It should have been the final morning of my eighth annual Book Club Retreat, which sounds ever so intellectual but actually involves me and sixteen of my best mates spending a weekend cooking, eating, drinking, reading, gossiping and singing show tunes badly. Generally, someone starts on the cocktails at about ten in the morning. Usually, someone has a good old cry, knowing they’ll get all the hugs. Heroically, at least three of us make it out for a run on at least one morning.
But this year it’s cancelled, like so many of the Lovely Times. It’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, I know. My wonderful partner is fond of pointing out that he and I have done the Covid crisis on easy mode: we have no children, no caring responsibilities, we’re both set up to work from home anyway, we get on with our neighbours, we have a fabulous community of people at our local fitness studio to keep the lockdown lard at bay and the cats love joining us for afternoon naps.
I’ve never been so conscious of my own privilege.
And I’m also conscious that this year has been terribly hard for many, many people. I’m genuinely touched and honoured by how many of you have got in contact to tell me that my books have helped you through this time – made you laugh, distracted you for a few hours, or kept you up all night (sorry about that).
One of the things I love most about being a writer is hearing from my readers, so please do keep reaching out on social media or just by leaving a review on Amazon to let me know what you thought of Thank You, Next.
A huge thank you for choosing this book among all the other books out there clamouring for your attention. I hope you enjoyed it, and I wish you all the very best until next time.
Love, Sophie
Books by Sophie Ranald
Thank You, Next
Just Saying
No, We Can’t Be Friends
It’s Not You It’s Him
Sorry Not Sorry
Out with the Ex, In with the New
It Would be Wrong to Steal My Sister’s Boyfriend (Wouldn’t it?)
A Groom with a View
Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?
You Can’t Fall in Love with Your Ex (Can You?)
Available in audio
Our with the Ex, In with the New (available in the UK and in the US)
Out with the Ex, In with the New
Gemma didn’t expect her life to look like this. She’s still living with her mother, who steals her leggings and tells her off for leaving crumbs in the butter. After twenty failed interviews she thought she’d bagged her dream job as a journalist – except it turns out to be writing articles about cats that look like George Clooney. Luckily she has her wonderful boyfriend, Jack, to help her forget just how rubbish things are.
Then Jack dumps her out of the blue. With nothing but her childhood teddy bear, Stanley, and a whole heap of heartbreak, Gemma resolves to turn things around. She throws herself into her new job and soon she’s hanging out with cheeky, golden-haired hunk Charlie, eating in swanky restaurants and sipping trendy cocktails – and her old life seems like a distant memory.
But it’s not long until her shiny new world starts to lose its sparkle – and Gemma misses the days of wearing battered pink converse and eating peanut butter on toast in bed. Then Jack turns up, backpack in tow, and things starts to go wrong with Charlie. ‘Out with the old, in with the new’, the saying goes. But what happens if neither one is quite right?
This laugh-out-loud romantic comedy is for anyone who’s ever cried their eyes out to love songs after a break-up or accidentally drunk-texted their ex. Fans of Sophie Kinsella and Lindsey Kelk will love this unmissable read which is all about falling in love with the most important person: yourself!
Get it here!
It’s Not You It’s Him
New Year’s Eve. The most overrated night of the year, right? I have to get through a night of enforced fun, drink all the prosecco and talk about new beginnings. But I don’t want new beginnings. I want my old beginning back.
It’s been ten days, two hours and forty-three minutes since Tansy got dumped. Two heartbreaking weeks since Renzo, who made her weak at the knees and dizzy with excitement, found out Tansy’s secret – and ended it on the spot.
Since then, she’s spent every evening scrolling through their old photos, drunk texted him twenty-six times (he stopped reading after five), and lost count of how many packets of Kleenex she’s cried her way through.
That’s where Operation Get Renzo Back comes in. She ropes in a new wing-woman, maxes out her credit card and accidentally-on-purpose bumps into him at every opportunity. Oh, and she finds a fake boyfriend, as you do…
But while she’s busy pretending, Tansy’s plan is thrown a major curveball. She has to learn the hard way that it’s not her, it’s him – and that sometimes, a break-up can end up being the making of you.
A fresh, funny and fabulous novel for anyone who has been dumped, got a post-break-up haircut, stalked an ex on Facebook, and then realised they were WAY better off without them. Fans of Sophie Kinsella, Lindsey Kelk and Matt Dunn will love this laugh-out-loud read.
Get it here!
No, We Can’t Be Friends
Everyone knows a girl like Sloane. She was always The Single One. She never brought a plus-one to weddings. She was the woman you’d set up with your single cousin. She joined ballroom dancing classes to meet men and was the queen of online dating.
But then she met Myles. Perfect Myles, with denim-blue eyes and a dazzling smile that melted her insides. She’d finally found The One.
Except she didn’t imagine that Myles’s idea of Happy Ever After would include Sloane battling an overflowing laundry basket, buying birthday cards for his family, and ironing his Calvin Klein underpants.
Then Sloane finds out that Myles has a secret.
The fairy tale is well and truly over. Her heart is blown to smithereens. Eating her weight in Ben & Jerry’s and large Meat Feast pizzas can only get Sloane so far before she has to make a decision… Can she learn to love herself more than she loved the love of her life?
