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Reading lists

Books to read if you love The Bear

Restaurant Babylon

The shocking secrets of the world's finest kitchens

A glorious behind-the-scenes account of London's debauched hospitality business.

Shocking and at times jaw-dropping, this is a must-read for any Babylon fans or those who like eating out. ****

Edwards-Jones gets away with stories far more bizarre than anything you would believe in a novel. Sometimes you laugh out loud at the outrageousness of it all...[her] mission is to amuse and entertain

Imogen Edwards-Jones is the bestselling author of Hotel Babylon, Air Babylon and Fashion Babylon, as well as novels such as The Witch’s Daughter and Have You Got Anything 
Stronger? A broadcaster, columnist and journalist for over twenty-five years, she lives in London.

What makes a restaurant hot? Whose name do you need to drop to get a table? Why is one place booked solid for the next nine months while somewhere equally delicious is as empty and inhospitable as the Gobi desert? 
 
Welcome to the restaurant business, where the hours are punishing, the conditions are brutal and the Chef's Special has been languishing at the back of the fridge for the past three days. 
This is an industry plagued with obsessives. Why else do some chefs drive themselves crazy in pursuit of elusive Michelin stars, when in reality all they're doing is 'making someone else's tea'? 
 
Nothing is left to chance: the lighting, the temperature or even the cut of the salmon fillet. There's even a spot of psychology behind the menu. What do they want you to order? What makes them the most money? And why should you really hold back on those side dishes? 
 
In Restaurant Babylon, Imogen Edwards-Jones and her anonymous industry insider lift the lid on all the tricks of the food trade and what really makes this £90 billion a year industry tick. So please do sit down, pour yourself some heavily marked-up wine and make yourself comfortable (although we'll need that table back by 8.30 sharp).

Hospital Babylon

Hospital Babylon is an in-depth, amusing and highly insightful expose of the extraordinary world of modern medicine. It will take the reader on a journey through the various departments and wards where babies are made, thighs are reduced, noses straightened and spare kidneys are flown in from the Indian subcontinent. 
 
We will meet doctors who sleep with nurses. Doctors who sleep with patients. Doctors who fiddle their insurance forms. Doctors who suck fat, pump up breasts, plump lips and lengthen penises. The doctor who specialises in flatulence. The doctor who shoots up before he operates. Doctor Feelgood who will give you anything and everything you need. As well as the doctor who makes a fortune doing buttock enlargements in the Caribbean. En route, we will discover what touches them, what amuses them and quite how obsessively insane you have to be to make it to the top. 
 
Why does a private room cost over £1000 a night? Who are the people changing your bedpan? Holding your hand as you go to sleep? What do they do to you while you're out cold? Why are drugs so expensive? How easy is it for the pharmaceutical companies to grease the good doctor's palm? Who exactly is profiting from your illness, embarrassing affliction or brand new nose? And, of course, what happens when it all goes wrong? 
 
Packed with true stories, anecdotes and revelations, Hospital Babylon is a riveting, entertaining and shocking look at 24 hours in the life of a hospital. Both amusing and appalling, it will make you question whether you should sign that consent form after all...

Wedding Babylon

The perfect alternative wedding present from the bestselling author of Hotel Babylon

A must-have for any bride-to-be... lifts the lid on scams used by the wedding industry to make sure your big day is their pay day

A horrifying insight into the scams and scandals of the business

Packed full of wedding gossip... You won't want to put it down!

Following a week in the life of a busy wedding planner, and based entirely on true but anonymous stories, Wedding Babylon takes you to the heart of an industry where emotions run high, money flows like champagne and £3,000 cakes are made of polystyrene. Why are weddings so expensive? What makes us spend a year's wages on one Big Day? And just how Big does your Day actually have to be? 
 
Hilarious, shocking and full of jaw-dropping true tales of wedding days from hell, here is definitive proof that, sadly, the course of true love never did run entirely smooth ...

Pop Babylon

Sniffing out the secrets of the music biz

Pop Babylon is a true guilty pleasure, leaving readers both appalled and longing for more. It's not the deepest book you'll ever read, but who wants Balzac on the beach?

A Babylonian expose of the excesses of the music industry should be required reading for all X Factor wannabes

How do you make it as a pop star? Why does one boy band make it big and another disappear off the pages of the magazines altogether? Why do girls cost more than boys? And who should you sleep with to get to number one? 
 
Packed with scandal and intrigue, Pop Babylon takes you to the dark heart of one of the world's most wicked and secretive industries. It's a world where money talks, bullshit walks and drugs are a way of life. And where talent isn't always at the top of the list of priorities... 
 
