Blogtour review - The Wee Small Hours by Rosa Temple

The Wee Small Hours
Rosa Temple

Island Dream Books, 31 October 2025
Available as: PB, 322pp, e   
Source: Review copy
ISBN(PB): 9780993338113

I'm grateful to Anne Cater for sending me a copy of The Wee Small Hours to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

About the Book

A cosy small-town romance about sleepless nights, unexpected friendships, and finding love when you least expect it.

Annie Lambert hasn’t slept properly in years. Her remedy? Moonlit walks through her quiet Herefordshire town, where secrets linger and stories whisper in the shadows. When her mother returns to Australia, Annie inherits the crumbling family home—and a place in the Monday Afternoon Knitters Circle, a trio of spirited seventy-somethings determined to fix her life stitch by stitch.

Suddenly, Annie’s small-town world is anything but quiet. A homeless man and his loyal dog become her closest confidants. A charming ex-footballer arrives as a new client. And her rugged builder seems to have more than bricks on his mind. As romance sparks and renovations begin, Annie finds herself tangled in more than just yarn.

But when old wounds resurface and the knitting club’s secrets threaten to unravel, Annie must decide: can she mend the lives around her while finally stitching together her own?

The Wee Small Hours is a heartwarming novel about second chances, found family, and the healing power of connection—even in the loneliest hours.

About the Author

Rosa Temple writes feel-good contemporary fiction with plenty of romance and romantic humour. Her novels celebrate love, friendship, and the messy, magical moments that make life worth living.

She is the author of four self-published titles: Sleeping With Your Best Friend, Natalie’s Getting Married, Single by Christmas, and Dear...Anybody? As well as three romantic comedies published by HQ Digital: Playing by the Rules, Playing Her Cards Right, and Playing for Keeps. In 2022, Simon & Schuster UK released her uplifting novel The Slow Lane Walkers Club, a heartwarming story about community and second chances.

Rosa Temple is the pen name of Fran Clark, who also writes emotive women’s historical fiction.

She lives in Herefordshire, where she leads a community choir, teaches vocals, and occasionally performs soul, jazz, and Latin music. She writes every day, usually with herbal tea and banana bread, and is always trying to improve her piano skills.

Website: https://www.rosatemple.co.uk/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rosatempleauthor/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@rosatempleauthor

What I thought

There's something appealing about the idea of being up late and alone, don't you think? Just you and the late-night radio, perhaps, alone in your room, an island of light. Or wandering the streets, able to explore and linger where you couldn't by day. It's a magic evoked in music, such as the song which gives this book its title. In the sight of a lit window set against the darkness. Or in the Edward Hopper painting, Nighthawks.

Not so much fun, though, if you're alone and awake because you can't sleep. The romantic dream of solitude is more of a nightmare if you suffer insomnia, if you know you're going to spend hours lying awake and the next day drained, unable to function properly because of your lack of rest. 

This is fate of Annie Lambert, heroine of The Wee Small Hours. Annie lives with insomnia, roaming around Ross on Wye, her home town, in the dark rather than lie sleepless in bed. In the c course of her wandering Annie makes friends, such as homeless Dez and his dog, Phoenix. She passes the shuttered and dark houses of her friends. Living alone, Annie  disturbs no one with her comings and goings. Constantly warned it's not safe, it's not wise, she nevertheless continues.

Annie still lives in the family house - the rambling, old, cold family house - which is freighted with memories after her mum and sister (whose coats still hang in the hall!) decamped to live in Australia. Seemingly content with her life, shuttling between the Monday afternoon knitting circles, work as a physiotherapist, and home, Annie remains, however, both single and sleepless.

Everything turns on its head, however, when one of Annie's clients turns out to be a celebrity... and an attractive handsome one at that. Is something about to happen between Annie and Reef? 

This book was great fun to read. Annie's an appealing central character, portrayed very well - an anxious woman, concerned that she might have inherited her mum's depression, suffering from sleeplessness but still trying to get on with her life, willing to try different things. For example, Annie took up drawing and painting during lockdown and is pretty good at it, though she's formed a habit of rejecting praise or compliments. She also plugs away at her knitting, despite being very bad at that, enjoying the company of Bea, Judith and Rhiannon, septuagenarians who have their fingers on the pulse of things despite some long-held animosities - and who are united in their goals of supporting Annie.

So when Reef comes into her life, Annie has baggage (as does he) but nevertheless the two try to develop their relationship, interrupted as it is by his busy schedule. Annie bonds especially with Reef's son Noé and all seems to be going well until... well, I don't want to indulge in spoilers, I'll just say there is a distraction for Annie. 

