A more hilarious motley crew of writers you will never meet. The humour is spot on and every page made me laugh. The characters are so well drawn that you feel you’ve met them before. Not a word is wasted (well maybe by Keith…) and it doesn’t fall into parody. These people are real! Aren’t they?

Thank you to the author, publishers Unbound and online book club Pigeonhole for access to read this book for free. This is an honest and voluntary review. This was such a fun read. Ridiculous, over the top, but lots of fun. The story is almost wholly told through emails exchanged between the main characters (with the end being the script of a short documentary). I was worried at first that the format might be too restrictive, but actually it always felt like an asset to the storytelling rather than a barrier. The emails are exchanges between the members of the newly formed Crawley Writer’s Group, eight (although only seven actually go to group meetings) people brought together by their literary ambitions. Each of them bring a very different style from Keith’s prolific writing of epic fantasy worlds to Alice who faces a seemingly eternal struggle to compose the perfect first sentence of her planned story. It’s wonderful how the authors convey these eight different characters just through the emails they write. They do meet in person as well, but we only see these meetings through the emails as different members of the group recap what happened in an email of thanks or thinly veiled criticism of the contributions given at each meeting. There are also the direct emails between different group members engaging in some off-topic discussions, with the obligatory accidental reply all email to reveal something which was meant to be a secret between two of them. Romance, intrigue, book deals, dead sheep and fantasy conventions all keep the plot rolling along. While I’d never want to be in the same room as any of these people for too long reading about them was a lot of fun.

Such an easy read, and one that had me giggling throughout. We follow a group of writers through emails, both to the group and some privately between members. This eclectic group would in both way be friends outside of the group, and it shows with just how different they all are. A couple do meet up outside of the group, with hilarious results (the night in the hotel before comic con being the one that sticks in my mind the most!) that mean you can’t help but wonder just how these people get through day to day life. It was great to follow this group through the trials of trying to write their own work, as well as the trials of being thrust together with people they didn’t particularly like, and to also see that they either didn’t understand or didn’t want to see some of the sarcastic comments that were pointed towards them. Reading this book was so easy, and such a different type of book with it all being written in email form. Although it sounds like it won’t work, in this case it absolutely does. I loved every minute of this, and could have read so many more pages of it! Thank you to Dan Brotzel, Martin Jenkins, Alex Woolf and Pigeonhole for allowing me to read this beautifully written and extremely mad book, I thoroughly enjoyed it!