I enjoyed this book, witty tales of female friends and their lives and families. It flows along and there is plenty to entertain you. It didn't especially grab me but it was very readable and I would seek out other work by this author.

A very detailed oriented read, personally it just becomes hard work rather than enjoyable as I prefer a fast paced read and it can make it slow. I enjoyed the wit of the characters but overall it was just OK for me.

This book had me laughing out loud in a few places ! I alternated by reading it on Kindle and also listening to it.
The story is funny, uplifting, sad in places and has some very dark humour to it ! It follows Susan from a student to her life as a wife and mother ...

Nina Stibbe’s voice is so distinctive I think I could recognise it anywhere. I absolutely loved One Day I Shall Astonish the World, there’s such an immediacy to it, and of course, like everything Stibbe writes, it’s very, very funny.

Really enjoyed this read. The tone was quite original and odd in a good way. The story goes all the way up to the first lockdown which somehow feels quite novel to have that period included in books.

Mixed feelings. I think that the authoress Nina Stibbe has very good skills in capturing the everyday highs and lows of a lifetime female friendships. I find the deadpan/upper stiff lip mannerisms and the very typical British middle class behaviour being quite spot-on, accompanied with that typical English humour.
Yet...why are Susan and Norma friends? Do they ever...think about themselves and their lives? I think that the more I was with their story the more I have started to see them somehow as the caricatures of females, not real characters. The authoress luckily can play with the subplots and we see both sides of the both women during the years - their blind spots, but also their good sides and deeds. But i would love for them to actively question the state of their lives and the realities of their relationships, as they do not lead their lives, they only follow the events as the world goes by (or at least the narrator of the story, Susan, does - Norma has some decisions under her belt).
The novel loses the steam towards the end, at least the last third of the novel is anecdotal (even if it deals with the realities of a starting pandemic). Also and the ending part is quite abrupt, or it seems like if the authoress has planned to write more, but suddenly decided to end the novel here. Or should it signal the start of Susan´s emancipation in life (finally)?

I´d say the execution is quite good. I only wish for a more nuanced and more deep plot, the soul of the story.

One Day I Shall Astonish the World is an unexpectedly humorous and moving book that I had fun reading. Although it didn't captivate me as much as I hoped it would, I still had fun reading it. I was drawn into the characters lives and the story of friendship, hope and family.

I will certainly be on the look out for other books by Nina Stibbe in the future and for now I would recommend this one!

I really loved this novel, the latest by Nina Stibbe which explores the world of friendship and rivalry through the years. It was as sharp, and funny as her previous novels , but also incredibly moving as it explored the insidious spread of Covid. I felt very privileged to be able to access an ARC. Thanks you to the author, the publishers and NetGalley

A humorous novel about two women in an East Midlands university town navigating life through young adulthood to middle age. Although parts of the novel showed great perception, nothing really happens and there was no storytelling to spark my interest, I like Nina Stibbes quirky writing but this novel was not one of her best.

A real gem of a book, easy to read although longer than it needed to be in my opinion. Humour is there, as you would expect from Stibbe, but not to the extent I expected. The relationship between the two women felt very artificial and the description of the droll that is life felt too real and not fiction enough for me! Still, a great read.

This was a heartfelt moving back, full of good humour and incredible characters that have stayed with me long after finishing it. I'm bereft!

Unexpectedly funny and ironic book, that makes you want to read it again and again.

A beautifully crafted and perceptive story of hope, friendship and family.

Thank you to the publisher for my eARC copy of this book. Unfortunately I didn’t love this book and therefore didn’t finish, I just didn’t connect with this one. Not for me, sorry.

I thought this was quite good, an interesting storyline, but enjoyed it non the less.

Thank you NetGalley for my complimentary copy in return for my honest review.

What a wonderful book! I was completely pulled into the worlds of Susan and Norma and their often turbulent but long-lasting friendship. I cared enough to be outraged on more than one occasion and the triumphs and regrets of a life were so well documented that it felt as if I knew these women.
The end notes, as COVID hits their worlds, was pitched perfectly and I'm going to be recommending this book for years to come.

I rarely do not finish a book, and unfortunately this was one of those times. I tried my very best to continue going but I couldn't. I felt that this book didn't grab my attention. I was waiting for something to happen to spark an interest, but instead the narrator focuses on a lot of small details that makes it feel heavy. There was the inclusion of details that seemed completely trivial and then made into a bigger plot point that just didn't make sense. It was a book that I was left wondering why are these people friends?

I was prepared to be astonished. I wasn’t quite.

Susan seemed to keep unintentionally stumbling into life. She just ‘happened’ to meet her husband at brekky, and on the same day she also ‘happened’ to meet her best friend, Norma, at her workplace (Norma being the daughter of the shop owner). As she cruised through life, living the events she was ‘placed’ into, she started wondering if she had made the right choices in love, career and friendship. Did she even make a choice at all?

This was my first time reading from this author, and I did really like her sense of humour. A few chapters in, I was chuckling internally already because of Susan’s sassiness in responding to the situations around her.

With a title like this though, I was expecting something grand, Walter Mitty-style (the movie, not the book), to happen. But unfortunately, I was left hanging. I did try to appreciate the ordinariness of Susan’s life, and maybe that was the point of the contrasting title, but I was still left underwhelmed.

So if you want to read this book, jump right in without expecting any astonishment. Then you might be able to get more satisfaction from the journey and the ending than I did.

Having said that, I liked Nina Stibbe’s writing style. So I might check her other books in the future.

This ended up being quite a middle of the road book for me. For the first half or so I was enjoying it; the writing is funny, I was getting to know all of the characters. But once I made it past that halfway mark the story just lost me a little bit. The characters slowly started to get on my nerves - some of them were just down right awful - I didn't really understand their choices or the motivation for them, and there were bits of the story/relationships that just felt unresolved, even at the very end.

Susan and Norma are veterans of a.thirty year friendship, their lives couldn't be more different though from when they first.met working in a haberdashery. While Norma's life has glided along and she had achieved success in academia, Susan's has stalled.in suburbia. Susan narrates this tale of enduring friendship.

One Day I Shall Astonish the World is the latest from author and humorist Nina Stibbe. I’ve previously really loved her other books, so I was delighted to receive this ARC.

ODISATW is a study of a somewhat unusual female friendship over the course of a lifetime. Susan and Norma were thrust together when they both got jobs at a small haberdashery shop in 1990’s Leicestershire.

Over the course of the next 30 years they experience plenty of twists and turns in their careers, love lives, and family lives, and during a particularly bad patch, Susan wonders if she’s misinterpreted the strength of her friendship with Norma.

This has all the hallmarks of a Nina Stibbe book; it’s dripping with her classically sardonic wit, but the overall impression I was left with was that of gentle humour and warmth.

If you’re looking for a much slower paced book, you’ll enjoy this.

If you prefer a dramatic storyline, this isn’t it.
I did enjoy it and liked taking my time with it, but I’ve preferred some of her other books a bit more.

That said, I’ll always read anything by Nina ❤️

With thanks to @netgalley and @penguinukbooks @vikingbooksuk for the opportunity to read One Day I Shall Astonish The World, which is available to buy now.