Scottish author Jenny Colgan invites you to Midnight at The Christmas Bookshop

Fall in love with The New York Times bestselling writer’s uplifting holiday heartwarmer

Romantic fiction and sci-fi writer Jenny Colgan at home in Edinburgh, where she set her latest romantic comedy, Midnight at the Christmas Bookshop. Pic: Lisa Ferguson.

If your Christmas isn’t quite panning out how you hoped - maybe it’s more Home Alone than The Holiday, the Grinch grabbed all your presents and it’s turned out to be Lacking Actually - never fear because Scottish writer Jenny Colgan has the perfect pick you up in her latest feelgood novel, Midnight at the Christmas Bookshop.

It’s the kind of book you can curl up on the sofa with and devour along with a plate of mince pies and a mug of hot chocolate. Romantic and funny, it’s guaranteed to put a smile back on your face and help you fall in love once more with Christmas and whoever you might meet under the mistletoe.

Colgan, who divides her time between Edinburgh and Fife where she lives with marine engineer husband Andrew, their three teenage children - Wallace, 18, Michael Francis, 16 and Delphine, and two dogs, has been writing romance for nearly 25 years since her first novel Amanda’s Wedding landed her a six-figure book deal, and she knows exactly what she’s doing. That’s why her 35 titles have won her numerous awards and she’s sold more than five million books worldwide, with the first Christmas Bookshop title becoming a Sunday Times bestseller. She’s also turned her hand to sci-fi, writing audio script spin-offs and novels tied to Doctor Who and children’s books. And yes, Doctor Who was due to feature in the Colgan household’s Christmas viewing - “me and my children are beside ourselves that Ncuti’s from Fife, another Scottish Doctor” - along with Elf and The Muppets Christmas Carol because “it’s the most faithful Dickens adaptation ever made. They use more actual lines of Dickens than any other Dickens film”.

Jenny Colgan at home in Edinburgh, the setting for her latest novel. Pic: J Christie

Christmas at Colgan’s is a treat and when you escape the gloom of a dark December day and enter her bright and elegant West End flat you’re greeted by a grinning Colgan dressed in seasonal shades in a cosy red jumper and a silky green skirt proffering mugs of tea, a plate groaning with pastries. The 51-year-old is chatty and self-deprecating and you immediately warm to her because she says things like “this book was a pleasure to write but they’re not all, god no, some are like pulling teeth.”

It’s a pleasure to read too, the follow up to 2021’s bestselling The Christmas Bookshop and returns to the adventures of Carmen, the impetuous and impecunious Edinburgh bookseller and a cast of characters including Sofia, her more successful and uptight sister, her nieces and nephews with their cute manny, Mr McCredie the eccentric bookshop owner, a white witch, a tartan tat shop owner, and Oke, the dashing Brazilian dendrologist (tree expert) she’d really like to hug.

The idea for the Christmas Bookshop books came during lockdown when it snowed heavily at Christmas and Colgan walked the deserted streets of the city, struck anew at the beauty of the city she first visited as a child on trips to the zoo from Prestwick in Ayrshire then later lived in as a student and adult. Victoria Street, nestled under the castle, particularly struck a chord with its brightly coloured shop fronts, especially the bookshop, all muffled in snow and looking gorgeous, but Colgan realised she also missed the lights and crowds of the capital’s festive frenzy.

“I’m as guilty as anyone of going ‘look at the price of the Christmas market’ and saying ‘why is there vomit everywhere’, but as soon as it’s gone I’m desperate for it to come back. During the pandemic it was a snowy Christmas in Edinburgh, which is rare, and there was nobody on the streets and it was nuts. I had never seen it like that. It was so amazing. But I missed the lights and markets too.”

Midnight at the Christmas Bookshop, by Jenny Colgan is published by Little, Brown, Hardback £14.99, eBook and Audio. Pic: Contributed

As much as Midnight at the Christmas Bookshop is a romance, it’s also Colgan’s love letter to the capital.

“I don’t usually set my books in real places, but Ednburgh’s big enough, it can take it. And when I was a student here Victoria Street had loads of bookshops and of course now it only has one, John Kay’s which is lovely, so it came from that.

