You're listening to the Shilux Book Club podcast with me, Heather Steele and Georgina Blaskey.

Each episode, we dissect a hot book alongside a special guest with the help of our Shirlux community. Hello and welcome to the first ever Shilocks Book Club podcast with me, Heather Steele and Shillux's Georgina Blaskey. Today, we're joined by very special guest, Lauren Bravo. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me.

Lovely to have you on. I'm sure many

of our readers and viewers will already know who Lauren Bravo. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me.

Lovely to have you on. I'm sure many of our readers and viewers will already know who you are,

but just in case there's one or two who don't, Lauren is an author and journalist. She's

written to nonfiction books and her latest book, which is a novel. It's called Pre-loved and

it came out in April and I've been reading it this week

and it is really, really good. We were chatting over email earlier this week and I read the

beginning of the book and was like, I'm the main character. Like there's lots of similarities. I

don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but I very much love Gwen. But yeah, we'll be chatting about that at the end of the podcast.

But for now, lessons in chemistry.

When we decided me and Georgina to start the book club,

we were like, what book can we do?

We wanted to do one that's sort of lots of people who've already read and loved,

one that's still a bit current but you know a nice

summer read and it's a bit of a no-brainer really wasn't it yeah i mean i think it was the book

that when it came out everybody was talking about it everyone was excited i mean it was a publishing

phenomenon it really was especially debut novel at how old is she she's 66 yeah well this is what I love so much about it because I read it. I didn't know anything about Bonnie Garmes and I'm ashamed to say I read it with that slight pang of resentment in the back of my mind as an author and I was thinking I bet she's about 27 and I finished the book and I loved it so much. And then I thought, right, I'm just going to Google her.

And when I found out she was 65, I was so delighted.

It just goes to show that you can do anything, any time in your life,

make some changes and sit down and write a book.

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