… for a short, but very busy trip. If you’re nearby, I’ll be talking about Me Before You in the following places.

11th February – Soho House, New York. SOHONY Literary Salon 7pm (I’m not sure whether entrance is restricted to members- please check with Soho House before turning up!)

12th February 7.30pm – Warwick’s Bookshop, 7812 Girard Avenue, La Jolla, CA.

http://www.warwicks.com

13th February – 7pm – Mysterious Galaxy, 2810 Artesia Blvd, Redondo Beach, CA

http://www.mystgalaxy.com

14th February – 11.30am – Towne Center Books, 555 Main Street, Pleasanton, CA

http://www.townecenterbooks.com

On the 15th February I’ll also be doing an online twitter chat (follow #litchat) at 9-10pm GMT, 4-5pm EST, so if you think of a question, or you couldn’t make any of the events, do join me there.

Hope to see you there!

So here I am, waiting in Kansas City Airport, trying to stop myself buying glittery red shoe souvenir tat, and mulling over the end of my brief American odyssey. I’m pretty sure that if I clocked up the miles I’d be headed into George Clooney Up In The Air territory. It’s all gone so fast that I can’t translate the impressions of half the places Ive been into any useful sort of prose, so instead I thought I’d list the things I thought I would do while on tour. And what I actually did.

1. Get fit. I planned to use every hotel gym as I travelled around. Hahahahahahaha. I was also going to use hotel menus to just eat salad and come home looking like Gwyneth Paltrow. Yup, Hahahaha again. (My gym kit did, however, become useful as impromptu nightwear.)

2. Work on my book. In truth, in the little downtime I had, I ended up flicking glassy-eyed through the 8792 television channels, answering email and trying to call home to speak to my children (who were missing me infinitely less than I was missing them and spent most of the precious phone minutes explaining arcane and complex rules of various computer games)

3. Sleep a lot. (yeah, see 1.) Most mornings you are getting up at 6 to find your way to the next airport. If you are like me this will also mean that you wake up at 3am, 4am, 4.30am and 5am because you are panicked about sleeping through the alarm and missing the flight.

Obligatory "pointing at sign" travel photo

4. Write an interesting travelogue about the places I travelled through. In fact you move so fast that it’s almost impossible to digest what it is you are experiencing. Hence each day feels a little like: HEYI’MINTEXASOHLOOKAGUNRANGEANDA CHURCHANDANOTHERCHURCHOOHNICEHOTELHELLOLOVELYBOOKSHOPEOPLESIGNSTOCKWHYSUREOHGOSHI’MTIREDYUMBARBECUESAUCEOHLOOKIT’S6AMANDI’MOFFTOANOTHERAIRPORT…

So bearing in mind the utter failure of my intentions, here are the things that actually happened on tour.

American bookshops: happy for you to draw on their walls

1. People turned up to my events. This was a bit surprising, as like all authors I am well aware that ‘author event’ can mean 200 people in a jolly theatre, or two people who accidentally wandered into the wrong end of the bookshop and are now too embarrassed to leave. Add to that the fact that I am, you know, English, and I was fully expecting the latter. That I had such nice, enthusiastic audiences I am ascribing partly to the amazing reviews in the NYT and People, but also laying largely at the feet of the various independent bookstores that held them. It has been one of the great discoveries of this tour that the indies of the US are in such good shape. Long may it last.

A light lunch at Texas's Goode Company Barbecue

2. I was defeated by nearly every single meal I was served. Those who know me know I can eat, so this was a source of acute embarrassment to me. One day I am going to sit and watch an actual American eat an actual stack of blueberry pancakes. Until that day I refuse to believe that anybody can manage a whole plate unless it is divided into individual portions, frozen, and served over several weeks. Possibly to an entire school.

Dear Raphael Hotel, Kansas City. No-one needs this many pillows. No-one.

3. I got ill (see previous blog post). This was despite my multivitams, my berrocca, my intense handwashing habit, and the fact that I spent most of my time at airports with my scarf pulled over my face like the Lone Ranger. Manufacturers of Advil, I love you with a passion you can only imagine.