“There are things that Edinburgh people would get like jibes at traffic wardens and trams, but it’s gone everywhere. We thought it would probably do well in Germany and Norway which it has, but it’s been our first top ten in Italy, where everyone’s sitting on a sunbed reading it, and it’s a New York times bestseller.”

It seems everyone loves Christmas, everyone loves a romcom, and Colgan has enjoyed giving them both ‘because it was Edinburgh, which is a place I really love, and because it was a book shop and I’ve worked in numerous book shops and am a big book person. And the other fun thing that happened last Christmas was the Brooke Shields Netflix film, A Castle for Christmas. Oh my god, it was the funniest thing I had ever seen. I thought this is hilarious, why don’t they just come to me, or a writer like me, a Scottish writer based in Scotland. There’s another one I haven’t seen yet called Christmas in Scotland and they’re all written by Americans thinking what it might be like, and it’s funny, so in the second book they use the bookshop as a filming location for a terrible American film.”

New York Times Bestselling author Jenny Colgan relaxes at home in Edinburgh. Pic: Lisa Ferguson

One of the strengths of Midnight at the Christmas Bookshop is the characters, and just as she does in her Mure series set on a fictional island, Colgan creates a whole world where lives and loves interconnect.

“I did say I would happily write about this street, this shop, this town, for ever because it’s so interesting and so many people visit and fall in love with it, but of course when you live here it’s a living city and it’s different. I’ve got a Christmas short coming out for next year and some of the characters appear in that, although it’s not centred around the same thing.”

Are there any of the characters in the book who are in any way like Colgan?

“There are two sisters, the younger one - Carmen - is a bit scruffy, and the older - Sofia - is a lawyer with four kids and is elegant. I don’t think I’m like her at all, but everyone thinks Sofia has it easy and she’s quite resentful of the fact they just expect her to do everything, and I’m not saying that that’s me at all, and I’m certainly not elegant and very hardworking, but definitely that kind of ‘well, what are we doing for Christmas then?’ kind of thing.”

But Colgan is hard working, writing more than two thousand words a day on her first drafts and producing one or two books a year, and her beautiful shiny flat with white baby grand piano in the hallway is testament to that.

“Well, I emphasise with Sofia and think I’d like to be very ambitious as well, but actually…”

Isn’t she ambitious though?

“Of course or we wouldn’t be here. Of course it’s a huge, huge thrill to me to be selling books in different countries and travelling. I love it. But I also think you can’t get away from the fact that this job is an ego trip. I want seven and a half hours of undivided attention, so yeah, of course, all novelists have egos by definition. I don’t want to take over the world in a massive endless… mind you I say that…. I’m quite friendly with Val McDermid and Ian Rankin, both of whom have completely taken over the world, and they have very nice lives,” she laughs. “So I am very happy but also yes, ambitious and writers don’t really ever stop writing.”

Inspiration comes from the world around her, the people she meets, from overheard conversations in coffee shops where she often writes.

“If I was to say to you or to anyone right now, tell me about your crazy family, we’d be here for ever. That’s everybody’s family. The world is just unbelievably overspilling with stories about folk and what they do. I was in a coffee shop the other day and a woman came in with an older woman who was obviously her mother and the older woman stood at the door, she didn’t want to sit there, she didn’t want to eat that, and the daughter was trying to please hear and you could see a whole life in two seconds.

“And I was in another coffee shop and there were two very serious older women sitting, and one was going to the other ‘well, you know, I will forgive you. I don’t have to, but I will.’ Who knows what that could be. It’s just normal gossipy curiosity isn’t it, humans just like stories.

“I think it’s interesting the amount of even very serious novelists that watch a tonne of reality television, things like Married at First Sight, because it’s just the human condition and it’s completely raw. It doesn’t matter how much Botox they have or how pumped up their lips are on Love Island, you will see genuine human emotion and interaction. I particularly like Love Island because they make the boys talk about their emotions to each other and I don’t think it’s bad for young people to watch young men doing that.”

We might all overhear conversations but Colgan takes them and runs with it, building the characters and their backstory, but does she start with character or plot?

