Unladylike Lessons in Love comes out in May ’23!

Just check out this glorious Avon/HarperCollins USA cover for Unladylike Lessons in Love. It took a few goes to get there, but then this beautiful thing emerged and it captures Lila Marleigh perfectly.

Lila is an independent young woman. She doesn’t play by Regency society’s rules, but then as her friend Kenneth always says why be only a tiny little bit outrageous when you can go all out? As the daughter of an English earl and his Indian mistress, Lila will never be fully accepted by the ton. She will always remain an outsider. She knows this and uses it to her advantage.

One night, when Lila is busy managing her bustling salon, a friend from the past – Maisie Quinn – comes begging for her help.

Ivor Tristram is the one man who can help – except he’s infuriating and – tiny problem – he is certain that Lila is his father’s mistress. Sparks fly. And, well, you can imagine what happens then.

There is a lot inherited from the wonderful Georgette Heyer – witty banter, high passion, all the ton’s secrets and rules of etiquette, not to mention a curricle race or two. But there is the added element of a very diverse cast of characters. And some sexy goings on. We also visit underground London cultures and the odd pleasure garden.

Must thank the fabulous Kerry Rubenstein for this cover. And Lucia Macro for helping us push to get to the right one.

And a bow to Julia Quinn, the queen of modern Regency, to light the way for new Regency writers and readers.

Arya Winters ‘irreverent and funny’

This is the second instalment of Arya Winters (the first was Arya Winters and the Tiramisu of Death). The series is shelved as a cosy, but I’m never sure it is really a cosy.

It’s a murder mystery, and yes, as the Booklist review suggests, it is deliberately irreverent. The trope of the ‘nice’ woman is an old and tired one. I have no time for it. Arya let’s me explore all the sides of myself – dysfunctional, neurotic, high anxiety, very blunt, intense – that it’s sometimes hard for women to explore in real life.

Do I push the bar a bit with how irreverent it gets? Yep, for sure. There’s no point pushing the bar a tiny little safe amount. So there is a little bit of sex, there is a some swearing, and yes, ribald humour, there is some of that. But there is also an exploration of vulnerability. Emotional dysfunction. How we hide or reveal our true selves. How desperately we want to connect with others and how we get in our own way.

Arya is invited to bake for a residential art retreat not far from Trucklewood. All Arya wants is to get away from her nosy neighbours and get some time off from feeling terrible about her break up with Branwell. So, off she goes to the retreat. And of course who should arrive there but Branwell. (You didn’t really think this would be a Bran-free book, did you?)

Murdery things happen. Arya has to grapple with her demons. She is excruciatingly blunt. She doesn’t like to hold on to secrets, her own or others’. And this house is a buzzing hive of secrets and it’s all Arya can do to not put her foot in her mouth all the time. Oh, and Bran has a perky girlfriend with a perky ponytail, and that isn’t helping anything either.

This book comes out just in time for Christmas 2022.

Unladylike Lessons in Love

The first of my Marleigh sisters Regency romance series comes out with Avon and HarperCollins in Sp/Su2023.

I can’t wait for this series to hit the bookshelves. In the first book, Lila, the oldest daughter of an earl and his Indian mistress, sets out to help an old friend who comes begging for her help. In helping Maisie, Lila must navigate the rat pits and pleasure gardens of Regency London, but most of all she’ll have to pit her wits against the gorgeous but infuriating Ivor Tristram to protect the sanctity of her heart.

Over the course of a six book series not only will the six sisters navigate what it’s like to be a mixed race woman in 19th c England but also uncover their late-parents’ secrets.

Check out the announcement here: https://www.thebookseller.com/rights/harperfiction-pre-empts-three-witty-and-romantic-regency-novels-from-murray

I’m definitely getting ‘eye popping raciness’ printed on a t shirt!

More big news coming soon…

I write in two genres – contemporary mystery and Regency mystery-romance. There’ve been some very exciting developments in the Regency side of things recently, but all top secret until the press release. More on this soon.