4. I got better at flying. As a former weeper and clutcher of armrests, I have in the past 12 days, flown every single aircraft and weather condition that I might have had nightmares about (including tornado air). Sometimes even without Valium. Garry, the very nice Texan I sat next to yesterday as we flew out of Houston, may have even persuaded me that take-off is a ‘rush’. Maybe.

5. I realised I want to be called Ma’am for the rest of my life. I think I may start a campaign to introduce it in the UK. There is almost no statement that can’t be improved by the word ‘ma’am’, from ‘would you like maple syrup with that’, to ‘oh your accent is SO funny’. I made every single flight, and every single event, despite misunderstandings about time zones across America, The Great American Lurgy, and airports the size of some small African countries. (Dallas Ft Worth any airport that requires an actual Blade Runner airborne tram thingy to get you from gate to gate is TOO BIG).

6. I made a lot of new friends, ate a lot of new food, and got to add a few places to my ever-growing-list of Places I Would Quite Like To Live One Day. Time to board now, but thank you America for making me feel so welcome.

So it all started with the time change. Fool that I am, I hadn’t realised that there are different time zones across the US and while I kept moving west, during the first week of my book tour, my body clock stayed resolutely somewhere over the Atlantic.

By Thursday I had spent the best part of a week waking up at 5am after only a few hours’ sleep. My schedule involved six flights in six days, and it was starting to tell. Add to that the Very Annoying Italian Woman at Chicago O’Hare who coughed and coughed at me without covering her mouth, and I suppose it was inevitable that I would get ill.

So yesterday I hit my low point. I got up at 5.30am, caught a taxi from Manhattan Beach to LAX, got the 8.25am flight to Oakland Airport, and by the time I was mid-air I felt ill. Properly ill, like when you don’t care that you look weird resting your head on the table on your flight, and find yourself leaning against your oversized suitcase for support, and weep inappropriately in restrooms.

Thank goodness for Alex. Alex is my handler on this part of the tour (we have spent some time discussing the right title for her job – she doesn’t like ‘media escort’ because of the, um, connotations). Alex got me through yesterday. Even as I fell asleep between events, dozing in a sweaty stupor in her passenger seat, she kept me going. She fetched me hot lemon and honey during my speaking engagements so that my voice kept going, and soup for the car journeys, and by the time I made it back to my hotel last night I was so grateful to her I could have actually cried. (I think I may have done).

So as I lay shivering in bed last night I watched the news reports about the ‘flu epidemic sweeping America and realised that my aching limbs and prickling skin and inability to stay awake between engagements might not be *just* the product of time zones. And I started to panic – because you can’t be ill on a book tour. There are too many things riding on it; the schedule is too tight; I couldn’t even imagine how we would reschedule.

Then I remembered something an old friend who was a nurse had once told me. She had been due to sit medical exams when she came down with a virus. It could not have been worse timing. So she drank a pint of water every half an hour for the best part of a day, until she felt better. She literally flushed it out of her system. It was a tall order, and I know there will be dire warnings about over-hydration etc etc but given that I am in a hotel that is nowhere near a pharmacy, and I woke up this morning with no voice at all and had an hour-long radio interview at lunchtime today, I thought I’d give it a go.

Reader, I have drunk a mug of warm water every fifteen minutes for the past eight hours. I have drunk some with lemon and honey, some with agave syrup, some with Tabasco sauce. I have gargled with salt and glugged cough syrup. It has been, frankly, disgusting. I have drunk black tea, herbal tea, coffee, and iced water. I have eaten Advil every five hours and silently blessed its manufacturers for They Are My Friend.

And, gratifyingly swiftly, I have begun to feel human.

I have a new found respect for pop stars and actors who spend a lot of their lives on the road. When I looked at my schedule from home and googled the nice hotels and the travel schedule it sounded simply exciting. How hard could it be, after all? But over this past week I’ve learned that while being on tour *is* undoubtedly exciting and rewarding, it also means you have to treat your body with a little respect. I know of one author who simply gave up halfway through her tour and went home. I wouldn’t go that far, but I have a greater understanding of why you might.

