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    True Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop
    True Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop
    True Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop
    Audiobook10 hours

    True Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop

    Written by Annie Darling

    Narrated by Laura Kirman

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    It's a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of a good job, four bossy sisters and a needy cat must also have want of her one true love. Or is it?

    Another delightful novel from the author of The Little Bookshop of Lonely Hearts. Perfect for fans of Lucy Diamond and Jenny Colgan

    Verity Love – Jane Austen fangirl and an introvert in a world of extroverts – is perfectly happy on her own (thank you very much), and her fictional boyfriend Peter is very useful for getting her out of unwanted social events. But when a case of mistaken identity forces her to introduce a perfect stranger as her boyfriend, Verity’s life suddenly becomes much more complicated.

    Johnny could also use a fictional girlfriend. Against Verity’s better judgement, he persuades her to partner up for a summer season of weddings, big number birthdays and garden parties, with just one promise - not to fall in love with each other…

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateAug 10, 2017
    ISBN9780008173166
    True Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop
    Author

    Annie Darling

    Annie Darling lives in London in a tiny flat, which is bursting at the seams with teetering piles of books. Her two greatest passions in life are romance novels and Mr Mackenzie, her British Shorthair cat. The Little Bookshop Of Lonely Hearts is her first novel.

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    Reviews for True Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop

    4/5

    62 ratings7 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Verity doesn't need a man to be happy. She likes her own company, needs alone time and is perfectly content being a Jane Austen fan girl without having her own Mr. Darcy. Verity works at Happy Ever After, a bookshop specialized in romance. Verity deals with the accounts and is great with money, but she doesn't like helping customers. Her colleagues are curious and always encourage her to go out with them, so Verity has come up with an imaginary boyfriend, so she can take time for herself when she needs it. This backfires when they see her at a restaurant while she's on her own. She needs a partner and sees a man sitting by himself, that's how she meets Johnny.

      Johnny is in love with a woman he can't have. Everyone keeps telling him that he should move on, but he isn't ready. That's why an arrangement with Verity is beneficial. They can accompany each other to social events, so nobody will try to set them up anymore. For Verity this deal means she has to step out of her comfort zone, Johnny has a large amount of rich friends and that means she has to go with him to many parties, weddings and other events. While spending time with each other it becomes clear Verity and Johnny have a lot in common, but their relationship is purely based on friendship, isn't it?

      True Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop is another wonderful story about a member of the Happy Ever After team. Verity is an introvert and large groups of people make her want to scream. She comes from a big and loud family and has problems fitting in sometimes. With Johnny she can truly be herself. The only problem is that Johnny isn't available. His love life is incredibly complicated and I was curious where that would lead. Finding out if he'd ever be able to untangle the web of complex emotions that's his personal life kept me on the edge of my seat. Verity can stand her ground and she's good for him. I loved her fiery spirit and kept hoping Johnny would see how wonderful she is.

