4.5 stars. Not an easy book to review.. it’s a somewhat love story, but is a dark one with me wishing Charlie would leave her situation.. asap.. this minute. The rationalizations Charlie told herself for staying put in a relationship with Richard were difficult to read and I just wanted to scream at Charlie. Bitter Sweet shows how past trauma can affect our future selves and is why someone such as Charlie would find herself in her current situation. The title “Bitter Sweet” perfectly fits the story. Do recommend. Pub. 7/8/25

It felt really draggy honestly throughout the whole thing and then in the end once there was resolution I was intrigued.

Scandalous and interesting, I could not put this down. I love books about the publishing world and the relationship at the heart of the story was so captivating.

Thanks to NetGalley and random House Publishing Group Ballantine for the eARC.

This book is not an easy one to get through. Our FMC is involved in a major affair, then she goes into a deep depression and this author makes you feel it with her. The characters in this novel have such raw, real feelings it was hard to separate it from real life. Really well done.

Bitter Sweet by Hattie Williams is a lyrical, emotional, and heavy debut with themes of grief, self-worth, and toxic love. When Charlie, a young publicity assistant at a publishing house, meets her much older literary idol, their connection quickly turns into an all-consuming affair. As the relationship unravels and turns toxic, Charlie faces a deep depression.

Williams’ writing is poetic and deeply emotional, capturing the fog of depression and grief, and the pull of a destructive relationship with clarity and nuance. The strengths for me, however, are really the supporting characters, particularly Charlie’s boss Cecile, and the friends and family who rally around Charlie when she begins to fall apart. While I struggled to connect with Charlie, these characters and their relationships with Charlie kept me grounded in my reading of Bitter Sweet.

One critique of note is that there is some redundancy throughout. I found it especially notable in the first third of the book.

That said, Bitter Sweet is a strong choice for fans of literary fiction that explores messy, real emotional subjects in beautiful prose. Readers of Coco Mellors and similar authors with emotionally complex, character-driven stories will enjoy this book.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I requested this book because the author was so lovely when she came into the bookstore. It took over my life for three days. Honest, raw, real and compulsively readable. I'm excited to see this author take off. And she will.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the arc

Unfortunately, this book had too many trigger warnings for me. I wanted to love it, but just didn't.

They say you shouldn’t meet your heroes. Charlie is about to find that out the hard way. She’s fresh out of university, working as an assistant at a publishing house in London. For years, she has admired writer Richard Aveling, whose work helped her through the most devastating parts of her traumatic past, and to her surprise, she encounters him when out for a smoke break. Despite their 30-year age gap, they are immediately drawn to each other, and an affair begins—an affair that consumes Charlie’s life and threatens to change her world permanently.

Older men in positions of power preying on much younger, naive women is a tale as old as time, but it’s given a refresh in modern London that makes the story feel relevant and relatable. There is a fascinating (and devastating) exploration of the role of power dynamics in this book, and I was disturbed, and sad, and angry. It’s absolutely brilliant.

Oh, Charlie. Sweet, sweet Charlie. I wanted to reach into the pages and give her a huge hug and tell her everything was going to be okay. I also wanted to knock some sense into her. I loved her so, and she frustrated me deeply; this is the mark of a brilliantly executed character.

I love it when side characters are just as entertaining as the main character, and Charlie’s best friends Ophelia and Eddy fit the bill. Kudos to them for their unwavering love and patience when handling Charlie and her trauma. But the real hero here is Cecile, Charlie’s boss, who never stops supporting Charlie—never bats an eye at the dozens of days off and no-shows and offers nothing but support when the you-know-what hits the fan.

Joining the voices of Sally Rooney, Caroline O’Donoghue and Eliza Moss, Hattie Williams’s debut is a brilliant addition to the discussion of the difficulties of power imbalances in modern relationships.

Thank you to Random House for an ARC of this book on NetGalley. Bitter Sweet publishes on July 8, 2025.

