Keyes discusses Rachel's Holiday sequel at PMJ showcase

Marian Keyes shared details about the sequel to the eagerly awaited Rachel’s Holiday as part of Penguin Michael Joseph’s spring showcase last night (22nd November). 

Again, Rachel will be released on 17th February 2022. Keyes told audiences: “We find Rachel in Dublin. She is now working as an addiction counsellor in the Cloisters, which is where she got clean. She lives in Wicklow. She's got a dog called Crunchy. Mammy and Daddy Walsh are still on the go. She has a lovely garden. She has a lovely life. There is a man and then there is another man. That's all I can say really." 

She said Rachel’s Holiday was the last book she would have thought of writing a sequel to “because it seemed to matter so much to people”. She said: “You can’t just pick up at the happy ending. You know, there has to be pain. There has to be disappointment. There has to be reversals and setbacks. And the last thing I wanted was reversals and setbacks for Rachel. But a reversal and setback came to me. Probably because enough time has passed as well. She’s a different person now than she was when I first wrote about her.” 

Keyes said when Rachel’s Holiday first came out “it got almost no review coverage” with one two-line phrase, “forgettable froth”, standing out. “The climate at the time was that anything pink or anything that women were reading was automatically denigrated,” she told the showcase attendees.  

She stressed that there is “no need to feel guilty” when reading books for women, or books “obviously marketed for women. The patriarchy hasn’t changed much in 25 years. The only thing that has changed really is women are a lot more vocal than they used to be, which is great, I’m so delighted with that. 

“I want to write about contemporary women in the world we live in right now. That’s never changed”. 

Other key titles at the showcase included The Lost Paths by Jack Cornish, head of historical paths at the Ramblers Association, which will be released in May 2022 as well as The Good Left Undone, the latest by Adriana Trigiani title, due to publish in April 2022.

Charmaine Wilkerson’s Black Cake, publishing in February 2022, was also featured alongside Teresa Lim’s The Interpreter’s Daughter (June 2022), and Claire Alexander’s Meredith Alone (June 2022), about a woman who has not left her house for 1,125 days.  

Completing the line up were Dr Julie Smith’s Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? (January 2022), Gillian McAllister’s Wrong Place, Wrong Time (May 2022), The Full Diet by Dr Saira Hameed (March 2022) and the latest book in the David Raker Missing Person Series, The Blackbird, by Tim Weaver (June 2022).