Lily King mesmerized me with Euphoria, years later I still think about that book. I was thrilled to be given a copy of her latest work, Five Tuesdays in Winter, a collection of short stories. Some of the stories packed an emotional punch and I wanted a full length version while others were well lacking. Overall a quick read, but probably not one that will stay with me.

The anthology of stories leads to a mixed bag of emotions. I thoroughly enjoyed most of them since it's focused on the shifts that happen when transitioning from one phase of life to another.
While in some, the characters were beyond awful, and the author kept the story open-ended, leaving the reader even more curious.

I don't often read short story collections, but heard such glowing praise for this writer. I too loved this collection and will be suggesting it to readers looking for something captivating.
The characters in these stories are so well drawn they capture the readers heart. I can't wait to check out more of Lily King's books!

This short story collection was such a beautiful introduction to this author for me! The author explores emotion through ten different stories, through ten unique characters. The everyday and ordinary stories of people are compelling. After each story I had to take a little break, as each story made me feel something different and I wasn’t quite ready to let go at each conclusion.

I’ve started dabbling in short story collections over the past year or two, and apparently I’m a huge fan! I love how when done well, the stories offer up so much despite so few words. I enjoyed the majority of this collection immensely; a few were just okay, but I think that has a lot to do with personal preference and also the comfort (or discomfort) a story might evoke.

It’s so interesting how the author pulls you right into someone’s life, we are blasted with a snippet, with feeling, and then it ends. I read a story or two before bed over the course of nearly a week, and each left a lingering feeling or thought.

Undoubtedly I’ll soon be reading Lily King’s backlist novels. Thank you so much to Grove Press and to Netgalley for a free e-copy of this collection. It is available now! All opinions are my own.

I don’t normally read a lot of literary fiction but I loved Lily King’s Writers and Lovers so I was excited to get a copy of Five Tuesdays in Winter. I enjoyed this book because the character development and emotions really come through. Some of the stories made me feel uncomfortable and some I wanted an entire novel dedicated to learning more about the characters’ stories.

Thank you to Lily King, Grove Atlantic, Grove Press, and NetGalley for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Lily King's literary mastery, her spare and stunning prose, and her gift for creating lasting and treasured characters is on full display in this curated selection of short fiction. “Five Tuesdays in Winter” showcases an exhilarating new form for this extraordinarily gifted author writing at the height of her career. I loved this book.

About the author

Lily King is the New York Times bestselling author of five novels, including most recently “Writers & Lovers” and “Euphoria”. Her work has won numerous prizes and awards, including the Kirkus Prize, the New England Book Award for Fiction, the Maine Book Award for Fiction, a MacDowell Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and she has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Hemingway Award. She lives in Portland, Maine.


A huge thanks to @groveatlantic and @NetGalley for the review copy of “Five Tuesdays in Winter”.

You may know Writers and lovers was one of My favourite books of last year I read, so when I heard Lily king was bringing out a short story collection oh I was HYPED!
Yeah maybe a few week later but I’ve finally read it (well I listened to it really) and it was a super enjoyable collection.
Some better than others but as a whole I had a great time with it.

Lily king delves into many different ranges in these stories in terms of Subject matters. Some such as Family drama, Grief, New beginnings, love and many more.

As I listened to on audio what I enjoyed about it was the way that each story had a different narrator which with other Short story collections I’ve listened to before they don’t have, plus I feel it helps to differentiate which story you are on (just me ? Maybe 😅)

The stories themselves ones that stood out to me were
Creature,
Hotel Seattle
South
All had that something extra for me and were the most enjoyable.

Happy to have finally read this one. Now (i’ve been saying it for ages) it’s time to go back into King’s back catalogue and read the rest of their work!!

I love Lily King's writing style so much and was super curious to see what this collection of short stories was like. Sometimes short stories leave me wishing for more, but King shined at sharing deeply emotional stories that also packed a punch. As it normally happens, I connected with some characters and premises more than others, but finished and felt really impressed with the overall compilation. 4/5 stars.

Thank you to Grove Atlantic for my free copy to read and review.

Lily King is quickly becoming an automatic buy for me. Lily does such a great job telling stories, whether it is a full length novel or in several different short stories. Each story is unique and heartbreaking but healing at the same time. It's easy to lose yourself in the characters and their lives.

Lily King is one of my all-time favorite authors (Writers and Lovers is *chef's kiss*), and I very much enjoyed her short story collection. These focus on the changes in life that happen when you are moving from one phase to the next. All the stories are strong, but my favorites are North Sea, When in the Dordogne, and the titular story. This collection is well worth your time.