Really enjoyed this quiet yet deeply moving story of a young publicist who has an affair with an older writer she deeply admires. The affair is the juicy-sounding part, but it's also a book about grief and about being swept into something that turns out to be not a good idea. It's a melancholy book but not depressing. The first person narration really draws you in to Charlie's inner life.

Highly recommend!

Thanks to the publisher for providing an advance copy for review!

I loved this read! I’ve seen others compare it to “The Rachel incident” but I didn’t see many similarities other than genre. It’s beautifully written and relatable, so easy to see that readers will connect with Charlie and feel for all she goes through. Highly recommended!

Charlie is twenty-three years old comes from a family that is one step above poor and surrounded by friends and co-workers in the publishing industry who come from money. Charlie has had dreams of a job in the publishing industry since being a young teenager and her dreams come through when she is hired by Winden & Shane to work as a publicity assistant. This position has even more draw when she gets to work to help promote the latest book of an author that she is a total fangirl for. One Richard Aveling who is one of the biggest British authors of the time. Even though Richard is married overtime Charlie and Richard start an affair, it is everything that Charlie wants but you know how it goes for a workplace romance, no one can know and more so because Richard is married. With the struggles of keeping quiet and being isolated Charlie starts to revert back to the stressors she had when she was growing up. Does she eventually get her man? Does Charlie live happily ever after?
Pick up and read this book it is a page turner.

4.5 stars, could go up.
Many thanks to Ballentine and NetGalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I loved this book, and I cannot believe how much I loved this book. I almost waited to rate it because there is a part of me that wonders if just exceeded my expectations so much that upon finishing, I'm not seeing it fully. But as it stands now, it may very well be a 5 star read, and I went in thinking I may not even finish.

My literary plot line kryptonite is a female protagonist who allows herself to be treated badly, even worse when in the end they are somehow rewarded for it. I understand this may sound judgmental, but it is what it is. In this book, we follow Charlie, a young woman in London working at publishing house, who falls into an affair with a much older, very famous and married author. It goes about how you would expect. I knew very little when I requested the galley, and after receiving it, the more I heard about the book, the more disappointed I became. But Williams does something very different and very nuanced here.
For one thing, even as Charlie continues to make poor decisions, she is very self-aware:
"As I sat and watched my friends move around the table that last night, it became cleaner to me just how disconnected I had become from them, from my own life. I knew no way back, maybe because I didn't want one, maybe because I was so sick of myself and the inside of my skin that I could see nothing that would halt me as I moved further forward into inevitable self-destruction."
For another, without giving too much away, there is a background of trauma that is revealed as the book unfolds which leads us to understand with much greater clarity why she is behaving how she is behaving, even as she knows sometimes deep down and sometimes quite clearly, what the likely consequences of her actions will be.
And finally, as someone in the mental health field, I was blown away by how well, how thoughtfully, and how responsibly mental health issues were handled by this author. I don't know if I have ever seen it done anywhere close as well as this, and I am so grateful to Williams' hard work to get this right. It is handled with compassion and hard truth, which is so rare to find.
As a bonus, the side characters here are wonderful, and even in her stupor, Charlie recognizes how wonderful her friends and family are, and it was so nice to see these relationships on the page. I am just blown away and can't wait for Williams' next book. I highly recommend this to all kinds of readers.

“I couldn’t erase him, and I couldn’t leave him—I had neither the strength nor the will, let alone the sense.”  
  
5 stars! Excellent! I was hooked from the first sentence to the last. At times, I had to take a break from reading because it was all too real; I was feeling sad and uncomfortable because of how reminiscent Charlie’s experiences were of my own…  
  
In 𝘉𝘪𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘚𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘵, we follow Charlie, a 24 year old working in publishing, as she begins a relationship with her favorite author—56 year old Richard Aveling. He’s handsome, charming, intelligent, and…married. Charlie’s obsession quickly leads to her falling in love with him even though it’s clear he won’t leave his wife for her. As expected, this relationship takes a HUGE toll on her already fragile mental health (her mom died suddenly when she was 16), and even ends up impacting her career.   
  
