Your spring summer reading list is here, and it’s set to be a sizzler. We’ve got a signature Beth O’Leary romance (swoon), a heart-wrenching and profound exploration of racial injustice and a searing YA memoir-manifesto from LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson.

Here’s a look at the next book club picks in more detail.

April – The Kindest Lie by Nancy Johnson

Nancy Johnson’s The Kindest Lie is one of the most buzzed about books of the season. A complex exploration of race, class, family and forgiveness and what it means to live the American dream – we can’t wait to finish this in one spring sitting. Check out the blurb below, and purchase the book from bookshop.org here!

A promise could betray you.

It’s 2008, and the inauguration of President Barack Obama ushers in a new kind of hope. In Chicago, Ruth Tuttle, an Ivy-League educated Black engineer, is married to a kind and successful man. He’s eager to start a family, but Ruth is uncertain. She has never gotten over the baby she gave birth to-and was forced to leave behind-when she was a teenager. She had promised her family she’d never look back, but Ruth knows that to move forward, she must make peace with the past.
Returning home, Ruth discovers the Indiana factory town of her youth is plagued by unemployment, racism, and despair. As she begins digging into the past, she unexpectedly befriends Midnight, a young white boy who is also adrift and looking for connection. Just as Ruth is about to uncover a burning secret her family desperately wants to keep hidden, a traumatic incident strains the town’s already searing racial tensions, sending Ruth and Midnight on a collision course that could upend both their lives.

Powerful and revealing, The Kindest Lie captures the heartbreaking divide between Black and white communities and offers both an unflinching view of motherhood in contemporary America and the never-ending quest to achieve the American Dream.

May – The Road Trip by Beth O’Leary

We’re so excited to read Beth O’Leary’s third novel The Road Trip. Beth has cemented herself as one of our all-time favourite authors with her charming, heartfelt and hilarious literary voice. Her writing is like comfort food for the soul and we’re predicting her latest novel is going to be one hell of a ride. Check out the blurb below, and purchase the book from bookshop.org here!

Addie and her sister are about to embark on an epic road trip to a friend’s wedding in rural Scotland. The playlist is all planned and the snacks are packed.
But, not long after setting off, a car slams into the back of theirs. The driver is none other than Addie’s ex, Dylan, who she’s avoided since their traumatic break-up two years earlier.
Dylan and his best mate are heading to the wedding too, and they’ve totalled their car, so Addie has no choice but to offer them a ride. The car is soon jam-packed full of luggage and secrets, and with four hundred miles ahead of them, Dylan and Addie can’t avoid confronting the very messy history of their relationship…
Will they make it to the wedding on time? And, more importantly… is this really the end of the road for Addie and Dylan?

June – All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson

From having their teeth kicked out by bullies at age five to their first sexual relationships, All Boys Aren’t Blue is a series of unflinching personal essays chronicling George M. Johnson’s experience growing up under the duality of being black and queer. Check out the blurb below, and purchase the book from bookshop.org here!

This powerful YA memoir-manifesto follows journalist and LGBTQ+ activist George M. Johnson as they explore their childhood, adolescence, and college years, growing up under the duality of being black and queer.

From memories of getting their teeth kicked out by bullies at age five to their loving relationship with their grandmother, to their first sexual experience, the stories wrestle with triumph and tragedy and cover topics such as gender identity, toxic masculinity, brotherhood, family, inequality, consent, and Black joy.

What book’s got you excited for spring-summer reading and lounging outside on a picnic blanket?

April, you’re up next, son. Beer gardens are beckoning, the four-day weekend is brewing, and church is re-opening. And by church, we mean the salon. Obviously.

Our hair has been through hell and back and it deserves this long-awaited renaissance. Deliver us from lockdown evil and forgive us our tresses – we’re finally back in the chair bitches. One Billie Eilish, coming up…

Here’s how to make the most of April ’21!