Tracking a year in the making of a brand-new boy band, Pop Babylon is pure, unadulterated reading pleasure - stuffed with stories about pop's most demanding divas, which jocks do shock and just how long you can chop a line of cocaine. Disgraceful, revelatory and great down-and-dirty fun, it's essential reading for anyone who wants to know what it really takes nowadays to be top of the pops.

Beach Babylon

The secret life of paradise - what happens when the sun goes down?

How does it feel to live and work in the world's most beautiful and luxurious tropical island resort, surrounded by white sandy beaches and aquamarine seas? How does it feel to be in the lap of luxury when you're thousands of miles from anywhere else? And when the guests are some of the richest and most demanding people in the world, where do you find the energy every day to smile, smile and smile again? 
 
Beach Babylon takes you behind the scenes at a five-star tropical island resort. Do all the stories which take place behind the closed doors of the exclusive spa have happy endings? What do the world's richest people expect from room service during their fortnight in paradise? What does the windsurfing instructor do to keep sane after hours? 
 
In the bestselling tradition of her previous Babylon books, Imogen Edwards-Jones investigates the rivalries and alliances between the staff at a resort where pandering to the guests' most extravagant whims is de rigueur. With a cast of millionaires, celebrities, hangers-on and prostitutes, Beach Babylon takes you to a world where extreme luxury is the norm and where excess somehow isn't always enough...

Hotel Babylon

A journey through the entrails of the luxury hotel business

Informative, disgusting and utterly fascinating

Reading Hotel Babylon is like mainlining Popbitch

A 5-Star read. Imogen Edwards-Jones takes readers on a brilliant romp that's just as luxurious as the presidential suite and definitely a whole lot funnier

Makes shock revelation after shock revelation

Five stars for excess... amusing and appalling

An eye-opener...with plenty of tips for the frequent traveller

'Something strange occurs to guests as soon as they check in. Even if in real life they are perfectly well-mannered, decent people with proper balanced relationships, as soon as they spin through the revolving hotel doors the normal rules of behaviour no longer seem to apply.' 
 
All of the following is true.Only the names have been changed to protect the guilty. All the anecdotes, the stories, the characters, the situations, the highs, the lows, the scams, the drugs, the misery, the love, the death and the insanity are exactly as was told by Anonymous - someone who has spent his whole career working in hotels at the heart of London's luxury hotel industry. However, for legal reasons, the stories now take place in a fictitious hotel known as Hotel Babylon. More than a decade is compressed into a day. Everything else is as it should be. The rich spend money, the hotel makes money and the chambermaids still fight the bellboys over a two-pound coin.It's just another twenty-four hours in an expensive London hotel.

Air Babylon

A mile-high journey through the best kept secrets of the airline industry

Lifts the lid on the airline industry, the scams, the hedonistic lifestyle of the staff and the treatment of the passengers

A shocking but fantastic book that should be read before you go on holiday!

For real life debauchery, the perfect in-flight read (or maybe not...) has to be Air Babylon

Lifts the lid on what cabin-crews really get up to in the galley

Some readers may find a stomach-distress bag essential

Heard the one about the airline that has introduced 'corpse cupboards' on new planes to cope with the number of people who die in the air? Heard the story about the First Class air hostess who got fired for sitting on the face of a passenger during a long haul flight? Heard about the amount of knickers and false teeth that are left behind in the body of the plane? Heard how pissed-off stewards put laxatives in your drinks? Heard about the pilot who ran out of runway? Heard of the disabled passengers who miraculously walk again? 
 
No? Then you haven't read Air Babylon. 
 
Do you know the best place to have sex on a plane? Do you know how to dress for an upgrade? Do you know that one drink in the air equals three on the ground? Do you know who is checking you in? Who is checking you out? Do you know exactly what happens to your luggage once it leaves your sight? Is it secure? Are you safe? Do you really know anything about the business that you entrust your life to several times a year? 
 
Air Babylon is a trawl through the highs, the lows, and the rapid descents of the travel industry. It catalogues the births, the deaths, the drunken brawls, the sexual antics, and the debauchery behind the scenes of the ultimate service industry - where the world is divided into those who wear the uniform and those who don't...

Fashion Babylon

From high fashion to high street - a peek up the skirts of the world's most glamourous industry

Witty and naughty, it is a must read for every fashionista

Jaw-dropping stuff ... A real must read for anyone interested in fashion or obsessed by celebrity. Brave and brutally honest, it will have fashion's finest foaming at the mouth

By avoiding cliche but including colour and explaining the money, Fashion Babylon will appeal to the consumer in everyone

The revelations spill out in a succession of asides from the narrator, or bitchy exchanges that leave you rubbing your hands with glee

An enthralling book which tells you as much about human life as it does about the fickle world of fashion. Excellent!

