Jo Thomas writes funny and sunny best-sellers about food, love and family. Books that wrap their arms around you and give you a “great big hug.”

And her latest release Countdown to Christmas is billed as “the most uplifting and feel good romance of Christmas 2023.”

Hi, I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler and on Binge Reading today Jo talks about her own love for books that take you somewhere else, and her ambition to leave readers with hope and a smile on their faces.

This week’s Giveaway

Our Giveaway this week is a Deck The Halls BookSweeps bundle of historic holiday romances. Enter the drawer for a library of 20 plus historical romances, including Tangled Destiny, a New York Christmas novella, which is the prequel to my own Of Gold & Blood historical mystery series.

The BookSweeps draw is valued at $250 and includes a new E reader.

Enter the draw here: https://www.booksweeps.com/giveaway/dec23-historical-holiday-romance/

ENTER BOOKSWEEPS DRAW

Now do remember you can support the production costs of the show by buying me a cup of coffee at buymeacoffee.com/Jennywheelx.

And if you enjoy the show, don’t forget, leave us a review, so others will find us too. Word of mouth is still the best form of recommendation for people to hear about the show and great books they will love to read.

Items mentioned in this episode

Books Jo is reading

Katie Fforde: https://katiefforde.com/,

Jill Mansell: https://jillmansell.co.uk/

Milly Johnson: https://millyjohnson.co.uk/

Jilly Cooper: https://www.jillycooper.co.uk/

Galway Bay: https://www.galwaytourism.ie/galway-bay/

Pulia:  https://www.traveldepartment.com/travel-blog/10-reasons-to-visit-puglia-region-in-italy

Where to find Jo Thomas online

Website: JoThomasauthor.com

Instagram: @jothomasauthor

Twitter: @jo_thomas01

But that’s enough of the housekeeping, as you can probably tell, I’ve got a real frog in my throat, so I won’t keep talking. I’ll introduce Jo.

Introducing romance author Jo Thomas

Jo Thomas Best selling author of feel-good fiction featuring food, love and family…

Hello there Jo, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.

Jo Thomas: Jenny, great to be here.

Jenny Wheeler: You say up front that the sorts of books you write are about food, love, family, and fun. You like to have happy endings. And they are for people who like sunny and funny. Is that’s how you started out your writing?

Jo Thomas: It’s really yes, because they were the books that I loved to read. And I would read authors like Katie Fforde, Jill Mansell and Milly Johnson.

I wanted books that would take me to somewhere different where you felt that you would join in old friends?

Like in the evenings, I can remember reading a Jilly Cooper and getting into bed at night and thinking, ‘I’m going to visit old friends down the pub.’

And it’s a nice place to be. I want people to feel that they care about the characters in my books and that they’re with them through adversity and that they leave with hope and a smile on their face.

When you start writing, people say, oh, write about what you know, and I thought, I don’t know about anything.

The only thing I like is food really. But I’m not a chef. I’m just someone who’s interested in where their food comes from and then I thought why not write about the thing I’m interested in?

I was in a restaurant in Galway, in Ireland with my husband and I was like, ‘I dunno what I’m gonna write about.’

A perfect setting for Jo’s first best seller

I’d ordered some oysters and they put down this platter of oysters in front of me. And just for a moment, it stopped raining for a while. And I looked out the window and I was looking out over Galway Bay and the moon came and shone silvery shadow across the water and the candle was going in the window and it was like being in someone’s front room eating these oysters.

And I thought, this is sexy. And once I discovered the whole background to the oysters in Galway, the shell shucking competitions, their place in their culture…

 I thought, this is what I want to write about. And so that’s how it started for me. I thought, just like at home, I’m putting food at the heart of my stories.

Jenny Wheeler: It sounds like in a number of your books you’ve done that very thing. You’ve gone to a place or a restaurant and been drawn into the stories about food, haven’t you?

Jo Thomas: Exactly that. After the oysters my brother was living in southern Italy in Pulia, and I went over there for the olive harvest and I went, whoa, I love this. I’m gonna write about this. And then it just snowballed. And I just realized that I devour cookery books like people read fiction.

I love to read cookery books that take me on a journey. And it just snowballed from there. this latest book is set in Maple Country, all about maple syrup in Canada. Of course, last year I was right. Was it last year? There’s so many now. I’ve done gingerbread in Germany.

I’ve done Iberico ham in Spain, and I’ve just come back from a wonderful trip to Geneva, which will be on the cards for next year.

A Countdown to Christmas in Canada

Jenny Wheeler: How wonderful. Yes. Now this Christmas book that we’re going be talking about is called Countdown To Christmas, and as you say, it’s set in a very small northern forest town in Canada where they depend on maple syrup for their economy. You’ve got some wonderful maple syrup recipes in it as well, and your key character is a baker who’s lost the joy of cooking.