So anyway in the two days that I didn’t write anything, a lot happened, and not just book-related. I had an animated discussion with a lovely driver called Kelly about accents: (“I could listen to your accent all day, Ma’am.” “That’s very kind. I could listen to yours.” “But you’re the one with the accent, Ma’am!” “No, I’m the normal one, YOU all have the accents.” (repeat to fade) ) I had dinner in Silver Lake with my two oldest gay friends, who have been together 47 years, and looked through their albums of the Gay-Ins of the 1970s and felt deep happiness about being in an actual house and ate their delicious black bean soup (am I the only one who remembers David Soul singing a song about this?). I slept in a room which had a whirlpool bath with ‘mood’ lighting and learned that green is never going to be a good idea. I was surprised at a bookstore reading in Santa Monica by my lovely Scottish friend Damian, who diverted his trip from Palm Springs to support me. I hung out with a friend Alison who I hadn’t seen for 9 years and discovered that with some friendships you really can just pick up where you left off.

But most excitingly of all, I finally discovered what a skunk smells like. My friends Bruce and Reggie, who couldn’t believe we don’t have them in England, drove me slowly past a dead one. The smell lingered in the car for a further five miles, making me gag pleasurably. BOY they small bad. I feel like a lifetime of Pepe Le Pew cartoons finally make sense. Who says you don’t learn something every day?

So to get to Witchita, you have to fly in a small plane. I appreciate the term ‘small’ is relative: I am not talking about a two seater, but frankly any plane where there is only one seat on my side of the aisle is too small in my book. The journey here from Chicago airport thus tested my new-found ‘nonchalant flyer’ status somewhat. (I sweated and tried not to visibly hold the plane up by the armrests.)

Wichita itself is flat. Really flat. You find yourself gazing out of the car window and trying to calculate how many days’ drive away the horizon might be. I did a tiny TV station run by a husband-and-wife team where a 110 year old cine-camera sits in reception and a poster for  their “The View” type talk show, “Mouthy Broads”, sits opposite. Casual conversation reveals that most residents here know all the presenters in person.

My hotel, The Ambassador, opened a week ago. It is enormous and plush and sits like a leviathan in the middle of the city centre. It is so new that my sheets bear the imprint of the packet, and I feel guilty about sullying the virgin facecloths. The staff are lovely and so keen that I’m fighting the suspicion I may be their only guest. They have not yet set up room service, so they invited me into the bar and made me the most delicious burger I have eaten in years (we are in cow country). They didn’t charge me for the accompanying glass of wine because nobody had yet decided how much it should cost.

I hope The Ambassador is a huge success, but looking out at Wichita’s quiet streets, and hearing how Boeing, one of its biggest employers, is leaving in February, I can’t help wondering how it will fill its magnificent rooms.

Somewhat busier was my event at the lovely Watermark Bookstore last night. I have long observed that the thing about about book events in quiet towns is that they often provide the best audiences. I could not have asked for a nicer audience. Beth, the manager, might have graffiti artist tendencies, because on the pillars of the cafe upstairs customers are encouraged to scrawl their reading resolutions (“Watch less! Read more!”) while in the basement every visiting author gets to write a message on the wall. David Sedaris, the US humourist, did a picture of an owl.

He is a great favourite with audiences here, and rightly. Apparently the last time he was there he signed till the small hours, asking for and telling jokes and being mischievous. “Sir,” he asked one man. “If you woke up in the woods with grass stains on your knees and a condom behind you, would you tell anyone?”

The customer was wide-eyed. “NO!”

Sedaris grinned. “Wanna come camping?”

So today I head to Dallas, and then onto L.A, trying not to think about the cheery weather forecast which predicts “just a thirty percent chance of tornadoes in the Dallas area.” Weather here, as my handler told me yesterday, is a little freaky. She told me how her parents house was destroyed by a tornado several years ago. Emerging from a neighbour’s cellar to scenes of devastation, they found blades of grass embedded like spears in the wall of the house.