What is fashion? What is fashionable? Who decides what is in? What is out? Why is it green one year, and blue the next? Why is one little black dress worth three thousand pounds and another thirty quid? Is the catwalk that catty? Is everyone high on drugs and full of champagne? What makes a supermodel so super? And a designer too hot to touch? Who is making the money? Who owns who? Who hates who? And who's in each other's pocket? 
Following in the glamourous footsteps of Hotel Babylon and Air Babylon, Fashion Babylon will get under the well-cut skin of the fashion industry. Using a world renowned source, Fashion Babylon will take you through six months in a designer's life. Starting at the end of one catwalk show, it will explain how a collection is put together - from the rail of found objects, to how it gets on to the catwalk, into the shops and onto the covers of a magazine. It will tell you who goes to the shows, where they sit and whose backside one needs to kiss to get there. It will introduce you to a host of places and characters, it will take you into a world where women get paid tens of thousands for getting dressed in the morning and where a wrong shirt length can cost you your career. 
Witty, naughty and full of gripping detail Fashion Babylon will explain the mark -ups, talk you through fashion's two seasons and discuss the money and commerce behind one of the most international, lucrative and secretive of businesses. With something for the simple follower of fashion as well as the hardcore fashionista, Fashion Babylon will change the way you sashay into Top Shop, flick through the pages of Vogue and enter the portals of Harvey Nichols forever.

The Stork Club

The hilarious and touching true story of one woman's trials and tribulations with IVF

There is remarkable courage in the candour that permeates these pages, as well as a sparkling wit which, despite the poignancy of the story, often made me laugh out loud and somehow contrives to make the book more than the sum of its parts - it becomes a touching testimony of how the human spirit can not just endure, but ultimately triumph over adversity

When I was a teenager, I thought you could get pregnant from sitting in a jacuzzi. Not that I'm sure I even knew what a jacuzzi was, but I knew they were racy places where racy things happened. Men, as far as I remember, didn't even have to be there. So long as they'd been in the water in some sort of excitable state, pregnancy was inevitable - even if you kept your pants on. You see pregnancy was that easy, that dangerous and it could ruin your life. 
 
Almost 20 years later and pregnancy could still ruin my life. Although now it is not the threat of what having a baby would do, but of not having a baby at all. I have been trying to get pregnant for two years and have not even come close to hearing the pitter-patter of tiny feet...' 
 
So begins The Stork Club, Imogen Edwards-Jones' very personal, very moving and very funny memoir of her (and her husband's) trials and tribulations with IVF. Poked and prodded by endless doctors, pumped full of an exotic cocktail of drugs and forced to try to have sex at the most inopportune moments, Imogen pulls no punches in her account of this process. In her words, 'The fertility game is like a marathon, where you just have to keep on running. No matter how many times the finishing line is moved, no matter how increasingly heavy the going or unpleasant the terrain, you pick yourself up and, ever more determinedly, keep on going. Until one day, you pray, you might just make it...

James Patterson

Imogen Edwards-Jones

BORN IN THE SHADOWS. LIVED FOR THE SPOTLIGHT. WAS SHE MURDERED? 
 
Before Marilyn Monroe, there was Norma Jeane. No one would have thought that the girl who spent her childhood between foster homes and orphanages would one day become a global star. 
 
The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe tells the extraordinary story of Marilyn Monroe’s life – and the shocking circumstances of her death. 
 
For decades, fans have speculated about the truth of her final days. Was it suicide? A tragic accident? Murder? Drawn from rigorous research, this book seeks answers. 
 
Told in vivid, dramatic scenes, James Patterson and Imogen Edwards-Jones uncover the life and death of the remarkable woman who was Marilyn Monroe. 
 
__________________________________ 
 
'A poignant primer on the life and death of the Hollywood star... skilfully weaves the known details into a poignant biography.' - The Times 
 
‘Electrifying . . . A spellbinding new account of the star’s final days by the world’s greatest thriller writer’ - Daily Mail 
 
'Meticulously researched deep dive into the glamorous life of Marilyn Monroe - and the mysterious circumstances surrounding her death in 1962.' - The i Paper 
 
__________________________________ 
 
 
PRAISE FOR JAMES PATTERSON 
 
'It's no mystery why James Patterson is the world's most popular thriller writer ... Simply put: nobody does it better.' JEFFERY DEAVER 
 
'No one gets this big without amazing natural storytelling talent - which is what Jim has, in spades.' LEE CHILD 
 
'Patterson boils a scene down to the single, telling detail, the element that defines a character or moves a plot along. It's what fires off the movie projector in the reader's mind.' MICHAEL CONNELLY 
 
'James Patterson is The Boss. End of.' IAN RANKIN 
 
'The master storyteller of our times' HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON 
 
'One of the greatest storytellers of all time' PATRICIA CORNWELL

The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

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