1 Put off filling out the census. So sick of being perceived like this.

2 Have a garden party every weekend to make up for all the sad shitty little virtual birthdays we’ve all had to pretend we’ve enjoyed. Milk it.

3 Realise you’re now officially estranged from your dentist. It’s been 84 years.

4 Forget how to make small talk with your hairdresser. You’ve got nothing left to give, just a mask that prevents anyone from hearing anything you ever say again (try adding a hairdryer into the mix. Lol.) and a micro-fringe you made earlier.

5 Nurse your first proper pub hangover since circa summer ’20. Everything hurts and foreheads everywhere are campaigning for change.

6 Praise your introvert for living authentically. Invites are there to be declined.

7 Confess that all of your lockdown walks had a hidden agenda…

8 To find a horse in a field and ideally, get close enough to stroke it on the nose

9 Eat so many Terry’s Chocolate Orange Mini Eggs that you basically identify as free-range now

10 Countdown the days to Handmaid’s Tale Season 4. Praise. Be

11 Feel your Serotonin making a comeback

12 Hate that your signature toxic trait is getting annoyed at everyone else for failing to help clean the house but then getting annoyed when they try to help anyway. Because nobody do it like you do

13 Start to process your Drag Race UK grief. If you can get through Thursdays without it, you can get through anything

14 Celebrate one whole year of being entirely incapable of setting work life boundaries. Slowly dying but it’s fine

15 Fork out for a staycation in a shepherd’s hut that’s more like a glorified loaf tin with a roof, knowing you could have gone to Bali for two weeks for the same price

16 Get heavily invested in the heatwave rumours that circulate every single April

17 Post a photo of blue skies and blossom ‘cos Spring. Keeping it edgy.

18 Ask yourself What Would Jackie Weaver Do whenever things get a bit chaotic

19 Buy a big lilac feather boa just to feel closer to Harry Styles

20 Defrost your social skills and tell your bra to pull up. We’re going IN.

As we prepare to phase out locky d 3.0 once and for all, we have been feeling a certain type of way about losing the part of us that was once in a situationship with sweatpants and strangely attracted to Joe Exotic.

So, we put our heads together on Zoom one morning and decided that the only way to ensure the funkiest year of our lives stayed with us forever, is if we created a perfume that smelled just like it – something we could mist over our summer dresses in a not-too-distant future, and think back to that time in 2020, when we’d just be getting ready for a wild night in the living room. So we did it, we bottled lockdown.

If you told us a year ago that we’d be creating a lockdown scent infused with trampled hopes, banana bread essence and loungewear, then we would have fully gone Piers Morgan and left the WhatsApp Group. But a lot can happen in 12 months and here we are, one rotation around the sun later and not mad about smelling a bit like Boris Johnson, emotional burnout and overhyped bakes.

Admittedly, when we first came up with the concept, we didn’t know if we could make it work. Phone calls were made, brows were furrowed (prototype #17: way too much banana) and nostrils were shook but after nearly a year in the making, the launch is finally happening.

Drawing on the scent profile of lockdowns 1, 2 and 3, Banana Bread & Loungewear is naturally quite a complex fragrance because, as it turns out, a pandemic + existential dread makes for one complicated concoction.

First you get the familiar bitter sweet ‘n’ buttery notes of banana bread and 2020 ignorance, followed by heart notes of stockpiled its-obviously-not-cashmere-bitch sweatpants and finally, you get the lingering slightly floral, if a bit savage, base notes of Carole Baskin and her wild cat litter tray. It’s different but it’s good different, ya know?

Oh, and because every cult fragrance needs a niche ingredient, every bottle of BBAL contains real salty tears. Now, that shit is bananas. Just how many breakdowns can one bottle hack, we hear you ask? The limit does not exist.

The Zoella Banana Bread & Loungewear EDP is set to hit the shelves next week, just in time for you to overwhelm a pub garden near you, and we can neither confirm nor deny if this article sits on a throne of April fool’s day lies. But yes, it absolutely does.