When her mother went through her house she found her chest of drawers apparently untouched, the drawers still closed. When she looked inside, however, underneath her carefully folded clothes lay leaves and shards of glass. Apparently the tornado opens the drawers, lifts the clothes, and forces debris under them before closing them again.

I love this image. I’d love it a lot more if I wasn’t about to get on another little plane.

Day 3: it must be Wichita… (sorry, I have always wanted to say that). I write this from Departure Gate Nine at La Guardia Airport. My bag is already at the 23kg limit (worrying, given I’ve only been away four days) and I salute the porter at the Warwick Hotel who was able to assess its weight accurately this morning just by hauling it up the steps. (Big tip, there, people. BIG TIP)

Yesterday began at 5.30am, when I got myself “camera ready” for an appearance on WFSB’s Better CT programme. For some reason, every time I see the word “camera ready” on my schedule I read it as “oven ready”. It was a fair representation of my appearance.

As the sun came up we drove two hours from Manhattan to the station, and I waited in the Green Room for my slot. I got talking to a little girl, Ava Carlson, and her family. It took about two minutes to discover that she was there because her friend Charlotte had died in the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown. With her father, Aaron, she was promoting a project they had set up to encourage small acts of kindness among children; a way, I suspect, to persuade those children affected by that day, that life is not necessarily about men who come into their schools bearing semi-automatic rifles, but mostly about good things, good people, goodness.

The pain of that day is still evidently etched raw on the people of Connecticut. It comes up in conversation abruptly, and often, as if they are still processing it. Ava’s father, I noticed, held his children close reflexively. He and his wife worried aloud whether their project would be seen as hijacking the tragedy. They didn’t even want to answer the producer’s potential question: “how did you feel that day”. “How can we answer that?” Aaron said to me, “given that we came home with our child and other families didn’t?”

He told me of the unexpected things that had resulted: how their home had inadvertently been turned into a distribution centre for gifts that had arrived from well-wishers for the children, hundreds of teddy bears, branded pillow cases. The town is trying to work out how to answer the thousands of letters that have arrived, from all over the world. All of them saying in essence the same thing: we just want you to know you are not alone.

We drove the two hours back to NY, and I signed stock, did an interview, then I got back in the car and headed back to Connecticut for an evening at Mystic’s Oyster Club, for Bank Square Books.

Bank Square Books is one of those independent book stores that the US seems to be holding onto better than the UK. Run by passionate booksellers, and in a picturesque high street, it was devastated during the Hurricane Sandy at the tail end of last year, when flood waters wrecked the floors and warped even those books that sat above the watermark. For a small independent shop already combatting harsh prevailing commercial winds, it could have been devastating. But something amazing happened. The local community turned out in force to help. The landlady offered them the use of an empty apartment to store the undamaged stock. Children transferred the children’s section. Passers-by popped in to help. Neighbours worked in four hours shifts. Annie Philbrick, the co-owner, said it felt like an affirmation of what the store had meant to the community.

It’s hard not to write this without coming across like Jimmy Stewart in a Christmas special. But yesterday reminded me that sometimes the most catastrophic events have unexpected and life-affirming side-effects. There is a sign on a billboard on Highway 95, between NY and Connecticut. We passed it in the morning, and I found myself looking out for it when we went back. It reads: “We are Sandy Hook. We choose love.”

If you are interested in the Charlotte Bacon Act Of Kindness Award, I know they would love to get support from other schoolchildren, no matter where they’re based. The website is www.newtownkindness.org, and they can be found on facebook under www.facebook.com/NewtownKindness.org.

