Jessica Ruston

The Sun says Luxury is “‘A scandalously good look at high life.  Compulsive” in their Christmas Gift Guide today.

I’ve just finished reading this and it’s going straight onto my list of favourite foodie books that aren’t cookbooks (in with Anthony Bourdain et al).  I love a food memoir, or a chef’s autobiography, or any kind of narrative non-fiction related to food.  I especially love it in the winter, for some reason, because it’s comforting, I suppose, and when I’m in the kind of phase that I am at the moment, where my head is so full of my own novel-in-progress that reading any kind of sustained fiction is impossible and so I devour essays and magazine articles and books like this.

This is a picnic, really, of food-inspired vignettes from Laura Lockington’s life (a life which has clearly been full of thousands of escapades and stories which this book only really hinted at and which I was desperate to know more about).  From her childhood ‘farting around in the kitchen’ (this reminded me so much of my own childhood kitchen play, where I would spend happy hours ‘making mixtures’ from anything and everything in my mother’s cupboards.  Bicarbonate of soda for fizzing action was a must), to Sauce Vierge recipes from Italian prostitutes and the deep glamour of being whisked away to Paris for lunch as a 12th birthday treat by two dissolute Uncles, Lockington traces the outlines of her life through her love for food.

She is an honest, warm, and funny writer, and, perhaps most impressively, she writes about food with a lightness of touch that any pastry-maker would envy – not for her the heavy-handed, bossy and pious talk of a ‘passhun’ for food that so many seem to write with; instead, as with the best themed memoirs, she uses the food in her life as a springboard from which she paints deft pictures of her family, her friends, herself.  Cupboard Love would be an excellent stocking filler for any food-loving friend – here’s the amazon link.

I saw that Coggles had included LUXURY in their mailing list recently which I was so pleased about. Of course every bit of exposure is good and welcome, but when it comes from somewhere so fitting it’s particularly pleasing.  Coggles.com is a brilliant online boutique – they sell well known designers like Vivienne Westwood (my fave) and Lulu Guinness but also stock less known names such as Kelly Ewing – who makes quite Westwood-esque tailored jackets and dresses that I adore (I am lusting after this dress…)  The site is clean and well designed and though there’s lots on there it is also carefully edited – you don’t have that feeling of wading through thousands of things that aren’t right as you do in so many online shops.  Do check it out.

It’s so exciting to think of my book being read on the other side of the world, and I was thrilled to spot my first review from Australia online recently.

“IF you love an epic saga of love and betrayal, Luxury, a doorstopper of a novel with ‘holiday read’ written all over it is just that. There are three main characters, Maryanne, who falls in love with Nicolo, a fledgling property developer, and his best friend Logan. It all goes pear-shaped when Logan moves in on Nicolo’s girl, destroying their friendship. Although Logan and Maryanne build a successful life of unparallelled luxury together, Nicolo is waiting in the wings for an opportunity to make them pay. Luxury, the private island paradise Logan creates for the mega-rich is a feast for the senses, with Ruston’s description of the resort more tempting than an episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

In a word: Rich”

Review by Shari Tagliabue

Very pleased to announce that rights have just been sold for LUXURY to be published in Indonesia and Poland.  This is great news and I hope to be able to announce more foreign rights sales before too long.  Can’t wait to see it in other languages, even if I won’t be able to read it!

Just a little round up of mentions from the blogs – look out on Chick Lit Reviews next week for a review and interview with me – I’ll link to it here when it’s up.  Also do follow Chloe and Leah on twitter if you’re a fan of commercial women’s fiction, for updates, links and news.  They are @chicklitblog.

There will also be a review coming soon on Trashionista, the queen of chick-lit/commercial fiction blogs.

And Bookalicious has posted a review on her site – she found it ‘unputdownable’ which I am always pleased to hear!

In December’s issue of Elle, out today, Luxury is named Debut of the Year in their Literature Awards, 2009.  “Proof that light fiction needn’t be badly written, there’s nothing guilty about this pleasure.”

Thanks very much to Elle for this fantastic accolade.

Today I am lowering the tone on Normblog by talking about Lace as part of his Writer’s Choice series… do check it out.

Luxury has the lead review in today’s Sunday Express and I couldn’t be happier with it.  Here it is in full.

For all the women crying into their Chardonnay about how they don’t have a boyfriend in today’s literary scene, there has been a distinct lack of career witches who are willing to do anything, absolutely anything,  to get on in the world.

Praise be, therefore, to Jessica Ruston, whose first novel, Luxury, is right in there in shoulder-pad territory: admittedly, the two protagonists are actually men but here, in the world of five-star hotels, international travel, multi-million-pound designer jewellery, treachery, betrayal, sex and the rest, we are well and truly back in bonkbuster territory.

Thank goodness: the genre has been sorely missed.

The story revolves around rival hoteliers Logan and Nicolo. They met as young men and, together with third friend, Johnny, set off to conquer the world.

As often happens, alas, a woman disrupts the proceedings when Logan nicks Nicolo’s girlfriend, setting in chain a lifelong rivalry in which lives are destroyed and the two men… well, I’m not telling; it would spoil the fun.

This is a wonderful debut: Ruston is staggeringly assured. Not only does she write convincingly about her chosen area, involving high finance and the business elite, but she’s utterly in control of her timescale, moving at ease between three different decades, as we first meet the protagonists, still friends, in their 20s, before fast-forwarding to the present day, before plunging deeper back in time still to discover what makes them click.

It’s also a lot of fun trying to work out who is based on who and what is based on what.

Logan is also the star of a reality television show, designed to find Britain’s best hotelier and thus clearly in the Gordon Ramsay/Alan Sugar arena (not that he actually resembles either of them), while his obsession is with a beautiful island in the Indian Ocean, L’ile des Violettes, on which he builds a resort that I think bears more than a passing resemblance to Richard Branson’s Necker.

I’ve never been to Necker but that’s the joy of books like Luxury: they take you into a world you would never normally experience.

Bonkbuster: welcome back.

VERDICT 4/5
Headline, £6.99

***** Great news – Luxury has entered The Bookseller’s Top 20 Fiction Heatseekers chart at Number 15 *****