Who is sophie kinsella

Simon vs. Wedding Night by Sophie Kinsella. Hexbreaker by Jordan L. Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan. Captive Prince by C. California Girls by Susan Mallery. Shadow Bound by Erin Kellison. Two By Two by Nicholas Sparks. The Smallest Part by Amy Harmon. Lost and Found Sisters by Jill Shalvis. Dancing Lessons by R. Death and Destruction by Patricia Logan. Sign in to vote ». Topics Mentioning This Author.

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We will not remove any content for bad language alone, or being critical of a particular book. Welcome back. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. That's why I didn't go to my publishers and pitch it. The idea of sitting down in their office and saying, 'I'd like to write about a girl with an overdraft who likes shopping and gets letters from her bank manager,' well it just sounded nuts. But I could just see it going on all around me; we all talked about shopping, we went shopping, the store card thing was massive, and I could see the hypocrisy of taking out the credit card, then being shouted at for not paying it off.

And nobody had done it. I thought, wait a minute, shopping has become the national pastime, and nobody has written about it. It felt very much like an experimental project. She submitted her first Sophie Kinsella manuscript, The Dreamworld of a Shopaholic, to her publishers without telling them it was actually by Madeleine Wickham.

It was not just a hit but a sensation. To her credit, the success of three further Shopaholic books didn't deter Kinsella from then writing standalone novels, in between further Shopaholic instalments. Her latest, I've Got Your Number, is another outside of the series, but its plot — about a young woman who finds a mobile phone and becomes entangled in its previous owner's life — reflects the author's same sharp eye for the zeitgeist.

It was just a very abstract idea — this thing is so powerful, it contains your whole world, and it links you to somebody in a way that 10 years ago would have been impossible. This tiny device gives an insight into every aspect of our lives, so as a novelist, my God, it's perfect. It's only this big! And yet it's got your business world and your romantic world and your emotional world. It's all there. I've Got Your Number is cleverly plotted, highly engaging and romps along splendidly.

I defy anyone stuck on a long-haul flight not to be happily diverted by the caper. And yet I kept finding myself distracted by misgivings about its version of femininity, which celebrates intuition over logic, emotional intelligence over success, and offers little that hasn't already been said in Pride and Prejudice — or, for that matter, Legally Blonde.

Why do chick-lit authors create ditzy heroines whose intelligence is strictly emotional — and even then a bit hit-and-miss — and whose preoccupations seldom extend beyond fashionable handbags and romantic fantasies. Kinsella is a self-possessed middle-class Londoner who met her husband on her first night at Oxford, and married him at 21; he is the headmaster of a private school, and they have four sons, joined by a daughter shortly after we meet. She can hold her own at an Oxbridge high-table dinner — so why, I ask her, is so much chick lit written by highly intelligent, educated women?

You can be highly intelligent, and also ditzy and klutzy. You can be unable to cook, you can like lipstick. And I think it's more realistic to represent women having all these facets, than to say, OK, you're intelligent, so I've got to write you as all competent, which I think is an unfair ideal. To have someone who never makes a mistake, never finds her personal life in disarray, never worries about work-life balance?

I think that would be unreal. What I'm writing is real. Yes, I agree, but in Kinsella's most recent Shopaholic book, Bloomwood saves the personal shopping department she now works for by helping wives to deceive their husbands, and conceal how much they're spending on clothes — confirming every cliche men like to level at women.

I mean, who's to say which is right? They think that way. And they're not stupid, they're not retrograde, they haven't sacrificed their feminist ideals. They are real people with a shallow end and a deep end, and I'm just putting the whole picture out there. This is the classic defence, invoked not just by chick-lit authors but magazine editors, luxury goods advertisers, reality TV producers and so on.

Kinsella's third novel under her Wickham name was Swimming Pool Sunday in , in which tragedy befalls a little girl at a pool party. The ensuing drama complicates her mother's already-troubled relationships with both her husband and paramour.

Kinsella wrote The Gatecrasher and The Wedding Girl as Madeleine Wickham before deciding to try her hand at a lighter style of fiction. She settled on a new pen name, taken from her middle name and her mother's maiden name, and called herself Sophie Kinsella. Its heroine, Rebecca "Becky" Bloomwood, is a year-old financial journalist with some terrible personal-finance habits of her own.

She lives in a posh London neighborhood she can ill afford, overspends on clothes, and then buries her bank statements and credit-card bills in a drawer.

Seeking an avenue out of her mounting crisis, she settles upon a plan to snag a successful advertising mogul as her future husband. A series of comic mishaps followed by a few revelatory moments bring the plot to a satisfying end.

Confessions of a Shopaholic caught on with readers via word-of-mouth, and sold extremely well. Critics were not always kind, however. Kinsella said that the idea for Shopaholic came relatively easily to her. And once that happened I could see the character, I could see where it was going, and I could see the potential for comedy. The sequel Shopaholic Abroad —changed to Shopaholic Takes Manhattan for its American publication in —finds Becky with a better-paying television job and the ad-exec Luke as her steady boyfriend.

When his career takes him to Manhattan and she follows, however, a whole new world of high-end shopping tempts her. Before long, she has been exposed in the press back in England as a questionable financial-advice giver, and Luke breaks up with her. The setbacks dissipate, however, before the conclusion, and Becky triumphs once again.

Kinsella continued to write soberer fare under her own name, and in 's Cocktails for Three she moved out of the Aga-saga realm and set her characters in the world of magazine publishing. She returned to Shopaholic Becky in with Shopaholic Ties the Knot, which begins with Becky in perhaps the ideal job, finally: as a personal shopper for Barneys, the upscale Manhattan retailer. Predictable chaos ensues as plans to wed Luke get underway.

It was only with the publication of her first non-Shopaholic book under the Kinsella pseudonym that she finally revealed her identity as Madeleine Wickham. Can You Keep a Secret? Coming back from a client meeting that went badly, Emma blurts out several secrets—including the fact that she doesn't really like her job all that much anyway—to the handsome stranger seated next to her on a bumpy business flight.

On Monday morning, she sees the man again, but this time at the office: he is the company's American owner. A Publishers Weekly review termed the plot somewhat transparent, but conceded that "Kinsella's down-to-earth protagonist is sure to have readers sympathizing and doubled over in laughter. But more complex problems arise when her parents reveal that a long-ago relationship her father had produced a long-lost sibling. Kinsella imagines the fun sisterly shopping trips she and Jessica will embark upon, but Jessica turns out to be a stodgy environmentalist with a distaste for frivolous consumerist pursuits.

Kinsella's Shopaholic series has been such a success that the titles have been translated into nearly three dozen languages, a testament to the universal themes she addressed about finance and romance. The story has even been optioned by Disney for a possible movie. Though she admits to being somewhat of a free-spender on clothes, Kinsella is a suburban mother of two boys who lives near where she herself grew up.

Having left her journalism job behind many years ago, she writes novels full-time, and keeps to a regular schedule.