least gleefully started to drop bigger and bigger breadcrumbs. But Norton is a model of restraint. He spends chapter after chapter making doubly sure you feel the way he wants you to feel about each character before dropping his bomb. It was after Giedroyc left university that her mother, then in her 50s, had a series of strokes. “But she has a will of steel, that woman – she’s amazing. She’s about to turn 84. We’ve had 30 stolen years, because she could so easily have died. The consultant took us into a little room and told us: ‘You’ve got to prepare yourself, she’s not going to make it.’ But it’s not been easy for her, or Dad, who was, for a long time, her full-time carer.”Main character Gary, a man with a job that Mortimer used to have, in the same location where Mortimer used to work. He also has the exact same cadence, vocabulary and thought processes as Mortimer, as seen in his long digressions about pies. That said, Gary is described as having a slightly larger nose than Mortimer, so they are definitely different people. Plot Sally Parker is the bored wife of an elaborately rich hedge fund manager. She has a full-time nanny, a chef and someone to groom her dogs. But when her husband suddenly goes bankrupt, all this is whipped away from her and she can start to find herself again. This debut novel comes from the comedian and former Bake Off co-host Mel Giedroyc, one half of Mel and Sue. Giedroyc would like one more throw of the dice doing a standup show with Perkins, but has questions over whether they’d ever sit down and write it. She is writing a novel, adjacent to her first, with a couple of recurring characters, which she hopes to eventually turn into a Leatherhead trilogy. She enjoys not being a “bright young thing” any more, saying “it’s actually quite a relief when people aren’t that interested”. She mildly fears getting cancelled, but not in a Laurence Fox/GB News “you can’t say anything any more” way, more by her children. “I’m walking on eggshells, honestly.” (Hard relate. My kid called me racist the other day when I said I preferred boxers to spaniels.) She is as she started out, all drive and no plan, the way I think maybe comedians have to be, if they want to be funny. Plot Gary, a down-at-heel London solicitor, goes for a drink with a friend. The next day, the friend goes missing. Meanwhile, Gary meets and falls for a mysterious woman. Could the two be connected? And why does Gary keep having conversations with a slightly belligerent squirrel? The debut novel by comedian Bob Mortimer has the answers. This book has a very different feel to the comedien, Mel Giedroyc that is well known on UK tv. I do love a domestic drama so was looking forward to this but unfortunately, I felt it did not deliver.

Sally Parker and her family are rich. When her husband loses all their money and life begins to fall apart, she knows that she should be the strong one who holds her family together - but how does she manage that when she can't even hold herself together. As life around them crumbles, so does Sally - can she find her inner strength? I really like Mel Giedroyc. I find her very funny and extremely engaging, and behind that slightly daffy persona there’s an extremely intelligent mind, so I was hoping for something very good here. I’m afraid I was disappointed.It's about two friends, John and Owen, and it's written in the first person by John who's talking about his best friend Owen, who is an odd boy - he is very, very small, he has almost iridescent, luminescent skin and a very, very odd voice. A sort of high-pitched nasal voice which is illustrated in the book every time that Owen speaks - it's in capital letters! I can hear him.

Who should buy this book? If I had to guess, I’d say every single woman who owns a cat will have this pressed into her hands over the next few months. But today, what we’re talking about is the treat she has cooked up on her own: “I got a spurt of midlife confidence and thought: ‘Sod it, I’m over 50 and have always wanted to write a novel, I’m bloody well going to do it.’” She already had some nonfiction (“less scary than fiction”) under her belt, including From Here to Maternity (2005), a comedy diary about pregnancy, concocted while “brain dead”. After seven series, they got wind of something afoot but didn’t know until it was publicly announced that the production company, Love Productions, had sold the show to Channel 4. “I was getting messages from the head of C4 saying: ‘We hope that you’ll be on board.’ I think it took us under 20 seconds to work out that we weren’t going to go with it. We felt that the show had been nurtured by the BBC. And effectively, the makers of the show were just going ‘See ya’, and going for the money. And that didn’t sit well with us.” They never thought it was going to crash and burn without them, since they were only ever “bookends”. In the end, there would always be more bakers, other cakes.Plot A story told over four generations of Welsh women – an unstoppable pensioner, her estranged daughter, her abandoned daughter, and then her daughter – written by the actor and Gavin and Stacey co-creator Ruth Jones. Can these women heal the complex wounds that drove them apart? Rich family losing everything is a trope that is well-used in books, and one I thought I could get behind in an easy to read sort of way. But I just could not. The family's friends were awful - Surely most people aren't that hurtful and mean? People going up to Sally's wardrobe and clearing it out of her designer gear and her not saying a word was plain silly. The staff were awful too - again, surely nobody would allow people to work for them in their home that they hated as much as these? Catherine moves to Dublin, she has a baby called Cyril and she gives him up for adoption. The book is basically about their two lives, her life and his life, and they’re both treated as outcasts. Because she never got married but had a child that she had to give up for adoption, and Cyril is this boy who grows up with his adoptive parents, who were really eccentric – one’s an author who chain smokes.