I was manhandling my iPad mini this morning, scrolling through my Audible Library in search of ‘Amen Maxine’, the book I meant to start today when scrolling unintentionally became tapping and a book that I’d hadn’t even seen the title of started to play. I didn’t know what it was but it caught my attention from the first sentence and, thirty minutes later, I realised that this was the book I’d be listening to today.

I recognised the author, Stephanie Butland, immediately. I read two of her books in 2018, ‘Letters To My Husband’ and ‘Lost For Words‘ and thought they were wonderful. LibraryThing tells me that I bought ‘The Curious Heart Of Ailsa Rea‘ in September 2018, which surprises me as I was in the middle of moving countries at the time and everything was chaos. Anyway, somehow this book sank beneath the surface of my TBR slag heap and only resurfaced today.

Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear the opening minutes of ‘The Curious Heart Of Ailsa Rea’. Maybe they’ll call to you too and your reading plans will change for the better.