The Summer Seaside Kitchen Read online

  Praise for Jenny Colgan

  ‘This funny, sweet story is Jenny Colgan at her absolute best’

  Heat

  ‘She is very, very funny’

  Express

  ‘A delicious comedy’

  Red

  ‘Fast-paced, funny, poignant and well observed’

  Daily Mail

  ‘Sweeter than a bag of jelly beans… had us eating up every page’

  Cosmopolitan

  ‘Will make you feel warm inside – it makes a fab Mother’s Day gift’

  Closer

  ‘Chick-lit with an ethical kick’

  Mirror

  ‘A quirky tale of love, work and the meaning of life’

  Company

  ‘A smart, witty love story’

  Observer

  ‘Full of laugh-out-loud observations… utterly unputdownable’

  Woman

  ‘Cheery and heart-warming’

  Sunday Mirror

  ‘A chick-lit writer with a difference… never scared to try something different, Colgan always pulls it off’

  Image

  ‘A Colgan novel is like listening to your best pal, souped up on vino, spilling the latest gossip – entertaining, dramatic and frequently hilarious’

  Daily Record

  ‘An entertaining read’

  Sunday Express

  ‘Part-chick lit, part-food porn… this is full-on fun for foodies’

  Bella

  Jenny Colgan is the author of numerous bestselling novels, including The Little Shop of Happy-Ever-After and Summer at the Little Beach Street Bakery, which are also published by Sphere. Meet Me at the Cupcake Café won the 2012 Melissa Nathan Award for Comedy Romance and was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller, as was Welcome to Rosie Hopkins’ Sweetshop of Dreams, which won the RNA Romantic Novel of the Year Award 2013. Jenny was born in Scotland and has lived in London, the Netherlands, the US and France. She eventually settled on the wettest of all of these places, and currently lives just north of Edinburgh with her husband Andrew, her dog Nevil Shute and her three children: Wallace, who is eleven and likes pretending to be nineteen and not knowing what this embarrassing ‘family’ thing is that keeps following him about; Michael-Francis, who is nine and likes making new friends on aeroplanes; and Delphine, who is seven and is mostly raccoon as far as we can tell so far.

  Things Jenny likes include: cakes; far too much Doctor Who; wearing Converse trainers every day so her feet are now just gigantic big flat pans; baths only slightly cooler than the surface of the sun and very, very long books, the longer the better. For more about Jenny, visit her website and her Facebook page, or follow her on Twitter @jennycolgan.

  Also by Jenny Colgan

  Amanda’s Wedding

  Talking to Addison

  Looking for Andrew McCarthy Working Wonders

  Do You Remember the First Time?

  Where Have All the Boys Gone?

  West End Girls

  Operation Sunshine

  Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend

  The Good, the Bad and the Dumped

  Meet Me at the Cupcake Café

  Christmas at the Cupcake Café

  Welcome to Rosie Hopkins’ Sweetshop of Dreams

  Christmas at Rosie Hopkins’ Sweetshop

  The Christmas Surprise

  The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris

  Little Beach Street Bakery

  Summer at Little Beach Street Bakery

  Christmas at Little Beach Street Bakery

  The Little Shop of Happy-Ever-After

  A Very Distant Shore

  By Jenny T. Colgan

  Resistance Is Futile

  Spandex and the City

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Sphere

  978-0-7515-6481-5

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Jenny Colgan

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Excerpt from Spandex and the City by Jenny T. Colgan

  Copyright © 2017 by Jenny Colgan

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  SPHERE

  Little, Brown Book Group Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DZ

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  The Summer Seaside Kitchen

  Table of Contents

  Praise for Jenny Colgan

  About the Author

  Also by Jenny Colgan

  COPYRIGHT

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  A Word from Jenny

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Acknowledgements

  Recipes

  To nurses. Because you’re amazing.

  hiraeth (n): a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home that maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for lost places in your past

  A Word from Jenny

  Hello! If this is your first book of mine you’ve read – hello, and welcome! I really hope you enjoy it. And if you’ve read my books before, a huge and heartfelt thank you; it is lovely to see you again and, wow, you’re looking great, did you change your hair? It totally suits you.

