Full of joy and fun

Delightful!

Brilliantly life-affirming

Its gentle good humour and optimism will warm the stoniest of hearts

A lovely, warm, page-turner of a story filled with all the perfect ingredients - thought-provoking and emotional too, and with characters that feel like my kind of friends. Cathy’s best book to date!

‘The Lemon Tree Café serves up double helpings of happiness, lashings of love, and leaves you feeling full, warm and hopeful.’

a lively confection of the best kind…sweet as a piece of lemon shortbread

Uplifting, love-filled slice of brilliance *****

Cathy Bramley serves up the perfect concoction of charm and escapism

Romantic, touching and funny - the perfect recipe. I love Cathy’s writing and her characters - her books are delicious

Perfect, feel-good loveliness

Delightfully warm with plenty of twists and turns

A gorgeous, gloriously romantic read with buckets of charm - I absolutely loved it!

A heartbreakingly beautiful story about friendship and unrequited love. I was totally and utterly captivated

Warning: you will shed tears and end up booking a trip!

Prepare for tears and laughter

Unashamedly romantic

Brilliantly evocative

Brilliant, warm and beautifully judged - I raced through it

A lovely, absorbing novel, full of beauty and mystery

So evocative you can practically smell the paella and sangria

More than a book about sport it is a book about a young man struggling to find his groove in the rough and tumble of fairly unforgiving, male society.

In A Natural, Raisin delves into the life of a lower league English football team – a subject never covered before, as far as I know, in literary fiction. Perhaps it doesn’t sound an immediately appealing prospect. But he makes it wholly absorbing.

[A] gripping, well-written and moving story, which should interest anyone curious about enclosed worlds and hidden lives… Raisin captures both the sweat and the glory of football. He has mastered the register of manager-speak, with its urgently shouted clichés, and the earnest banter on fans’ messaging boards.

A Natural makes a conceptual leap that most old-style football fiction laboured to achieve: in the end its characters are as important as the milieu that tethers them and what emerges is an exceptionally good novel, which just happens to take place on a football pitch.

Raisin provides an authentic portrayal of life in the lower divisions both on and off the pitch. The fine details are present in the pre-match nerves in the changing rooms, the neatly laid out kit and the smell of Deep Heat, but it is the unchecked laddishness, the fake camaraderie and the close scrutiny from supporters on social media that Raisin wants us to feel… This is a rare novel about the challenge of being a gay professional footballer and hopefully it will go some way to help changing perceptions in a sport that has still got a very long way to go.

Ross Raisin’s book about a gay footballer, demands about 200 pages of patience, but you won’t regret it. In the vertiginous second half of this rich, wise study of masculinity, Raisin demonstrates with extraordinary sensitivity how difficult it can be to attain E.M. Forster’s dictum, “Only connect!”

The virtue of devastatingly simple storytelling was also felt in Ross Raisin’s A Natural…one of my favourite novels of the year, about a gay footballer hiding an affair with the groundsman at his struggling lower-league team.

A deeply moving portrait of fear and acceptance.

This seems like one of those books designed to fold straightaway into contemporary liberal conversation.

Cause for jubilation . . . This proves her to be the reigning queen of British chick lit . . . insightful, funny and poignant

Praise for Marian Keyes

Gloriously funny

Funny but poignant

A total triumph

Not only is it a great story with funny, loveable characters, it made me laugh out loud

A beautifully written modern love story from Britain's best contemporary female author

Wonderfully written and completely engrossing, with exquisitely drawn characters in a brilliantly plotted narrative. It will make you think long after you finish the final page

A tender, funny and hopeful look at love, grief and life. Bumper box of tissues required

A beautiful read

Funny, heart-warming and extremely wise

A deeply satisfying book full of big emotions

A laugh-out-loud, rollicking good read and a very touching love story

Moyes is the queen of the classy weepy

A delight

A sparkling novel of hope and sacrifice’

Magical, heart-warming and time-bending story.