Photo: Stewart Williams @photostew

Thirteenth Night wins the Exeter Novel Prize!

So this was very, very cool. Hearing from and seeing the fellow finalists (even though on zoom) was brilliant. Lots of great novels to come from them. I was so excited about the short list I already spent a couple of days in Exeter before the prize ceremony, took a train to nearby Dawlish and did the coastal walk from Dawlish Warren, a quick charity shop crawl (which is the main point of going anywhere, obvs), and of course a stop at Brody’s for breakfast (they actually had fried bread in their buffet!) Winning the prize was amazing. I love this novel. It’s Knives Out but with an edgy, slightly neurotic, high anxiety podcaster from London who gets caught up in a MYSTERY when a respected actor gets murdered in Yorkshire. More about this soon….

photo: Stewart Williams @photostew

Interview with Sara DiVello and Murder by the Book

Check out my interview with the lovely Sara DiVello and the out of this world Murder by the Book bookshop. See the full interview here

I talk about social anxiety, loneliness and the all important question: can you have too much sex and swearing in crime fiction? And did our generation invent anxiety?

How to Have Sex in Crime Fiction

Check out my new, very fun article on sex tropes in crime fiction and the oh all important drive to bring sex positivity to our fiction.

Read the full article here

“My female characters do enjoy sex and they’re not afraid to admit it. But it’s not all magical, soulmate sex. They get it wrong. They get turned down. They get confused between love and sex. Sometimes they have sex with people they love, other times it’s just sex for sex. Sometimes it’s curl-your-toes great and sometimes very, very excruciatingly average. And oh, sometimes they just get horribly, soul-crushingly lonely …”

Starred review by Publishers Weekly

Read the full review for Arya Winters and the Tiramisu of Death here

The reviewer says:

“Full of original metaphors and pithily funny descriptions, this lively fair play mystery leaves readers with some serious food for thought. Murray turns the cozy genre on its head in this wryly witty and at times poignant outing.”

This is my first starred review, so I’m very excited! I love Publishers Weekly and their super team of reviewers.

Arya Winters and the Tiramisu of Death

A long long overdue blog post!

Here’s my latest novel Arya Winters and the Tiramisu of Death (Agora, Oct 2021).

It’s a ‘cozy’ quirky sexy mystery, causing great controversy. Is this a cozy or is it not? Can there be sex and swearing (yes!) in a cozy or can there not? Is this – finally – a long overdue very millennial mystery whose main concerns are very millennial too – social anxiety, loneliness, sex and belonging.

Meet Arya Winters. She speaks her mind, and it often gets her into deep waters. She wants love and desire, but often gets it wrong. She wants to fit in, but only on her own terms. A very millennial heroine in a very millennial novel.

Buy it here on Amazon or here on Blackwells.

And tell me what you thought! Leave a review or tweet me @AmitaMurray

The Tragedy that is Game of Thrones

Image result for opening credits game of thrones kings landing

I’m glad I wrote an ode to Game of Thrones after Season 8 Episode 2 aired, because this sure as hell is not going to be an ode. It’s more in the nature of a nasty obituary. And just so you know, there are a truckload of spoilers in this post.

The final episode of the show airs tomorrow, for us lot in the UK. At the start of the final season of the show and half way into it, if someone had asked me how I would feel on the eve of the final episode, I would have said awful, grief-stricken, and love-lorn, like someone I love is leaving and never coming back, and all I’ll have left of them is some old pictures and the smell of their t-shirts that lingers in their closet. After giving eight years to a relationship, that’s how you feel when you know it’s going to end, when you know nothing you can do can stop its demise now. You feel heartbroken.

Unless that relationship has gone terribly, irrevocably wrong, right at the end. In which case you can only mourn what it once was, you can only look back in regret, wait in trepidation at the cringeworthiness of the final goodbye, and feel a huge sense of relief that it’ll soon be over. Thank FUCK is all you have to say about it.

