Publisher: Orion
Published: January 23rd, 2020
Format: Hardcover, Kindle
Genre: General Fiction, Women’s Fiction
Welcome to my stop on the blog tour for this delightful novel. Thank you to Tracy at Compulsive Readers Tours for the invitation to take part, and to Orion and NetGalley for the eBook ARC in exchange for an honest review.
SYNOPSIS:
From the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Lido comes a story of friendship, belonging and never giving up your dreams.
Welcome to the café that never sleeps.
Day and night, Stella’s café opens its doors to the lonely and the lost, the morning people and the night owls. It’s a place where everyone is always welcome, where life can wait at the door.
Meet Hannah and Mona, best friends, waitresses, dreamers. They love working at Stella’s – the different people they meet, the small kindnesses exchanged. But is it time to step outside and make their own way in life?
Come inside and spend 24 hours in Stella’s café, where one day might just be enough to change your life…
MY REVIEW:
Have you ever had that feeling where you just want to climb inside a book and live there? That’s how I felt about The 24-Hour Café, a delightful, heartwarming story that warmed my insides like hot chocolate on a cold day.
The story takes place over twenty-four hours at Stella’s, a London café that has a style all of its own, sharing glimpses of the lives of two of its waitresses, best friends Hannah and Mona, and some of its customers. Over the course of the day we get to know these people, see what they’re going through, what matters to them and how their interactions with each other affect their lives, some in ways they don’t expect. It is a story about life, love, friendships, dreams and heartache. We see people at their best and their worst, when they are at their happiest and when their life is falling apart.
At the centre of the story is Hannah and Mona. The friends both live and work together, the café providing them with flexible conditions perfect for continuing to chase their dream careers – Hannah of being a singer, Mona of being a dancer. They’ve always been more like sisters than friends but this past year, things have changed and they’ve grown apart. Can they fix their problems or are things broken forever? That question is underlying over the course of the book and I was so invested in these characters that I was rooting for things to be fixed.
I devoured this book in under twenty-four hours and just couldn’t put it down. It was an easy but immersive read, with interesting characters that felt real and relatable. I immediately cared about Hannah, our first narrator, and felt the same about each character as they were introduced. I loved the different stories the author created for each narrator and how she made me genuinely care about them individually. The writing was uplifting and alluring, transporting me to this world that felt real, the vivid descriptions of Stella’s making me want to hop on a train to London and go there.
The 24-Hour Café snuck in at the very end of the year to take a place in my top books of 2019. It is a book that manages to be quietly understated and dazzling at the same time and I predict this will be on everyone’s must-read list in 2020. If you’re looking for a delicious, captivating and touching read, this is the book for you.
*thank you to @head_in_a_book_18 for allowing me to use her lovely picture in this post.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Libby Page is the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Lido. Her second book The 24-Hour Café launches in January 2020.
Before writing The Lido Libby worked as a campaigner for fairer internships, a journalist at the Guardian and a Brand Executive at a retailer and then a charity.
CONNECT WITH THE AUTHOR:
Libby also shares her swimming adventures with her sister Alex on Instagram
BUY THE BOOK:
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