Teaser Tuesday - 40 Love by Madeleine Wickham, Read by Katherine Kellgren

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

“She had spent most of the day getting ready for tomorrow, but luckily the tasks she had allotted herself – arranging flowers, preparing vegetables, waxing her legs – were the sort of thing that could be done outside.  The main dishes – vegetable terrine for lunch, seafood tartlets for dinner – had arrived from the caterers that morning and Mrs. Finch had already decanted them onto serving plates. She had raised an eyebrow – couldn’t you even bring yourself to cook for eight people? – but Caroline was used to Mrs. Finch’s upwardly mobile eyebrows  and ignored them. For Christ’s sake, she thought, pouring herself another glass of wine, what was the point of having money and not spending it?”

~ 40 Love (also known as The Tennis Party) by Madeleine Wickham, Read by Katherine Kellgren

In 40 Love Madeleine Wickham, once again, gives readers and listeners a taste of the affluent British community and does a superb job of exaggerating all their tendencies, nuances and situations to create a dark and humorous ambiance. Katherine Kellgren delivers an effective sound of the haughty, totty voiceovers that reign supreme in Madeleine Wickham’s cynical and sarcastic characters. I can’t wait to find out what madness lies ahead!

40 Love (aka The Tennis Party) by Madeleine Wickham, Read by Katherine Kellgren*

It was Patrick's idea that they should have the tennis party weekend. After all, he had the perfect setting - the White House. Bought out of his bonuses as an investment salesman, it was complete with stable, cocktail bar, jacuzzi, shell-shaped bedheads and, of course, the tennis court (towered over by an authentic Wimbledon-green umpire's chair).

He hadn't actually told Caroline, his brash and beautiful wife, what the real reason for the party was. And if she suspected that he had a hidden agenda, she managed to hide it in a cloud of Pimm's-induced laughter. She was glad to welcome Stephen and Annie, their impoverished former neighbours, less glad to see newly wealthy Charles and his aristocratic wife Cressida, and barely able to tolerate the deadly competitive Don and Valerie.

As the four couples gathered on the sunny terrace, it seemed obvious who was winning in life and who was losing. But by the end of the party, nothing would be certain. As the first ball is served over the net it signals the start of two days of tempers, shocks, revelations, the arrival of an uninvited guest, and the realisation that the weekend is about anything but tennis.

40 Love will be on sale everywhere August 30, 2011.

Check out her YouTube video promoting the new release!

 

*Synopsis available on Sophie Kinsella’s web site at http://www.sophiekinsella.co.uk/books/madeleine-wickham/the-tennis-party/

A BIG THANK YOU TO Esther at MACMILLAN AUDIO for sending me a copy of 40 Love for review. All opinions of the novel are my own for review purposes ONLY.

A Weekend to ReCOVER - Cocktails for Three by Madeleine Wickham

     A Weekend to ReCOVER! – A weekly meme hosted by Her Book Self, a fantastic blog by a self proclaimed “author addict” and lover of all genres. The premise of this meme is fairly simple: post an image of a book cover or other bookish illustration or artwork and talk about it on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday! (This meme originated at Miss Page-Turner's City of Books as ReCOVERy Friday and has been passed on to Lisa at Her Book Self - Thanks very much to both Literary Ladies!!)

            If you’ve followed my blog since its days over at Where You Wish Upon A Star, you may remember a post I once did comparing various covers created for chick lit books in the United States versus the United Kingdom – the differences are vast! (You can still find the old WYWUAS post here and another one I did while contemplating various covers of chick lit series.)Taking a cue from these previous posts as well as the British-based chick lit web site, Chick Lit Reviews’ feature, Cover Wars**, where the Cover Art of Chick Lit novels from around the globe are compared to one another, I’ve decided to continue A Weekend to ReCOVER in a similar fashion.

One of my current reads is Madeleine Wickham’s dark and humorous tale, Cocktails for Three, which portrays the lives of three young women struggling to balance the demands of work, friendship and romance. Londoners, Roxanne, Candice and Maggie, bond together every month over cocktails, catching each other up on the comings and goings of their lives. As the story takes place, each one, whether they are aware or not, are at a crossroads in life, either getting acquainted to a new beginning, making a bargain with the present or figuring out a proper ending. I’m about half way through the novel and with every turning page, become more and more enamored with the three women characters, who are eclectic, intriguing and yet, so relatable all at once. I can’t wait to get back to it and find out what happens next and ultimately how the story concludes.

Interestingly, as different as each of the women characters are in this book, so, too, are the many covers designed for its release. Probably the two most popular (well-known) covers include the UK and US initial releases:

In August, 2010, another cover was released in a re-branding strategy to re-release several of Madeleine Wickham’s books, coupled with her pseudonym, Sophie Kinsella, emblazoned on the cover:

Finally, (although I only recently came across these in a search for the first covers), there were also two other covers; one, for the Hardcover edition and one for the Mass Market Paperback edition:

I love the 2010 newly released cover as well as the UK edition. The only explanation I can even come close to mustering up is that maybe I’m so used to the US edition, with the green background, sunglasses and cocktails on the front, that I like the others for their variety. Perhaps, also, just as I’m most drawn to the personalities and relationships amongst characters in chick lit books, I’m more drawn to the covers which feature an artist’s depiction of what those characters look like.

Which one(s) do you like best and why?

Either way, whichever of the 5 covers is chosen, I’m really glad I picked up this book again. It’s a great story and I’m eager to reach its end (at the same time that I don’t want it to ever endJ) Look for my review on my blog once I do finish it!

 **If you want to check out Chick Lit Reviews for their previous posts on cover wars, visit  http://chicklitreviews.com/category/cover-wars/ and decide which covers you like best! 

***All covers retrieved at Amazon.com