DNF at 25%
I thought that I could read anthologies by Lily King. But I couldn't connect with her writing nor with the stories.

An Incredible selection of short stories by King. The characters are fully realised and there is a real mix of emotions throughout. I genuinely really enjoyed every story. To summarise my favourites:

Creature : Escaping her family life for the summer, a fourteen-year-old girl goes to work as a babysitter for the summer. She starts to write a letter to a friend that turns in to her own Jane Eyre type novel, she sees herself as Jane but her Mr Rochester is not what she expected. A raw and emotional story about the loss of innocence.

Five Tuesdays in Winter : A heart-warming romance, five Tuesdays in winter with Spanish lessons being given to a charismatic teen. Also incorporates a bookshop and finding love - just brilliant!

The Man at the Door : Highlighting misogyny through literary work. The arrival of a strange man with a copy of our main characters unfinished book forces her to face all of her own doubts and fears.

All of the stories were incredibly well written and engaging, really enjoyable to read.

Thanks to @netgalley and @groveatlantic for this ARC.

BOOK REVIEW

BOOK: Five Tuesdays in Winter
AUTHOR: Lily King
FORMAT: Audiobook
GENRE: Literary Fiction/Short Stories
RATING: 8/10
4 stars

Thank you so much NetGalley, Libro.fm, and Lily King for the #gifted advanced copies of the eBook and audiobook! Out now.

MY THOUGHTS

I really really enjoyed this compilation of short stories from Lily King. It was my first time reading her work and I was not disappointed. These short stories covered deeply emotional experiences that causes the reader to feel those emotions alongside the characters. The stories were raw and sensitive. Some about love, trauma, coming-of-age, loss, grief, abandonment, friendship and family.

I did feel that some of these stories went a little over my head. I had difficulty connecting with some of the characters or stories, but for the most part they invoked deep, raw emotion.

This was a wonderful short story collection! I think it would make a great selection for a book club, and the first story, in particular, would be an interesting supplement for a book club discussing Jane Eyre (—not a spoiler: the character is reading Jane Eyre!). The stories about mothers, their inner lives, and their relationships with their children were the most resonant to me. I also found the collection to be an interesting exploration of power dynamics.

Thank you so much to Grove Press for sharing the eARC of Five Tuesdays in Winter with me!

Lily King can do no wrong. I've loved her novels and this collection of short stories feels like such a gift! A quick read in the evening and I get a story that has completely transported me. I want to know so much more about all of these characters! I would recommend this collection of stories to anyone looking for a new author to love. I will read anything Lily King writes, forever.

All good short stories. Good characters and development. I just couldn't praise it though. Fell flat for me and I don't know why. Loved her others..

The below review first appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on January 30, 2022:

The past lingers like a ghost in award-winning writer Lily King’s new short story collection, “Five Tuesdays in Winter.” It’s the first such collection from the author of the critically acclaimed “Writers & Lovers” and “Euphoria,” yet its 10 stories are as absorbing as any of her novels.

Though there is ample variety in the collection that shows off King’s range, there is a unifying theme throughout: the question of how much characters’ pasts should determine their futures. A couple of early stories have a reflective tone as characters look back upon moments in their teenage years that will later have an impact on their adult lives.

The opening story, “Creature,” is imbued with an uneasy nostalgia that feels eerily similar to the first half of King’s 2010 novel “Father of the Rain” as a 14-year-old girl working as a live-in summer nanny falls under the spell of “Jane Eyre” and discovers a love for writing while mistakenly believing she’s found her own Mr. Rochester. But “When in the Dordogne,” another story of a defining summer, is a much sunnier memory of character’s teenage days when two college-age young men care for and pay some much-needed attention to the main character while his parents are in France.

In other stories, the past is less something to be revisited and more something that confronts characters in jarring ways. The pain a moody young woman feels after the loss of her father becomes something from which she can no longer hide in the haunting “North Sea,” and in the climax of “Timeline,” the story most similar to King’s most recent novel, “Writers & Lovers,” the leading lady’s history is both a savior and an intruder at the wedding of a childhood friend.

To varying degrees in all of the stories, the weight of the past hangs on characters’ shoulders like an overcoat and King seems to be asking questions about the way it is best worn. Is it good to pull the past closer for warmth in its familiarity? At what point do our histories become heavy, restricting and best left at home? As in life, the answer differs in every story.

A grown man’s disturbing dalliance with his former best friend in “Hotel Seattle” seems to suggest there are certain doors that shouldn’t be reopened, but in the book’s heartwarming eponymous tale, a curmudgeonly bookstore owner — a man accused by his teenage daughter of “loving his books but hating his customers” — doesn’t let a previous failed marriage talk him out of falling in love with the store’s sole employee.

