A Rastafari Childhood, A Frankly Ridiculous Number of Husbands, and Cocktails that Use My New Favorite Shade of Vermouth

Plus: A beautiful new romance about taking charge of your life

Hey friends, it’s been a while! Hope you’ve been keeping well.

It’s now officially spring…kinda? There’s some serious wisteria hysteria happening in our front yard, and lots more green growth on the street trees and in the parks…but London’s skies are gloomy as heck and the temperature is staying stubbornly around 50F (or 10C, for my metric readers). Don’t be surprised if this time next year I evacuate to sunnier climes and write a lot of newsletters about gintonicos and vermut.

I returned from my very educational vacation (i.e. tasting forty wines on a hilltop in Chianti, it’s harder than it sounds, there was an exam and everything) to The Slowest Burn’s first posting on NetGalley. This means that my novel is officially out in the world for strangers to read and review, and it’s not…mine, anymore. Which is pretty surreal, and not a little bit scary. I talked a very good game about not reading my reviews before they started coming out, a resolution that had all the structural integrity of an ice cream cone in August. I’m only human, unfortunately.

On another Slowest Burn note, here’s another piece of inspiration for the book. “Atmosphere” was the first song I added to the book’s playlist back in November 2020, when it had the working title “Nourish” and Kieran O’Neill was the bare bones of himself, a quirky Michelin-starred chef who liked dark indie music. If wondering what kind of weirdo listens to Joy Division while writing about two people falling in love, I don’t blame you in the slightest. They made some of the world’s saddest music and “Atmosphere” is one of their bleaker songs. But something about the dark shimmer of the instruments and the yearning in Ian Curtis’s voice weaves grief and love in a way that I find totally compelling.

Recently I read and loved…

Ready or Not by Cara Bastone

Eve Hatch is in a rut that I think a lot of us would recognize from our late twenties - in a stable but not fulfilling job, living in a nice enough place, not sure she’s happy, but uncertain how to go about finding happiness. Becoming pregnant by a one-night stand blasts her out of her complacency. It makes her look at herself and the people in her life afresh, from her distant older siblings to her conflicted best friend Willa, and particularly her best friend’s brother Shep, who’s been a Labrador-like sidekick since childhood but over the months of Eve’s pregnancy becomes the rock she’s always needed. It’s easy to describe this as a friends-to-lovers romance, but there’s such a depth and richness to it beyond the tropes - it’s a celebration of friendship, of community in the big city, and of one woman learning to seize life with both hands instead of letting events sweep her along.

The Husbands by Holly Gramazio

Lauren comes home from a party to find that her attic is producing an endless supply of husbands.

…

What, you haven’t gone and bought the book yet, just on the strength of that absolutely bananas premise?

OK, here’s more: this book is so ridiculously clever and witty and the most giddily surreal thing I have ever read - I was snorting and guffawing so often my husband was shooting me bemused looks. It’s also a razor-sharp commentary on how we’ve gamified love and relationships to the point where we have an infinite supply of possible lives available at our fingertips. This will be on my Best of 2024 list, so please, please get this in your life ASAP!

How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair

I squeaked with happiness when I saw my hold on this memoir had come in at the library - I had read an excerpt from it in the New Yorker months before and knew it I would love it. This is worth reading for Sinclair’s style alone - she wrote two poetry books before this and I struggled between wanting to savor every luminous phrase and getting swept away by the sheer power of her imagery. At core this is the story of her complicated childhood with a brutally strict Rastafari father, but it also gives so much insight into life in Jamaica beyond images of pristine white sand beaches. I learned a great deal about the origins and the culture of Rastafari, the legacy of British colonialism on the island, and the grinding effects of poverty and thwarted ambition.

I also enjoyed…Maya’s Laws of Love by Alina Khawaja, On Rotation by Shirlene Obuobi, The Lady He Lost by Faye Delacour, The Burnout by Sophie Kinsella, The Stranger I Wed by Harper St. George

And I mixed…an El Presidente and a Negroni Bianco.

We are in a weird shoulder season for cocktails, where I’m feeling kind of over brown drinks but not quite ready to move into the full Pimm’s-and-Spritz phase of the year. But I have a solution - white vermouth! Note that I didn’t say dry vermouth - white vermouth looks like dry in the bottle, but it’s definitely not. When you have a really good white vermouth, it tastes like eating a ripe peach in a Mediterranean garden on a hot day, sweet-tangy fruit mixing with sticky honeysuckle and sun-baked herbs.

Flights of borderline erotic description aside, it’s a delicious addition to your cocktail bar. The really good stuff drinks well with just ice and lemon peel, but it also plays beautifully with other boozy children. I stirred it with golden rum, triple sec, and grenadine in the El Presidente, and with equal parts Select (the Venetian answer to Campari) and Sipsmith gin in the Negroni Bianco. The latter was particularly good medicine on a chilled out Saturday night with a bowl of anchovy-stuffed olives.

I also enjoyed…wine. Sooooooo much wine. And a Hugo on the Campo in Siena. (Did you know that the Italian word for elderflower is sambuco? I did not, which led to some frantic Googling about sambuco vs. Sambuca.)