Her life is on a downturn and she rediscovers that she’s got skills that people value when she’s visiting this farm. But you’ve got a great thing set up where you do two hooks a year, one for winter, one for summer.

Tell us about how that rhythm got started.

Jo Thomas: I can’t remember how it got started really. When I started writing when I wrote The Oyster Catcher, I was then also writing a big book and a novella each year. I’ve got novellas that just come out as eBooks, and then it moved on to ‘if you’re doing novella, you know that you might as well do another big book.’

They just seem to be the stories that I wanted to tell. I love the seasons. I love change in seasons. I love now as we are moving into autumn and we are, the leaves are coming off the trees and winter is beckoning. I love that change of seasons and I love everything that it brings with it, but just as much I love the summer.

I love the spring rolling into summer. I live on the West Wales coast, by the sea and I love the beach in all weathers. I love it in the summer, but I love it just as much in winter with the dogs having a good old romp along the beach with the wind in our face.

I do love the seasons and of course, I love the way the kitchen changes with those seasons, whether we are doing, light salads and cooking outside. I love cooking outside, but just as much I love hunkering down and doing Sunday lunch and everyone around the table inside. It’s all really a pattern of my life within my kitchen where I’ll sit and write books and cook meals and the family come and go.

A summer book…. and a winter book…

So it became a very natural pattern. I’ve just finished writing now next summer’s book and we’ll be returning to Provence in France for that, which is an area I absolutely love. And people who’ve read my books will know that I wrote Escape To A French Farmhouse, all set in Provence.

And we are doing a return to Provence, which I’m very excited about.

Jenny Wheeler: Fabulous. Now Countdown to Christmas is being built as “the most uplifting and feel good romance for Christmas 23.” What do you think makes a good Christmas book? What do readers look for?

Jo Thomas: You’ve got to have all the feels in there. You’ve got to have all the feels. We do romanticize Christmas and I quite like the fact that we actually, a lot of people just call it the holidays because whatever you are thinking is, it is a nice time to gather with family.

So it is about being with ones you love; it is about having all the senses, snow, candles, lights. I spent time in Iceland and I’ve written a book in Iceland and there so much of the days in dark, but they use candles everywhere. And I can remember staying in this hotel once and you went down into sort of semi-cellar for breakfast.

And the baking smells drew you in. And when you got down there, the snow was halfway up the windows and there were candles in every window. And I thought it was like stepping into a great big hug. And I think that’s what we want from a good Christmas story. We want to step into that hug. We wanted to be a lovely, warm place that makes us feel good.

That’s the point of the sorts of books that I write and many of my contemporaries write, they are feel good fiction. We want to feel good in them.

The ‘big hug’ in Welsh – heart warming books

Jenny Wheeler: Hey, listen. And you mentioned the great big hug. I must just divert a little bit from the books to ask you about. On your website, you say, people say your books like a great Welsh hug, and there’s an indecipherable Welsh word that means great big hug. Tell us what that word is and how do you pronounce it?

Jo Thomas: That word is cwtch. So you have a cwtch. So a cwtch is a hug, but it can also mean a warm, cozy little room. Like a snug, the cwtch. And you cwtchy on in.

Jenny Wheeler: Oh nice! That’s something I’ve learnt today… Now your character, Chloe forgive me if I say, but at the beginning, she’s a little bit of a limp rag. I found her just a little bit irritating because she’d built her whole life around her son. She’s a single mom and he goes off to visit with dad when he’s 12 years old. Admittedly, a mom without her son at Christmas?

It is difficult, but she’s a bit of a limp rag at the beginning. What am I going to do? And all she does is fantasize about what Ruben would be doing now, and also looking back on her relationship with Ruben’s father and asking herself. ‘Could they have made it work?’ even though she acknowledges over and over again that ‘no, they couldn’t and that it said they didn’t try.

But she does develop during the course of the story and become a lot more interesting and has a bit more going for her as the story develops. And I wondered – a very long question, but do you quite often like to write about midlife women who are making a fresh start in life?

Jo Thomas: Oh yeah that’s bang on what I like to write about. Because I do think we reach crossroads in our lives when we get to midlife, whether it be, should I have had children, looking back, and I think you do get to a point of asking where could I have gone down a different road?

I didn’t want her to be limp, but I did want her to be at a point where I think having spent all those years bringing up her son and they’ve been through Covid, so it’s just been her and him. Suddenly Christmas on her own is quite a big deal. But also what I quite liked about her is that she is very keen for her son to have a really good relationship with his father.

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What if you’d taken a different path in life?

And I do think that, we all look back and think, oh, what if I’d gone down a different route or whatever? Not that really would’ve been a possibility, but I, there is an element of that when you sit there and you take time to think. And also it is can often be a time for new beginnings if we are brave enough.

Jenny Wheeler: She does get the opportunity to take a very big step into an adventure, and that’s how she ends up in Northern Canada. And she takes it, doesn’t she? She really makes the most of it.

