“Miss Aldridge Regrets” by Louise Hare (2022)

“The doorman barely glanced at me as I approached, slipping past him and down the stairs into the basement club, the stale air thick with cigarette smoke.”

One of the perks of working in a bookshop is occasionally getting your hands on proof copies of novels before they hit the shelves. One of the drawbacks, however, is that my reading list is so long already that by the time I get to said proofs, they’ve already been published. So this is one that has sat on my shelf for ages, but actually came...