Everything comes to a head over Christmas. I loved the way that Temple allows Annie a joyful celebration with her rackety collection of friends even while hinting that all may not be well with her. Real life is like that, we can have fun and entertain worries and doubts at the same time. It’s not all yes and no, the world s full of maybes and possibles. And we can flap between alternatives, trying on possibilities as Annie does multiple dresses in one key changing room scene. That scene is, I think, quintessentially Annie - her anxiety balanced with her willingness to try new things and not just take what she's offered.

The central characters here are engaging and feel real. Annie's dilemma is I think one of not being able to trust herself amidst conflicting pressures - not least the mix of good, bad and plain flaky advice provided by the knitters - while being continually undermined by that pesky insomnia. She has, though, a shrewd eye for what's really going on, perhaps being better at sorting out others's lives than her own.

For more information about The Wee Small Hours, see the author's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy The Wee Small Hours from your local high street bookshop or online from Foyle's, Waterstones or Amazon.

Review - Slow Gods by Claire North

Slow Gods

Claire North
Orbit, 18 November 2025 
Available as: HB, 422pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy 
ISBN(HB): 9780356526188

I'm grateful to Orbit for sending me a copy of Slow Gods  to consider for review.

After three books telling the story of what happens at home while Odysseus is adventuring, Claire North still has something to say about the gods - though here they are not Olympian deities but mighty computer systems, going about their inscrutable business across the galaxy. One, in particular, is referred to as "the Slow" because it eschews faster-than-light "arc travel". But one might equally accuse them of being "slow" to act against injustice and oppression in human affairs, which are illustrated in the opening sections of this book by the sad story of Mawukana na-Vdnaze. 

Maw has the misfortune to be born in the polity known as the Shine, a nakedly exploitative territory that works its common people to the grave to support the small minority who are Shiny - possessed of an indefinable mix of wealth, flair and assertion which gives them a passport to success. 

Maw does not have Shine, and his fate follows from that, leading him to a transformation ("I am a very poor copy of myself") which makes him, in the eyes of some - including himself - a monster, a ghost. 

The focus of the book is, in part, how Maw deals with that monsterdom, and seeks to be, if a monster, then a monster on the side of the angels - whether that means resisting the Shine, or working hard on the crisis of his time, the foretold collapse of a binary star system. When it occurs, this supernova will create an intense expanding shell of radiation and extinguish life for hundreds of lightyears. This will obliterate many of the Shine worlds, but also the planet Adjumir, on which a galaxy-wide rescue effort focusses.

I loved the way that North describes Adjumir and its people - "describe" is perhaps the wrong world, they conjure it up through stories, songs, language and the behaviour of the Adjumiris and especially Gebre, a spiky archivist who Maw meets on his rescue mission. Throughout this book we get snippets of history, turning into laments for what's been lost, for the fractured lives of exiles in the Adjumiri diaspora.

There's also haunting love story between Gebre and Maw, who only meet on two occasions - a fusion of duty, desire, loss and inevitable fate which gives the book its core, and a core of steel.

Entwined about that core are conspiracies, plots, secrets and lies, as well as the reprehensible behaviour of the Shine authorities. They see the threat of the coming supernova and refuse to act, indeed suppressing knowledge of it in their territories. (Thank goodness no nation today would act like that, ignoring a planet-killing threat for their own selfish convenience!) 

Through all this, we see Maw's gradual coming to terms with what he is and what he's done. This is often through the exploration of the myriad languages of the Galaxy and their customs and social structures, particularly a diverse assembly of genders (expect multiple systems of pronouns). It's a slow awakening for him, the dry tones of the editorial Maw writing this at some later point in his life counterpointing the passion of what he did and said in his story (and we're warned, this won't always be a reliable account). He's a character who finds it hard to forgive himself for some terrible things, something that, perhaps, allows him an insight into the otherwise inscrutable minds of the gods. I recall the frequent pleas in the Bible to a mighty God who yet permits suffering. How long, O Lord, how long? How long will the unrighteous prosper? How long will the innocent be oppressed? Rescue your people! Reveal yourself before the nations in your might, and cast down the evildoer!

A question we, in our day, might well ask...

Slow Gods gives a hint, a flavour, of the true complexity of that prayer, and of what it might take to answer it. Because there's always a cost to action - as Maw discovers one awful night on Adjumir. And it does so in a warm, generous narrative where monsters and failed, imperfect beings may contemplate their own very essence and deeds and seek redemption, even if - as suggested in a coda to the story - that seems to obliterate justice. 

Slow Gods is an enthralling, intelligent and absorbing story which revives the genre of space opera and adds North's distinct tone of moral questioning. A brilliant book. Buy this one as a present for the SF nerd in your life, and if that's yourself, just buy it!

For more information about Slow Gods, see the publisher's website here.