  Welcome to The Summer Seaside Kitchen! It’s the strangest thing that often you can go away on holiday to lots of different places, but not spend much time getting to know your own country very well (I know as I type this that my dear friend Wesley will be sniffing and rolling his eyes, because we have been friends for over twenty years and not once have I visited him in Belfast). Anyway, moving swiftly on: when I moved back to Sc
otland last year after decades of living abroad, I decided to rectify this.

  I’d never really spent time in the Highlands and Islands before, being a ‘lallander’ by birth (which means being from the south of Scotland), so I took every opportunity to visit and explore, and I will say that I fell in love with the Islands straightaway.

  The vast white beaches; the ancient strange monuments; the flat, treeless places (trees often can’t grow in the strong winds) and those endless summer nights when it never gets dark. Lewis, Harris, Bute, Orkney and particularly Shetland, one of the strangest and loveliest places in the UK as far as I’m concerned, all cast their own particular spell.

  I wanted to set a book up in the very far north, but here, I have made up an island which is kind of an amalgam, as there is nothing worse than writing about a real place and getting it wrong and everyone gets really very cross with you. Trust me, I have learned this from bitter experience .

  So, Mure is a fictional place, but I hope carries the essence and the feel of those amazing islands of the far north, which are so strange and beautiful and wonderful to me – although of course, to the musically-voiced people living there, they are simply ‘home’.

  Here you’ll also find traditional recipes for pies and bread which I love to make and hope you’ll enjoy trying out – you can let me know how that goes at @jennycolgan on Twitter or come find me on Facebook! (I am theoretically on Instagram but can’t really work it.) I so hope you enjoy The Summer Seaside Kitchen. It is a very personal book to me as, after a long time away, last year I finally came home to the land of my birth, as Flora does – and found that it had been waiting for me all along.

  With love,

  Chapter One

  If you have ever flown into London – I did originally type ‘You know when you fly into London?’ and then I thought, well, that might be a bit presumptuous, like hey-ho, here I am flying about all the time, whereas the reality is I’ve always bought the cheapie discount flight that meant I had to get up at 4.30 a.m. and therefore didn’t sleep at all the night before in case I missed the alarm and actually it ended up costing me more to get to the airport at an ungodly hour and then pour overpriced coffee down myself than it would have done just to buy a sensibly timed flight in the first place… but anyway.

  So.

  If you’ve ever flown into London, you’ll know that they often have to put you in a holding pattern, where you circle about, waiting for a landing slot. And I never usually mind it; I like seeing the vast expanse of the huge city below me, that unfathomable number of people busying away, the idea that every single one of them is full of hopes and dreams and disappointments, street after street after street, millions and millions of souls and dreams. I always find it pleasingly mind-boggling.

  And if you had been hovering over London on this particular day in early spring, then beneath you you would have seen the massive, endless sprawl; the surprising amount of green space clustered in the west, where it looks as if you could walk clear across the city through its parks, and on to the clustered, smoky east, the streets and spaces becoming ever more congested; the wheel along the river glinting in the early-morning sun, the ships moving up and down the sometimes dirty, sometimes gleaming water, and the great glass towers that seem to have sprung up without anyone asking for them as London changes in front of your eyes; past the Millennium Dome, getting lower now, and there’s the shining point of Canary Wharf, once the highest skyscraper in the country, with its train station that stops in the middle of the building, something that must have seemed pretty awesome in about 1988.

  But let’s imagine you could carry on; could zoom down like a living Google Maps in which you don’t only go and look at your own house (or that might just be me).

