We’re offering 15 reading groups the chance to read and review Sophie Kipner’s warm, witty debut novel, The Optimist – recently named as one of the Daily Mail’s Best Summer Reads 2017. Members of the chosen groups are asked to leave their reviews on Amazon as well as on the review forms. We have sets of 10 books to give away to 15 lucky reading groups.
If you’d like to take part, all you have to do is complete this short survey telling us a little bit about your reading group by 20 August.
Exclusive competition
Out of the 15 reading groups selected, three will also receive the opportunity to interview Sophie via Skype. In order to enter into the prize draw, readers are asked to share their most Tabitha Gray moment – Sophie’s hopelessly romantic, hopelessly hapless and utterly loveable heroine – with @ReadingAgency and @unbounders #SoTabithaGray via Twitter and on their review forms, so Sophie can pick her three favourites.
About the book
A delusional girl’s very misguided search for love…
Meet Tabitha Gray, a delusional girl from Topanga, California, who redefines what it means to be a truly hopeless romantic. Tabby suffers from an aggressive strain of cock-eyed optimism – no amount of failure, embarrassment or humiliation can dent her fierce belief that real, true, lasting love is just around the corner.
Where most people think, fantasize and dream, Tabby says, feels and does. Whether waiting in her lingerie for Harrison Ford to open the door of his hotel room; declaring her love, aged nine, for Ernesto the gardener; encountering Al Pacino in a Russian bathhouse; seeking passion with a blind man on the advice of a wise old woman with dementia at her grandmother’s home for the elderly; or sending intimate photos to a random sexter with an apparently charming dick, Tabby refuses to be crushed by her many misadventures. She has to keep believing, because if she gives up, what then? Ill-advisedly armed with the words of Dorothy Parker, Tabby knows that her own ferocious optimism is the only thing keeping her heart-sore, wine-swilling mother and cynical, single-mum sister from giving up on love altogether. She is their only hope. If Tabby can find love, then they too will believe…
In this warmly witty debut novel, Sophie Kipner takes a satirical look at the extremity of romantic desperation, and pays wry tribute to the deep human need to keep on heroically searching for love despite our manifold absurdities.
About the author
Visual artist, novelist, and secret society bartender, Sophie Kipner grew up in Topanga, CA, to an English ballerina mother and an Australian songwriting father. In her words ‘no one could help with math.’ After graduating from The University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, she hosted Channel 101’s long-running web show Everything, while writing and illustrating her own stories which have appeared in Kugelmass: A Journal of Literary Humor, Metazen, Amy Ephron’s One for the Table, FORTH Magazine and The Big Jewel. She is currently focused on her writing and art, and was recently profiled in Flaunt Magazine, Los Angeles Magazine, and the Huffington Post. In 2015, her latest series of abstract portraiture, DONTLIFTUPDONTLOOKDOWN, premiered during the Santa Barbara Art Walk at Ca’Dario Gallery, and has since been shown at KGB Studios in Downtown LA, WNDO Space in Venice, CA, and at Larrabee Studios in North Hollywood, CA. Works from this series have been sold internationally and are now in private collections across the United States, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Australia, Jamaica, and India.
Closing date: 20 August