Their relationship really tugged on my heartstrings because I remember being in my early 20s and dating guys 10 or 15 years older than me….It was a lot of me “performing” in a way to make them happy or make them want me, similar to how Charlie drops everything for Richard and does/says what she things will make him happy (even to her own detriment).   
  
I absolutely loved Charlie’s coworkers/friends—especially Ophelia. I wish I had a best friend like that omg. She was definitely my favorite character. Such a sweetheart. <3  
  
Overall, a powerful, emotional novel, exploring power dynamics in relationships, trauma, and mental health. 10/10 would recommend! But have the tissues ready…  
  
“As I sat and watched my friends move around the table that last night, it became clear to me just how disconnected I had become from them, from my own life. I knew no way back, maybe because I didn’t want one, maybe because I was so sick of myself and the inside of my skin that I could see nothing that would halt me as I moved further into inevitable self-destruction.”  
  
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC in exchange for an honest review ❤️

“You should be with someone who is kind to you, Charlie. You should have good people in your life.”
💫💫💫💫💫

Charlie is a junior publicist for a well-known publishing company. She gets the opportunity to work on her favorite author’s new book, but that author is interested in Charlie, too, and an all-consuming love affair begins.

✨Taylor Swift said, “I mean, I rose up from the dead. I do it all the time.”
✨Gracie Abrams said, “Do you miss us? Wonder if you regret the secret of us, us mistaken for strangers, the way it was, was the pain of, the reign of, the flame of us."
✨Griff said, “Oh, maybe it’s ‘cause I was young and you were the first to find. You built me up just to set me alight. You know if you told me to run, jump, throw my body right off of a highwire bridge ‘cause you’d meet me at the bottom, I would’ve done anything you wanted.”
✨HAIM said, “Oh, I bet you wish it could be easy, but it’s not this time. Boy, I crushed my whole heart trying to fit my soul into your arms, and I crushed up these pills, and I still couldn’t take them.”

It’s literally canon for a woman to date a man who wants to destroy them and call the shell of destruction left behind love. Bitter Sweet is truly a book of its title because we do rise from the ashes, no matter how deep in it, we claw ourselves out. I loved Charlie and the way she rose up from the dead - The Descent style - like one hand emerging from the surface of the cave, dirty, bloody and bruised.

This is a fantastic debut @hattiewilliamswrites! I am blown away at how deeply I related to it and how most others will as well. It’s so toxic and it’s so incredibly hard to read sometimes because Charlie is full of potential and so herself and then just stripped down in so many ways, voice and body. It is that, but it’s also so uplifting because it’s possible to break the cycle and get those things back. It’s always possible.

Thank you so much to @ballantinebooks and @netgalley for the ARC. Bitter Sweet is out on my birthday, July 8th! 🧡

Charlie gets the chance to work with an author she is a huge fan of. When an affair starts between the two Charlie will have to figure out who she was and is today.

This story was so heavy and I loved it. It is a very common thing to feel trapped into pleasing someone you respect. You can confuse this admiration for love and attraction and if you aren't careful, you will be taken advantage of. Especially as a woman. I was very drawn to Charlie and sometimes I screamed at her, "what are you doing?!" And other times, I would visualize giving her a hug and saying "same girl." This is a very important read for woman who feel judged and misunderstood. I commend this author for making this poetic and heartfelt.

3.5 ⭐️

I could not put this book down. It’s fast-paced, written beautifully, with an engaging premise. You are invested in the narrator’s well-being, from the moment that you meet her and understand how things are going to play out.

Even still, the last 30% of the book felt just a little bit… like a lecture. It was as if the author had switched into using the narrator’s decisions to show us why these situations are bad, what they can do to your life, etc. It’s not as though I wanted to stop reading so much as I wasn’t as engaged.