Sweden: has the best puddings ever. (and yes, I know how childish that is)

One of the unexpected consequences of having your novels translated into different languages is that you gradually become overwhelmed with editions of your own books. Few of which you can actually read.
Me Before You, for example, has been sold into 28 different countries (this is not a humblebrag – bear with me). Most of those publishers send authors between 4 and 6 copies of the translated book. Which means that my office now resembles a US-Serbian-Germanic vanity publishing experiment. And my youngest son’s bedroom now holds more copies of my books than of his own. (I’ll return to this in another post)

The other consequence is that if you’re lucky, you occasionally get invited to said Other Country. And last week, for the first time, I went to Sweden. My publisher, the wonderful Pia Printz, comprises two childhood friends, who, several years ago, decided to throw in their respective jobs and set up a publishing company. Their first book, happily, was a little novel by David Nicholls called One Day.

My promotional schedule began pretty much as I touched down, starting with an interview with Swedish media personality Carina Nunstedt of the magazine ‘Books and Dreams’. As we travelled to the event, Pia and Anna asked me several times: “are you nervous?”. No, I reassured them. I do lots of talks. I’m fine.
And then I saw the massive theatre. And understood why they had insisted I have a glass of something first.

I have always secretly wanted to be a Fifty Foot Woman.

It’s quite something to speak in front of a 500-strong audience and know that host and audience are all accommodating your total inability to speak Swedish by listening to an interview conducted in their second language. I’m not sure my ‘tak’ and ‘heyhey’ would really have cut it. But they were tolerant and enthusiastic and before I knew it, I was taking my place back in the auditorium (and discovering that I had actually morphed into the Fifty Foot Woman).

And that was where it got really interesting. Because all the other interviews were conducted in Swedish. And far from being bored, I became fascinated by the participants’ body language, and by the significance of the odd words of English that filtered through. Which were oddly revealing.

I really, really wished I could understand what they were saying....

Here, for example, is Camilla Henemark, ex-pop star and former mistress of the Swedish King. The audience was rapt. The only words I got from the interview (fill in the gaps with several minutes or so of imaginary Swedish) were: “ADHD…. dildo…. “ and “Mahatma Gandhi”. I would totally read her book.

These, on the other hand, are the only words I understood in 20 minutes of Peter Jöback, a Swedish singer huge in musical theatre: “Rehab…. Ave Maria… fucking flower!…. Elton John.”

A lot of women in the audience started to smile. I have no idea why.

There were the scarily fit blonde lookalikes whose book “Bodylicious” promised that you, with a little effort, could look like them. My sum total of their combined wisdom was: “New York…. superfoods…. hazelnuts…. pole dancer”. To be honest, I’m not sure any amount of hazelnuts and fixed poles could make me look like that, but they sure were purty to watch for 20 minutes.

I'm not sure they wear these shoes for *all* their exercising.

And there was Julia Dufvenius, a Swedish actress who read an extract from EL James’ Fifty Shades of Grey, which is just beginning to swallow Sweden like it did everywhere

You could have heard a pin drop.

else. I have no idea what bit she read, but I can tell you that that woman could make a Lidl shopping bill sound erotic. I held out for a “Holy Cow!”, but there was not a word I understood. Mind you, judging from the slightly glazed expressions around me, I didn’t need to.

I can’t write about the rest of my Swedish trip without sounding like an overexcited travel junkie. But I loved Stockholm. I loved its food and its distinct style and architecture quite unlike the southern European cities I tend to visit.

It has the coolest doors!

I know it's a door. But I just thought it was interesting.

And door knockers!

Insert joke about Swedish knockers here

And chemists that advertise using dead stuffed crows!

Not entirely sure this signals: "We can cure your indigestion!" But each to their own.

It’s no coincidence that I’ve spent the entire weekend since returning home running our household contents out to the skip. And nobody made me eat herring.

So I’m praying that Livet Efter Dig sells well enough to allow me to come back again for the launch of The Girl You Left Behind. I have however included a picture to show that in matters of tourist tat, the Swedes are every bit as tasteless as we are.

Sweden: It's not all Carl Larsson and Design House, you know. Troll, anyone?