It’s a solid collection. While all the stories aren’t equally thrilling, King manages to make each one memorable, and, because of the core theme, they feel like they belong in the same book. The fraught relationship people have with the past wears a different face in each story, revealing the complexity of the issue, but each character’s struggle feels human and relatable, largely due to the emotional intelligence with which King writes and how quickly her characters feel familiar.

In only a few short words, Lily King can communicate a character’s worldview, their desires, their heartbreak. It’s a skill that shines through in her longer work, as readers of her rich novels can confirm, but it serves her nowhere better than in these works of short fiction, eliminating the intimidation factor of short story collections and making each tale feel like a teaser of a longer book we can’t wait to read. “Five Tuesdays in Winter” is a layered and satisfying collection that will be a treat for fans of King’s novels.

I discovered Lily King a couple of years ago and this is the fourth book of hers I’ve read. I didn’t know much about it except that it was a short story collection. I assumed there were five given the title, but it turns out that’s just the title of one of the stories and actually there are ten.

They’re not always popular but I’m a fan of short stories, and these really are ‘short’ stories – the whole collection should be a quick read, although I took a long time as I was reading the stories between other things. Most of the stories are excellent but as with most collections, there are a few duds too. What I love is King’s ability to write such a wide range of characters and situations; I find some collections focus on the same characters or setting and you can be left with a sense of all the stories blending together.

I think the key themes here are love and family and the grief that can’t be separated from that – some stories were sweet and others heart-breaking. I didn’t quite get the last one, The Man at The Door, which was a bit surreal and didn’t seem to fit with the others. Having said that I was enjoying it.

I liked most stories but the standouts were: When in The Dordogne and Timeline. I didn’t enjoy: Waiting for Charlie, Mansard or South.

Thank you NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for this ARC.

4.5, absolutely rounding up!

Okay, Lily King has officially won my heart!

I was a goner when I read her Euphoria, I liked her Writers and Lovers a lot, and I adored this collection of short stories. I mean, nothing compares to Euphoria, but this book made me smile and sigh, and I couldn’t wait to stick my nose in my Kindle every night.

I love King’s language, her tone, her insight, and her plot-picking. She writes about relationships and creates some compelling, complex characters. I always admire it when a writer can create beefy characters in such a short story. The characters’ loving, yearning, aching, confusion—their mere existence, in fact—got under my skin. Quite a few of the stories are about teens who have something big happen to them, but this is definitely not a YA book, so get that thought right out of your head. The characters are familiar and mostly ordinary, but King paints them in a way that makes their lives exciting and fascinating. She peeks into their souls.

I liked all ten stories, some more than others, of course. “Waiting for Charlie,” about a man visiting his comatose granddaughter, stole my heart. Another favorite is “Hotel Seattle,” about a gay college kid who has a secret crush on his straight roommate and later gets to catch up with him. I just realized I could keep naming favorites; god, talk about poignant! All of them! They made me pause and think. One story, “Mansard,” sent me to Google to find out what a mansard roof is. I got lost in the pictures! I always love it when a story teaches me a little thing or two.

I thought “South,” which takes place in a car, and stars a mom and her two kids, had a little point-of-view problem, and I didn’t know the age of the kids, which I didn’t love—but still, the story was a good one. The one I was least fond of was the title story, “Five Tuesdays in Winter.” It was about a curmudgeonly man who owns a bookstore and has a crush on a younger woman. I’m sorry, but the subject matter has been done a million times (grumpy old man chasing after a sweet young thing) and I hate the whole idea of it. Sure, King has the tone and the language to make it interesting, and hell, it’s set in a bookstore, which is such a draw—but nah, not for me.

The last story, “The Man at the Door,” is magical realism, which was a shock after getting nothing but regular realism from King. I actually liked it—quite a bit, in fact. I don’t want to describe the plot. I’ll only say it’s about a frustrated writer-mother. It was very clever.

I’m waiting in line for King’s next book. No doubt it will be another gem.

Thanks to NetGalley for a copy of this book.

In the literary fiction world, Lily King is highly respected for her best-selling works Euphoria and Writers & Lovers. Both were fabulous standouts. So of course I had very high expectations coming into this book of short stories. And I must say, I was a bit let down. Several stories were lovely, including the self-titled "Five Tuesdays in Winter" where a bookseller falls in love. One was downright bonkers and violent. But not all were five-star winners and I didn't set the book down, wanting to tell everyone I know to read it. So for that reason, I'm giving this one a three-star rating. If you love short stories, definitely check it out.

Special thanks to Grove Atlantic for the advanced reader copy via the NetGalley app. My apologies for the delayed review!