That being said, the ending was really lovely! I enjoyed reading this book and recognized little pieces of myself in Charlie!

Thank you to Netgalley and Ballantine for the ARC of this novel.

Bittersweet is the story of a young woman in search of love who finds out that being a mirror for a man to admire his greatness in is not quite love at all.

This book was really well written with a significant depth of emotion. The character of Charlie as a deeply flawed, deeply feeling young woman embodies the ennui of the 2010’s. Her depression is written in a way that I personally feel is very truthful, in a way that someone who hasn’t experienced it might not understand. I especially like the quote about how Charlie comes to terms with it,

“I wasn’t cured of my sadness, that wasn’t going to be possible for me, but I knew it well enough to know what it needed. I knew it intimately, and what I had to give it in order to keep it contained, and how fragile that balance was and always would be for me.”

I always feel that fragility and the dread that the balance will tip.

I really liked this book and think that young women will get a lot out of it because it’s such a good case study in how people can be manipulative in relationships or why someone may stay in a bad one. Read this book and learn from Charlie’s mistakes!

Trigger warnings: abandonment, grooming, predatory relationship, age gap relationship, emotional abuse, drug/alcohol use, suicide attempt, infidelity, death, death of a parent, abortion, grief, depression, pregnancy

SPOILERS INCLUDED

At the start, Charlie tells us it doesn't end well. Even if she didn't allude as such, we adult readers would know. These kinds of situations never end well, do they?

"Bitter Sweet" is well-written, tactile, and cinematic coming-of-age novel that does not shy away from the reality of sexist workplaces, predatory relationships, and the realities of grief and depression. Wonderfully written by debut author Hattie Williams, the characters are dynamic and relatable--I especially loved her friend Ophelia and Eddy's persistent care, her boss Cecile's guidance and investment, and Charlie's complex relationship with her father/step-father.

As a reader, we have a clear viewpoint of Charlie's inappropriate relationship with Richard Aveling, a larger-than-life and immensely successful author, whom Charlie has had a strong attachment to from a young age. But Charlie doesn't view that way. Despite queries, nudging, and attempted guidance from family, colleagues, and friends, Charlie continues down a path we know won't end well. The dark themes and unfiltered writing won't be for everyone, but I thought this novel we drafted expertly with a very strong voice and perspective.

Towards the end of the novel, after her world comes crumbling down, Charlie begins to process her grief and the full scope of her depression. This stretch is difficult to witness, as she struggles with attempt after attempt, getting closer and closer to clarity on the reality of her relationship with Richard. But it's a necessary journey for us to witness because it provides insight to the "why didn't she leave," "how could she let it go on so long," and "how could she be so naive" type of questioning that often pops up in response to these inappropriate relationships.

"Bitter Sweet" has many parallels to my most recent ARC read, "Cover Girl" by Amy Rossi. If you enjoy one, I highly recommend you read the other.

I am grateful for the free ARC ebook copy that was provided to me by NetGalley, Random House, and Ballatine Books. All opinions are my own.

This title releases on July 8, 2025.

Bitter Sweet was such an engaging and thought provoking read. I found myself pulled into the story right away and stayed invested until the very end. Hattie Williams has a great way of exploring relationships and emotions that really made me think. I enjoyed reading this and will definitely be looking out for more from her in the future.

“I knew, really, that it wouldn’t end well. But I couldn’t stop myself from hoping otherwise.”

Oh, Charlie💔 this story is a complete train wreck. It’s painful, raw, emotional, moody, deep, hopeful. A complex view of an age gap romance and power dynamics, life in your twenties, friendships, first career job. It was suffocating to read at times but you just couldn’t look away.

This book is written beautifully and it felt like I was in rainy, dark and drab London, the French countryside, with her friends by the pool, inside Charlie’s head.

Downgraded to 4 stars because I felt like the book started dragging a bit about halfway through but it picks back up towards the end.

Perfect for fans of Sally Rooney and Coco Mellors.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.