I also need to come up with a better answer when my publishers next enquire as to the most famous Swedish celebrity I can think of. Did I come up with Strindberg? No. Or even Ulrika Jonsson? No. The first Megaswede to pop into my head was …

HURDY GURDY!

the chef from the Muppets. Heyhey!

Argh. I’m wincing with shame at the realisation that it’s a month since The Girl You Left Behind hit the shelves. A whole month in which I’ve singularly failed to update the website, blog, or write anything about the book itself. But the last few months has involved criss-crossing the country like a join-the-dots puzzle, doing events and literary festivals – and the worst of it is that I’ve been going at such speed that so many amazing experiences have become a blur of memory, rather than the whole essays that they probably deserved.

The best of this has been getting to meet and spend time with some extraordinary people. Seeing as 98% of my life comprises sitting in a back room wearing a onesie and talking to the dog, I am going to detail a little of it (please ready your ears for the clanging sound of names dropping).
Some highlights: giving a talk at Henley Literary Festival with Emma Freud (even though she nearly got me arrested on a night that involved curry, cycling a towpath without lights, and alleged ghost sightings); being interviewed at Wimbledon Festival by one of my journalistic heroines, Penny Vincenzi, and taking part in Damian Barr’s Literary Salon at Cheltenham Festival with one of my literary heroes, Michael Chabon (The best of it being that unlike the last time I met one of my literary idols, Chabon was utterly charming and didn’t stare pointedly over my shoulder). At Cheltenham I had the joy of looking up from the hotel reception desk to find I was checking in beside Roger Moore. For just a moment I was, I’m ashamed to say, deeply tempted to sign myself in as May Day.

I got to see two comedic heroes – Sarah Millican and Joan Rivers – live (Rivers was impressively offensive for a 79-year-old – I spent half her show with my hand clamped over my mouth), got to talk film with Richard Curtis, and, perhaps more surreally, discuss literary terminology for penises at the Isle of WIght Literary Festival with Anneka Rice. I also gave a talk via Skype to a classroom full of girls, gave another in aid of the wonderful Royal Neurological Hospital, and one from the nave of a church (the temptation to bless someone was almost overwhelming).

All of which is my slightly haphazard way of apologising for not telling you a bit more about the new book, The Girl You Left Behind.
It’s an epic saga, based around the portrait of an artist’s wife, and the two women at each end of the century whose lives and loves are affected by it. It went into the Sunday Times bestseller list at Number 8, so a huge thank you to all those who bought it. I’ll try to link to some of the reviews this week.
Meanwhile, Me Before You continues its astonishing run in new countries, most recently with a spell in the Icelandic bestsellers list. I’m now gearing up for the book tour that accompanies its launch in the US after Christmas. Thanks to everyone who bought it – and all those who’ve contacted me about it. I try to respond to everyone, but if I’ve missed you – please do message me again.

Me, my US edition, and my lovely editor Pamela Dorman. And a purty background. Photo c/o Publishers Weekly.

So last week saw a break in my usual novelist’s routine of onesie, animal husbandry, school runs and plot-related despair. I went to New York.

I’ll just say that again. I went to New York (now imagine it said with a kind of nonchalant head-toss, like going to New York for business is just, you know, my NORMAL routine). I was there at the behest of my American publishers (Me Before You comes out in the US at the end of the year) and the fact that someone else was actually Paying For Me To Be In New York meant that I was not only terrifyingly giddy by the time I got to Heathrow, but pretty much the whole time I was there.

New York. It's quite big.

Because there is something about New York; the never-ending din, the scale of the buildings, the bad smells, the raw energy, the naked ambition of the people striding too fast past you on the packed sidewalks. The last time I came here I was 23. I came for a weekend with my best mate. We did not sleep for three days, examined the inside of pretty much every drinking venue from the Village to Central Park, and I flew home in extreme turbulence weeping and clutching the hand of the complete stranger in the next seat.