Jo Thomas: She does and for very good reasons really. She it is just her and her son now. She doesn’t have any other family and she is not prepared to just accept a possible inheritance from someone she doesn’t know. She needs to know. Why she didn’t know about this person, who they were, what their life was, and to be able to pass that story onto her son.

So that should this happen, the reason that they have got themselves into a better situation is down to one person who she was related to, and she’s not prepared to just take the money and run. She wants to know firstly. Is it for real? And secondly, who was this person and why did he have nobody else to leave his money to?

Why is it her? So there are lots of and she’s full of integrity and really wants to know what the story is so that can be handed on down.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. Yes. As we’ve mentioned, food is very important. There are some great recipes in the book, but I noticed also that you’ve become an agent for maple syrup during the course of the story. How did that happen?

Jo’s love affair with maple syrup…

Jo Thomas: I don’t know that I’m an agent for maple syrup, but as I say I always put food at the heart of the story and Canada is very close to my heart.

I honeymooned there and I really wanted to explore maple syrup more. I use it a lot in cooking. For instance, on a big Sunday roast, I’ll do parsnips and I’ll do them in a bit of butter and oil and seasoning and then drizzle them with maple syrup and toss them in the maple syrup.

You get lovely caramelizing parsnips to go with the roast. Or at Christmas time, I’ll do a ham, a roast ham, and then score the fat. Rub it with some mustard, put it in some cloves, and drizzle it again with maple syrup. It gives it a lovely sweetness. And because there are four types of maple syrup, you go from light to very dark, you can really decide on the depth of flavor that you want from the maple syrup as well.

Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. Actually, funnily enough, I did a roast cauliflower dish for a potluck lunch that I was going to last weekend. It was partly an Ottolenghi influenced recipe, but it had maple syrup on the roast cauliflower. It was gorgeous.

Jo Thomas: Oh, I’m thinking of doing roast cauliflower. We are going to have a writer’s Christmas lunch, and I was thinking what to do for the vegetarians. I was thinking roast cauliflower, so I might look that one up with a drizzle of maple syrup would be wonderful.

Jenny Wheeler: It also had a drizzle of pomegranate molasses.

Jo Thomas: Oh, okay.

Summer At The Ice Cream Cafe

Jenny Wheeler: It was really good. Very Ottolenghi. Listen, we know that Christmas book is going to be a winner, but your last summer book was just the wonderful kind of antithesis.

It was called Summer at the Ice Cream Cafe, and it was about Beca Valentino who goes back to her home village, a seaside village, and wants to buy a gelato shop.

Now, tell us about that one. It’s just the total other side of it, isn’t it? The summer and the ice cream at the beach…

Jo Thomas: My senses of where I live, walking the beach, the sand between your toes, the smell of the sea. I just love it, the call of the seagulls. And in that book, I very much wanted to talk about – its set in Wales. And in Wales, there are an awful lot of Italian families who came over and settled.

And I have Italian heritage and my mother’s family came to London, moved to Clerkenwell and became ice cream sellers with handcarts in London.

There was a little bit of wanting to explore my heritage there and also. I wanted to write about a place that I love, which is Pembrokeshire in Wales, which is where I live.

And again, as we were saying women in midlife, when you have climbed to the top of the mountain, you’ve worked hard, but actually get there and say, was this the mountain that I really wanted to climb? And looking out and thinking, should I have climbed that mountain over there? So Beca hasn’t had children, and her marriage has fallen apart.

But she decides that she still wants to have family in some way or be a nurturer. And so she decides to foster, and the house that she’s always loved comes up for sale.

She sells up her business and moves back to her hometown and buys the house. And it’s the sort of town where you’ve got a lot of interesting things at play because you’ve got second homeowners who will come down from London and they’ve got lovely homes there.

Midlife stories about finding your place

You’ve got local people who might be working two or three jobs in the hospitality industry because that’s the thing that drives the economy there.

And you’ve got a lot of holiday makers who come and enjoy the beaches in the school holidays. So there’s lots of interesting interactions at play there and a community that maybe isn’t as integrated as it should be.

And so, this was a way of taking the character back to their past. She has to find her own place in that now because is she a local, is she someone moving into the area?

So she’s finding her own place, coming to terms with her own past and making a future for herself.

Within that, through the gelato and the boys that she fosters, who are not the small children that she expected to take onto the beach and make sandcastles with, they come with their own stories, their own issues. They find their way together through gelato to a new beginning.

Jenny Wheeler: Yeah, it’s a lovely story. Tell me, with the Christmas books, do you find that your readers have particular rituals about Christmas books?

I’ve been interested in previous years when we’ve talked to authors. Some people like to hide away the book and not open it until Christmas Eve and other people start reading it on the 1st of December.

Tell us what your readers tell you about Christmas books.

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