No, We Can’t Be Friends is a brilliantly relatable, hilarious and feel-good novel that every woman with a waste-of-space ex HAS to read! If you’re a fan of romantic comedies by Sophie Kinsella and Lindsey Kelk, and TV shows like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Jane the Virgin, pick up this laugh-out-loud book – you won’t regret it.
Get it here!
Just Saying
I almost gave up on love. My ex, who called his private parts ‘Nigel’, was enough to put me off men forever. But then I met Joe.
Alice thought she’d found Mr Right. Her blue-eyed boyfriend Joe gives her butterflies, makes her bacon sandwiches when she’s hungover, and doesn’t have a nickname for any of his body parts.
She should have known it was too good to be true. Because one day, Alice and Joe bump into Zoë. According to him, Zoë’s ‘just an old friend’. But Alice saw the way they froze, and heard the strange note in Joe’s voice when he said her name.
Then, out of the blue, Zoë needs a place to live. And Joe has the bright idea of inviting her, and her fluffy ginger cat Frazzle, to stay with them.
Alice tries her hardest not to feel threatened. But the thing is, Zoë doesn’t survive off microwave meals, or go days without washing her glossy copper-coloured hair, or accidentally get mascara in her contact lenses.
Joe’s ex might be pretty much perfect, but there’s no way that Alice will let Zoë steal him. She’s on a mission to prove that three (four, if you count the cat) is definitely a crowd…
This fabulous, feel-good page-turner is for anyone who has ever got a little too drunk and checked out their partner’s ex! (We’ve all been there…) Fans of romantic comedies by Sophie Kinsella and Lindsey Kelk, and TV shows like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Jane the Virgin, will love this utterly relatable read.
Get it here!
Acknowledgements
When I was writing Thank You, Next, it sometimes felt as if Zoë spent her days r
icocheting from her upstairs bedroom to her downstairs workplace to the gym and back again in a never-ending loop. There’s a reason for this – it’s pretty much what my life consisted of while I was working on this novel. Only when I was about halfway through did pubs and restaurants reopen in the UK and some semblance of normality return.
This meant that the usual face-to-face research that I so enjoy doing when I’m working on a book wasn’t able to happen. Nonetheless, there are many people who have helped me enormously during the process, and they all deserve a massive thank you.
Over socially distanced outdoor drinks, my lovely friend Nathan answered my questions about Grindr hook-up culture with breathtaking honesty, and I am so grateful for his insights. I know he will be disappointed that I gave Robbie a happy ending, but I have my fingers crossed that his own is just around the corner.
It’s been more years now than I care to count, but the Dungeons & Dragons games played with my sister Jassy as DM are as fresh in my mind as if they were yesterday. I could have written a whole book just about the adventures in Castle Drakeford, but – quite rightly – my wonderful editor would have taken a scalpel to it. But thank you, my darling sister, for all the happy hours we spent on those imaginary journeys.
Which brings me on to the team at Bookouture. I am so fortunate to have such an amazing publisher and work with such a professional, supportive, all-round bloody lovely team. Christina Demosthenous, my editor, holds my hand throughout the horrible solitary process of producing a first draft and the lovely, collaborative editing stages that follow, and makes my books the best they can possibly be. She also has endless patience when I whine that I can’t do this. Thank you, you are a star. Noelle Holten, Kim Nash, Peta Nightingale, Lauren Finger and Alex Crowe have also provided invaluable support behind the scenes on publicity, production and promotion, Lisa Horton came up with a totally gorgeous cover design, and Rhian McKay smashed it with a brilliant copy edit as always.
I also owe huge thanks to the team at the Soho Agency, who have looked after me since I started writing eight years ago. I couldn’t be more grateful for the expertise, wisdom and support of Alice Saunders, Araminta Whitley and Niamh O’Grady.
To Amanda, Becky, Carla, Catherine, Eleanor, Hazel, Helen, Jen, Jess, Katie, Kez, Lisa, Lou, Lucy, Lynda, Nikki, Rache, Sarah and Sian – love you all. Thank you for being my best friends and for the daily Covid chats that have kept us all sane over the past few months.
And finally, thanks to my darling Hopi and Purrs and Hither the cats. I couldn’t be cooped up with a nicer crew.
We – both author and publisher – hope you enjoyed this book. We believe that you can become a reader at any time in your life, but we’d love your help to give the next generation a head start.
Did you know that 9% of children don’t have a book of their own in their home, rising to 13% in disadvantaged families*? We’d like to try to change that by asking you to consider the role you could play in helping to build readers of the future.
We’d love you to get involved by sharing, borrowing, reading, buying or talking about a book with a child in your life and spreading the love of reading. We want to make sure the next generation continues to have access to books, wherever they come from.
Click HERE for a list of brilliant books to share with a child – as voted by Goodreads readers.
Thank you.
*As reported by the National Literacy Trust
Published by Bookouture in 2020
An imprint of Storyfire Ltd.
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
www.bookouture.com
Copyright © Sophie Ranald, 2020
Sophie Ranald has asserted her right to be identified
as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers.
eBook ISBN: 978-1-80019-041-2
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events other than those clearly in the public domain, are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Thank You, Next: A perfect, uplifting and funny romantic comedy Page 28