This time, I came as a grown up. A professional. A woman who had just escaped a week’s worth of Parentmail, VAT reminders and children’s homework. Jet-lagged and mildly disorientated as I was, I spent the first day walking the length of Manhattan, gazing upwards and trying not to spontaneously exclaim at passers by: “How great is this??” (I did talk to two cops. I asked them where the doughnut shop was – I banked on them being too young to get the reference).

And it did not disappoint. I was on 6th Avenue at an ATM  when I turned and became dimly aware of a young Asian man in a Brooks Bros suit, standing outside the lobby. I punched in my number – distracted by my conviction that it was not going to give me any money – and happened to look up, just as a young woman walked up to him, and carefully tipped a large paper cup of McDonald’s drink – lemonade or water – straight over his head. When I looked back, open mouthed, she was gone. He simply shook the excess water from his face and walked away. No matter what my editor says, I refuse to believe this is not an everyday occurrence in New York. It was like a Junot Diaz short story made flesh.

Breakfast at the Rockefeller Center. With company.

Likewise, bumping into Meg Ryan. I was standing on Prince Street in Greenwich Village, between meetings, and she walked past with her daughter. I was on the phone to my husband, and the conversation went something like this. “don’t forget H’s drama lessons… and how’s the dog’s ear?… Meg Ryan just walked past me… OHMYGODMEGRYANJUSTWALKEDPASTME.”

I can report, happily, that she looks impressively fit, and also, that I managed not to shriek while she was actually in earshot. Because if she had turned and registered me I would probably have begged her to do the Harry Met Sally Deli-gasm, just for the purposes of my full on New York Experience, and she would probably have had me sectioned.

See how well I suit a limo and driver? I do, don't I? Can someone buy me one? Please?

I had too many life-enhancing experiences in five days to repeat here without boring you in the manner of someone showing off holiday snaps (“oh and that’s Trevor again with the woman we met in the restaurant… what was it called?”). So I’ll just highlight my compulsory $10 manicure on 6th with a very nice woman who spoke no English, note that I was defeated by breakfast pancakes (each one the size of an eclipse), and that Tiffanys, inside, reminded me a bit of a hotel in central China where I had once stayed (though the jewellery was pretty nice). I also discovered I am an utter failure at the New York food order (“No, really, just ham and some bread. That will be fine”) but have a very good memory. I walked into a small, downtown bar with my friend Janine and immediately recognised it as a bar where I had spent my first night in New York, 20 years previously. That time had involved Wall Street bankers, a supermodel in a lift, and a random fridge-shaped man who offered me a bag of cocaine the size of my head outside the ladies’ loos. So, usefully, I was able to tell Janine where the Ladies was.

And most importantly, I did Shopping (the capital letter is important). Two hours before I was due to meet a number of New York’s finest journalists – my main reason for being there – I realised that not only was my dress All Wrong, but that something had happened to it in transit, and it smelt a bit … vintage-y. I had aimed for Quirky and English. What I had was Eccentric Lady Novelist With Vague Aroma Of Dog And Turmeric. All of which meant that I was forced to have a Saks Fifth Avenue Experience. The one where you are waiting at the door when it opens, and the woman brings in armfuls of clothes to your dressing room and you panic buy a designer outfit and a pair of spike heeled shoes and come out slightly faint, having spent more money than you have ever spent in your life, without purchasing something you can either drive or actually raise a family in. And I’m sorry, but it was fabulous. Even having seen my credit card statement in the cold light of day, it was fabulous.

The Gramercy Tavern. Just before our Very Important Lunch (that's the US edition of Me Before You, in between the flower arrangements)

Anyway, without wanting to say too much about the publishing side, just yet (although it was lovely to see the indie sector in such fine fettle stateside), I arrived home in the early hours of Saturday, some eight hours before my husband was due to fly to Korea (our most extreme game of Child Tag ever.) Within four hours of waking, I had to fix a leak in the coolant tank of my old Volvo, clear three disembowelled mice from the living room carpet where the cat had left them, and wash a rugby kit that really required the use of a Hazchem suit and tongs.

But I’ll be back, in January. And in the meantime I’ll be practising ordering things on the side, holding other things, without mayo, and on rye. New York, you’re a wonderful town.