I’ve thought about it, and I have a lot of problems with Season 8 Episode 5, and I’ll come to these in a second. First, I’ll tell you all the things I don’t have a problem with. For a season and a half, fans have been complaining about the way characters teleport all over the place, Bran stares through people in a really boring way and for no apparent purpose, intelligent characters like Tyrion do stupid things just to serve the narrative and hilarious ones like Tormund are quickly disposed of and sent back to the wilderness once they no longer serve a useful purpose. Now, fans are also complaining about the tragedy of Jamie’s arc – finding redemption in a knight’s arms and then discarding it like a dirty nappy. The strange behaviour of Varys who seemed to lose all his spidey skills right at the end. And the pointlessness of the Night King and his dispatch, after eight series of dread, in just one episode.

I stood by the show through all of this and more. I didn’t complain. Why are the fans getting all hot and bothered, I asked? That episode wasn’t too dark, of course the final battle was going to speed things up, and well, maybe people learned to apparate – what’s wrong with that? It’s all good, I said. In my eyes, the show can do no wrong.

Wow, I was wrong.

Things can go horribly wrong, not because the writers ran out of source material, not because they didn’t have permission from HBO to carry on for a couple more seasons, not because GRRM wanted to wrap things up, but because they were secretly having an affair with Star Wars, and it just got more exciting than their boring old marriage with Game of Thrones. And because of this new mistress, they decided to wrap up the show in a measly thirteen episodes, and King’s Landing has just gone up in smoke because of it.

My problem isn’t the destruction of King’s Landing and its women and children. Such atrocities and terrible tragedies form basically all of human history. Of course it isn’t the politicians or even the soldiers who are always the ones to die. It’s the women and children. It’s always the women and children. That is the human condition, that in all our time on this planet, for all our seeming intelligence and wondrous gadgets, we haven’t been able to find a better way of resolving our differences, or seeing that those differences are petty and meaningless in the first place. So, I have no problem with the tragedy that befell King’s Landing. It showed the horrors of war in a beautifully visceral way.

My peeve is that in the penultimate episode of the show, you cannot introduce a whole new character that no one has ever seen before and turn them into the main baddie. If you do that, literally no one cares. And this is what the show has done. Yes, Dany has always been ruthless, and slightly trigger happy with her dragon-nukes. Yes, she has a temper. And yes, she has a sense of entitlement. Of course she has. But for eight years, the show has shown her constantly struggle to be a better person, to ask for and listen to advice, to suffer from guilt at her mistakes, to strive to be a leader who can break the wheel, even at times when she feels like she’s as far away from it as she has ever been. From that character arc to the destruction of King’s Landing after the city had already surrendered all seemingly in the space of one or two episodes DOES NOT MAKE SENSE. It’s a travesty of good writing, and a tragedy for loyal fans.

Erik Kain has written a brilliant article in Forbes to show that if the writers always had this endgame in mind then there are ways they could have naturally brought us to that conclusion in a way that was comprehensible and not completely baffling. That would have stayed true to the rules the show has spent six years establishing, rules of morality and humanity, of intelligent decisions and bad ones, of what happens when people get pushed to the limit. If the show had followed Martin’s brilliant psychological reasoning, we would have got there in the end, and then Season 8 Episode 5 would have been just as brilliant, even mind-blowing as Ned’s beheading, the Red Wedding, and that unbelievable thing that happened to the Viper.

Still, you know what, I’m ready to move past all of that. But there is one thing I can’t move past.

And that is that this show took eight years to seemingly set up the most powerful female leaders television history has ever seen, and then turned them into vindictive, hate-filled,  irrational, manipulative, vengeful, nasty little girls, the kind that dunk others’ heads down the toilet when no one is looking, just because they feel like it, and lock other kids into dark toilets when no one is around. The show has taken all the worst stereotypes of femininity and put them into amazing, powerful characters like Dany and Cersei. Even Sansa is crediting her courage to rape and savagery. And they’ve already disposed of Olena and Marjorie. Arya is the only one left now, and even she is following the stereotype that women can only do great things once they turn their back on their sexuality and say goodbye to it.

This is where, after years of loyalty, I’ve lost all interest in what happens in the final episode.

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