      Annie Darling writes fantastic stories about at first sight impossible love matches. I like that idea a lot and her lovely sense of humor makes each scene a joy to read. Verity and Johnny have a terrific spark, both on an intellectual and a chemistry level. I loved how well they understand each other. Their friendship goes deep, but issues can become obstacles and Anne Darling handles that subject in a magnificent way that constantly made me smile. True Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop is entertaining, filled with humor and fabulously heartwarming. I absolutely loved this feelgood romantic story.
    • 4/5
      Verity Love is a textbook introvert living in a world full of extroverts who seem convinced that what she really needs in her life is a man. Verity, however, has sworn off romance unless it appears between a book cover (particularly her favourite book, Pride and Prejudice) and is content as the manager of her friend's romance novel specialty bookshop with her small circle of friends and her very loud cat, Strumpet. To keep her friends at bay, she's created a fictional boyfriend but when a confluence of events occur she meets Johnny who is intrigued by the whole fake partner idea and suggests he and Verity be each other's dates for a slew of events they have that summer. Will fake romance turn into something more?A Cinderella's slipper of a novel that fit me perfectly. I could thoroughly relate to Verity's introvert ways, I loved the constant nods to P&P that were cute but not too much, and fake dating is one of my favourite romance tropes. Plus adorable cat. Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      Verity Love has a pretend boyfriend, just to keep her friends off her back. When she meets Johnny, he finds it a perfect opportunity to pair up for the same purpose since they both have a lot of events to attend this summer. It all works pretty well, mostly, until it doesn't anymore. Johnny is a sweetheart but clueless, determined to devote himself to the woman he once loved who married his best friend, even though it's obvious she's stringing him along. Once Verity realizes her own feelings for Johnny have changed, it turns into a big mess.This is the second book in the series and I'm plowing through them in sheer delight now that I've found another author to love. Verity is wonderful, wanting to live in Jane Austen's world and gradually being brought kicking and screaming into the present. Johnny is a nice guy, too nice, but a good complement for Verity. All the other characters from the first book appear again as well as Verity's family who are hilarious. I recommend this book (the entire series) to readers who like funny romances set in contemporary England with occasional dashes of seriousness.
    • 4/5
      I do not like the cover nor the title and as I read the opening chapters, I was expecting it to turn into the sort of romance which annoys me. To my delight, it did not! In fact, this might be my favourite of the bookshop books -- although it isn’t so much a story about a bookshop as it is about someone who happens to work in, and live above, one.Verity loves her noisy family, her nosy friends, her job and reading romances, but she believes she is not suited to being in a romantic relationship. When chance acquaintance Johnny discovers that Verity has been pretending to her friends that she has a boyfriend, he has a suggestion: If they attend their various social engagements together -- just “as friends” -- then they won’t have their respective friends trying to set them up or seating them at the singles table. Verity reluctantly agrees.I loved the way this story shows Verity being an introvert. It’s something she has learnt to understand and has strategies to manage. She’s not always right about what her limits are, but she still has them, and clearly she’s not shy. She’s very different from her four loud, meddlesome sisters but they love and accept her as she is.And I liked her obvious love for, and knowledge of, Pride and Prejudice. Like her introversion, it felt real and nuanced rather than clichéd. She asks herself What would Elizabeth Bennet do? but also recognises that she isn’t always much like Lizzy.This has all the things I like about fake-dating without too much cringe-worthy deception or too much intimacy too quickly. I enjoyed watching Verity and Johnny getting to know each other slowly, and appreciated how the story handles Johnny’s reasons for avoiding dating. And I’m a fan of single-POV romance -- I like focusing on one character, and the other character being a bit of a mystery. “It’s not that I’m shy, not really, or that I hate people, because I don’t, it’s more that I find the world noisy and exhausting. Like, when I’m put into a new situation or meet too many people, after a short time, I can feel myself shutting down. Like a computer that’s got too many browser windows open.” She sighed at the thought of browser windows. It was Verity’s unhappy lot in life to exist in an age of technology. “The world is such a noisy place. There are car alarms and shop alarms, sirens blaring, even the self-service tills in the supermarket get uppity and insist that there's an unexpected item in my bagging area when there absolutely isn't.”
    • 3/5
      “A life without passion is a life half-lived.” (quotation pos. 1706)

      Content:
      Verity Love prefers to be on her own, as she has a problem with crowds of people. Her job as admin of the bookshop “Happy Ever After”, former “Bookends”, fits her well. Tired of friends and family who try to do some matchmaking, she invents a fake boyfriend, but because of a misunderstanding, she has to present a total stranger, as her boyfriend. His name is Johnny and luckily enough, he too needs a girlfriend as company during a season of weddings and birthday parties. Both are happy to just be friends – are they?

      Theme and genre:
      This romantic novel brings us back to Posy and her bookshop, which is now running, and a success. This time the main character is Verity, the admin and accountant, who is an introvert, having a problem with crowds and is happy to live alone with her tomcat. Maybe this is because she grew up with four sisters and family is an important topic of the story as well as being stuck for years in an unhappy love.

      Characters:
      Verity is special, but with the background of her youth easily to understand. Normally down-to-earth if she gets enough time to stay for her own, Johnny´s personal situation for her is not always understandable, but she wants to help him.
      Johnny is smart, good-looking but lost in his unhappy love. For me this character is quite unbelievable in his behavior regarding Marissa.

      Plot and writing:
      The story starts with the idea of Johnny and Verity to present themselves to friends and family as couple in love so everybody stops to try any kind of matchmaking. As weeks pass by, the situation gets complicated and there are many misunderstandings between Verity and Johnny. Again, I was not really convinced by the story, but I liked this second book of the “Lonely Hearts Bookshop”-series more than the first one.

      Conclusion:
      A story for fans of romantic fiction that is easy and entertaining to read, sometimes witty but with lengths regarding the endless misunderstandings between the two main-characters.
    • 4/5
      Sweet and romantic. A Pride and Predjudice loving introvert who has given up on relationships meets a man in love with someone he can’t have. They both need fake partners for a season of social events to make family and friends stop bugging them about still being single. When she finds herself falling for him, asking ‘what would Elizabeth Bennet do?’ no longer solves all her problems. I really enjoyed this and it made me reserve the other books in the series at my library.
    • 5/5
      A lovely romance novel, with lots of moments that will make you giggle and feel sad, approve and disagree with Very and Johnny's decisions all the time - an adventure that you can't afford to miss this time - especially if you are a book lover and `Pride and Prejudice` is one of the many books you truly love!