Millennial Angst Times Two, Epic Greed and Aspiration, and a Cocktail Which Is a Delicious Last-Second Save

Plus - Cara Bastone makes me want to pack up my laptop and go home

Hello! I’m back from a week of writing in Valéncia! The city was mellow and relaxed and beautiful, the orange trees on the street were blooming, the sun came out most days and warmed my Californian heart, and and if it weren’t for the fact that I got tired of spending all my time alone (a week solo is little too much even for this introvert), I would have happily stayed on longer.

But London has been genuinely basking in glorious sunshine and milder temperatures since I returned, and while I’m pretty certain this week’s weather is the textbook definition of a fool’s spring, I am doing my best to drink it down like a particularly fruity cocktail.

The best result from the Valéncia trip: Book 3 now stands at over 18,000 words! If I can write that amount of words four more times, it’ll be a novel! Yippee! I mean, I also have to think about small stuff like structure, and character arcs, and whether the story makes any damn sense, but that’s Future Sarah’s problem.

A quick note: if you’re based in the US and happen to use Goodreads, you can enter to win an advance copy of Love Walked In! The giveaway ends this Monday, so get in there while you can! Or if you don’t have Goodreads, you can always pre-order and give yourself something to look forward to on September 2.

Recently I read and loved…

Promise Me Sunshine by Cara Bastone

I bow down to Cara Bastone as the absolute master of emotional complexity in romance. She writes intricate, well-rounded characters that that feel so impossibly real you expect them to be standing in front of you when you look up from the page. She also doesn’t shy away from depicting storms of overwhelming, bewildering feeling, and MC Lennie’s journey to figure out some way to live with her grief after her beloved best friend’s death was a real roller coaster both for her and for me. Plus, if you like a hero who’s prickly, awkward, and shy, but a genuine sweetheart once you get to know him, Miles Honey (yup, that is his name) will win you over completely.

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico and The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue

Hello, fellow millennials: here are our two seminal novels. Or at least, the novels that will have you both nodding and cringing in recognition at how accurately they capture particularly formative moments and personality quirks of our generation - hence why I’m writing about them together. They’re also both very dryly funny and extremely evocative of the early 2010s, whether you wished you were dancing at indie nights and drunkenly making out with suspect boys or trying to be as cool as possible to fit in with some hipster ideal in Berlin. Trust me - once you’ve read Perfection, you’ll never look at an Airbnb listing the same way again. (US friends, Perfection will be published Stateside on March 18 - smash that pre-order button, you won’t regret it!)

Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan

I had been hankering for a big, sprawling social novel to fall into, and Caledonian Road was exactly what I needed. Set over a year of very recent history, this is a deep dive into what makes modern London tick: greed and corruption, desire and aspiration, privilege and entitlement….and every human life in the city simultaneously being precious and devastatingly cheap. It is staggering, just how many plates O’Hagan keeps spinning at once in the narrative, and it all comes to a huge, spectacularly horrible crescendo.

I also enjoyed…A Game of Scandal by Laura Wood, Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros, Left of Forever by Tarah DeWitt (out May 2025), A Man’s Place by Annie Ernaux, and First Time Caller by B.K. Borison

And I mixed…a Rue Lincoln.

This issue’s drink was supposed to be a Champs-Élysées, a Sidecar variation using delicious (and now more expensive and elusive) green Chartreuse instead of Cointreau.

Then disaster struck - I ran out of brandy in the middle of making the drink! I only had three-quarters of the amount the recipe called for. ButI’d been mixing cocktails at home for long enough that I wasn’t going to be deterred. Instead, I took a moment and thought about the other ingredients in the drink. Chartreuse is quite minty/aniseedy, and that made me think of a mint julep. Similarly, the classic combination of brown liquor, sugar, and lemon is a whiskey sour. Put those two thoughts together, and the obvious answer to make up the deficit was bourbon. And lo, it was good! The little bit of bourbon added a lick of vanilla and smoke to the drink and played nicely with the brandy. Overall, this is a great shoulder season drink, for when you’re ready for some freshness and brightness, but it’s not quite warm enough to leave brown drinks behind.

To make it: follow the recipe in the Champs-Élysées link above, but instead of 2oz/60ml brandy, use 1.5oz/45ml brandy and 0.5oz/15ml bourbon.

As for the name: when I told my very clever husband how I’d fixed my mistake, he checked a map of Paris and pointed out a little side street off the Champs-Élysées called Rue Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln, like bourbon, is from Kentucky, so at that point it felt like fate.

I also enjoyed…tinto de verano (cheap red wine + Fanta Limón = nectar of the gods, don’t knock it till you’ve tried it), sweet vermouth, and hot chocolate so thick it was like custard, all in Valéncia, and homemade Brandy Alexanders (so delicious we mixed them two nights in a row).