“Character. In romantic comedies, although I write about lots of other things apart from falling in love - I mean the Mure series is a very long saga about a Syrian immigrant when you boil it down - two people are going to fall in love and have a kiss. It’s the same with crime. There’s a body and someone has to find out why and how. So if you have a really good plot but don’t care about the characters, you won’t care about the book, whereas if you have characters you’re crazy about and believe in, you will follow them even if it doesn’t quite make sense or takes a round-the-houses route.”

And what is she working on now?

“I am tidying up a novella for next Christmas and also next year’s Summer book [in the Mure series] which is about a knitting circle. It’s called Close Knit. There are return characters like Morag the pilot, and a new character called Gertie who knits and dreams all the time, and I’m not a big knitter now, but I’m certainly a dreamer. You know when you’re constantly imagining scenarios for yourself about what might happen every time you meet someone, and that’s quite true to life for me, just that kind of constant living in your dreamworld all the time.”

Has she always done that?

“Of course. I think you just kind of assume that a pop star is going to walk by and fall in love with you. It’s that kind of thing, perfectly normal wish fulfilment.”

Given that she’s a firm believer in romance, what’s Colgan’s most romantic experience?

“Definitely meeting Andrew… Although - it may not sound romantic to you, but it was very romantic to me - after we had Delphine he had a vasectomy. I found that extremely romantic. I didn’t suggest it because one wouldn’t, but that, I remember finding extremely romantic. It was like ‘yeah, those are my kids and I wanted to have them with you’.

“Also what’s romantic is our washing machine broke down and he just went and fixed it. He wasn’t in the mood, didn’t really want to, but knelt down at ten o’clock at night, got the parts in, fixed it. That’s it. Honestly I know a stunning amount of guys that don’t take the bins out, haven’t worked that out.”

So does Colgan think that’s what everyone wants, love and romance?

“Yeah, I think so, and it tends to be categorised as a woman’s issue without being a woman’s issue at all. I mean there are tonnes of books about men wanting to fall in love but they all have to go and join the army and stuff, they’re all kind of war based.

“It’s a very basic human drive, and also it’s one of the riskiest things that you’re ever going to do. It’s the hugest decision you’re ever going to make, the consequences for getting it wrong are horrendous, really, really awful… the NUCLEAR devastation of divorce, even given that we now have that option which of course we didn’t before, so it’s a really high risk game.

“And because I’ve been writing for a quarter of a century I get a sense of what’s changed, and one of the things I really see, particularly if I’m writing about younger people, is the financial cost of when it goes wrong, because you can’t just move out and rent a room easily. The work I’ve just finished has to do with people being unable to find somewhere to live in cities.

“The real terrible drama in Jane Austen is if women don’t marry they’re just going to die and the great Indian novels, A Fine Balance or A Suitable Boy, if you don’t marry the right person your children will die. Now obviously we don’t have those things but it’s still a really high stakes situation, falling in love.

Despite it being high risks, it’s something most of us do, including Colgan, so how did she meet her husband?

“We met in a really strange way. I was with someone in a pretty serious relationship and we broke up then I went to Miami with some girlfriends and met some girls who invited us to a party on a yacht and he was behind the bar. I thought oh right he’s a barman but he wasn’t, he was the chief engineer of the boat, and I thought ‘OK, I could probably do with a fling’. That was 22 years ago. Aw man, it was hilarious, coming back…It was a fashion for tabloids to do stories about young women on holiday in Tunisia marrying waiters by mistake and that was exactly how my family treated me,” she laughs. “So that was it. And I remember it being wildly inconvenient, but yeah…”

And they lived happily ever after. Does Colgan always write a happy ending in her novels?

“If you asked me this pre-pandemic I would have said no but now I think there is enough s*** going down in the world, the last thing people need from me is something miserable. I would have been ‘oh I can write whatever I like’, but now I want you to pick up one of my books and whatever is going on in your life, you’re going to feel slightly better at the end than you did at the beginning. That’s my sole goal.

“I am so outnumbered in terms of s*** which is not giving us a happy ending at the moment, that I am basically staking my claim to ‘no, come over here, everything is going to be OK. There are going to be ups and downs, there are going to be sad moments, but fundamentally everyone is pretty decent and everything is going to be fine’.”

Midnight at the Christmas Bookshop, by Jenny Colgan is published by Little, Brown, Hardback £14.99, eBook and Audio