I don’t read enough. I’m aware that’s a ridiculous thing for a writer to say. But I can’t read in the day, and at night I’ve become one of those people who frequently drifts off drooling having read the same paragraph three times.
There’s another reason: unless the book I’m working on is going really well, and has a distinct voice, I can find that I’m adopting the book’s tone (I once found the heroine of a Frinton-based period romance sounding weirdly like Mma Ramotswe). Or, in the case of a really good book, you can become so completely disheartened by your own W.I.P that you decide it no longer deserves to be I.P and rip it all up.
So holiday reading is an actual luxury. I try to ensure it’s not work-related, and so this year I sought recommendations from friends online. As a quality control mechanism it has proven to be pretty effective.
So I thought I’d share a few of the books that I really enjoyed.

Out this month, this debut by Liza Klaussman begins as an evocative tale of relationships in post-war America and then veers off to become something darker altogether. Its structure is audacious – multiple narrators, often picking up the story decades apart. It is brutal, compelling, full of beautiful imagery, and conducts a lovely, leisurely dissection of the marriage at its heart, that of the glamorous Nick and Hughes, that leaves no easy answers.

Walking With Sausage Dogs by Matt Whyman. Full disclosure: I know Matt and his family, thinly disguised here in this Gerald Durrell-esque story of how pets can have a transformative effect on their households (and not always in a good way). There is a central episode – a bizarre accident with huge consequences – which I was privy to, and which Matt writes about with humour and candour. If your pets have become the miniature dictators of your family – or if you just love sausage dogs – you’ll love this.

One thing I hadn’t expected was that I would read so many books about women wrestling with the approach of middle age. Three of these were very good. One really wasn’t. I’m not going to write about that one.

I didn’t grow up with sisters. In fact, I was 19 before I acquired my first. So I found The Weird Sisters’ quirky portrayal of a family of women who love each other while not actually liking each other very much completely fascinating. Shot through with Shakespeare, and beautifully written, this is a sort of coming of age story for women whose lives didn’t quite turn out as they had planned.

Wife 22 by Melanie Gideon follows the life of Alice Buckle, a woman whose marriage is in steady decline and who, on a whim, agrees to take part in an anonymised internet survey about marriage. The relationship she builds with her anonymous researcher provides much of the tension within the book. It’s funny, compelling, and if I felt a tiny bit let down by the ending it certainly wouldn’t put me off recommending it.

A woman on the edge also features in the very funny Where’d You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple in which a daughter tries to unpick the disappearance of her unravelling middle aged mother, once a prodigiously talented and celebrated architect. The book is mostly told through correspondence, and Bernadette’s quirky, unrepentant and ballsy character totally won me over, not least in her battle with a Simon Cowell-alike, which ends in a heartbreaking act of destruction. I even liked it enough to forgive the author name-checking Mia Farrow in the acknowledgments…

And finally, I read what may well be my book of the Year: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. To say this is a psychological thriller doesn’t do justice to its multilayered twists and turns. It is rare that I read a book where I cannot tell to the last page where it is headed, but this is that book. It is fascinating on modern relationships and has a plot twist in the middle that actually made me make a noise like someone had kicked me in the stomach.
My husband (who monopolised my kindle for three days to read it, leaving me with only the Really Bad Middle Aged Lady Fiction) loved it just as much. I have been astonished by the mixed reviews it has received online – I thought it properly brilliant.

Read it, and let me know what you think.

… but firstly I just had to post this:

Actual Gail Tilsley (she'll always be Tilsley to me, despite the 89 subsequent husbands). From Coronation Street. Reading Me Before You. Yes REALLY.

It was broadcast while I was on holiday, so I woke up one morning to an endless stream of tweets going: OMG GAIL IS READING YOUR BOOK ON TELLY. As I said to someone this evening, this is it. I can go no higher. (Unless, that is, I can get a copy of my next one into the hands of Tim Riggins before the Friday Night Lights playoffs…)