  If you carry on down further, it would pretty soon stop looking so serene, less as if you were surveying it like a god in the sky, and you’d start to notice how crowded everything is and how grubby it all looks, and how many people are shoving past each other, even now, when it’s not long past 7 a.m., exhausted-looking cleaners who’ve just finished their dawn shifts trudging home in the opposite direction to the eager suited and booted young men and women; office jockeys and retail staff and mobile phone fixers and Uber drivers and window cleaners and Big Issue sellers and the many, many men wearing hi-vis vests who do mysterious things with traffic cones; and we’re nearly at ground level now, whizzing round corners, following the path of the Docklands Light Railway, with its passengers trying to hold their own against the early-morning crush, because there is no way around it, you have to stick your elbows out, otherwise you won’t get a place, might not even get to stand: the idea of possibly getting a seat stops miles back at Gallions Reach, but you might, you might just get a corner place to stand that isn’t pressed up against somebody’s armpit, the carriage thick with coffee and hungover breath and halitosis and the sense that everyone has been somehow ripped from their beds too soon, that even the watery sunlight tilting over the horizon in this early spring isn’t entirely convinced about it; but tough, because the great machine of London is all ready and waiting, hungry, always hungry, to swallow you up, squeeze everything it can out of you and send you back to do the entire thing in reverse.

  And there is Flora MacKenzie, with her elbows out, waiting to get on the little driverless train that will take her into the absurd spaghetti chaos of Bank station. You can see her: she’s just stepping on. Her hair is a strange colour; very, very pale. Not blonde, and not red exactly, and kind of possibly strawberry blonde, but more faded than that. It’s almost not a colour at all. And she is ever so slightly too tall; and her skin is pale as milk and her eyes are a watery colour and it’s sometimes quite difficult to tell exactly what colour they are. And there she is, her bag and her briefcase tight by her side, wearing a mac that she’s not sure is too light or too heavy for the day.

  At this moment in time, and still pretty early in the morning, Flora MacKenzie isn’t thinking about whether she’s happy or sad, although that is shortly going to become very, very important.

  If you could have stopped and asked her how she was feeling right at that moment, she’d probably have just said, ‘Tired.’ Because that’s what people in London are. They’re exhausted or knackered or absolutely frantic all the time because… well, nobody’s sure why, it just seems to be the law, along with walking quickly and queuing outside pop-up restaurants and never, ever going to Madame Tussauds.

  She’s thinking about whether she will be able to get into a position where she can read her book; about whether the waistband on her skirt has become tighter, while simultaneously and regretfully thinking that if that thought ever occurs to you, it almost certainly has; about whether the weather is going to get hotter, and if so, is she going to go bare-legged (this is problematic for many reasons, not least because Flora’s skin is paler than milk and resists any attempts to rectify this. She tried fake tan, but it looked as if she’d waded into a paddling pool full of Bisto. And as soon as she started walking, the backs of her knees got sweaty – she hadn’t even known the backs of your knees could get sweaty – and long dribbling white lines cut through the tan, as her office mate Kai kindly pointed out to her. Kai has the most creamy coffee-coloured skin and Flora envies it very much. She also prefers autumn in London, on the whole).

  She is thinking about the Tinder date she had the other night, where the guy who had seemed so nice online immediately started making fun of her accent, as everybody does, everywhere, all the time; then, when he saw this wasn’t impressing her, suggested they skip dinner and just go back to his house, and this is making her sigh.

  She’s twenty-six, and had a lovely party to prove it, and everyone got drunk and said that she was going to find a boyfriend any day, or, alternately, how it was that in London it was just impossible to meet anyone nice; there weren’t any men and the ones there were were gay or married or evil, and in fact not everyone got drunk because one of her friends was pregnant for the first time and kept m
aking a massive deal out of it while pretending not to and being secretly delighted. Flora was pleased for her, of course she was. She doesn’t want to be pregnant. But even so.

  Flora is squashed up against a man in a smart suit. She glances up, briefly, just in case, which is ridiculous: she’s never seen him get the DLR; he always arrives looking absolutely spotless and uncreased and she knows he lives in town somewhere.

  As usual, at her birthday party, Flora’s friends knew better than to ask her about her boss after she’d had a couple of glasses of Prosecco. The boss on whom she has the most ridiculous, pointless crush.