This series is an adaptation of something I saw on Twitter – people were posting 26 books in 26 days, each title beginning with a different letter of the alphabet. However, I’m planning on taking around 26 months to get to Z. Each month I’ll post a newish book I’ve enjoyed, plus a children’s book and an older book.

This month – X – is where it starts to get a little tricky. I decided when I started that I wouldn’t read books especially for the series. I wanted it to be my own personal A-Z, and reading books in order to include them here would make the whole thing artificial. I’m sure there are books around beginning with X, but I haven’t read any. So this week, any book with X somewhere in the title counts.

My X books are:

Newly married Natasha has the perfect house, a loving husband and a beautiful little girl called Emily. She’d have it all if it wasn’t for Jen, her husband’s ex-wife who just won’t leave them alone …

Then Natasha returns home one day to find her husband and Emily gone without trace. Desperate to get her daughter back, Natasha will do anything even if it means accepting an offer of help from Jen. But can she trust her? And do either of them really know the man they married?

This is just the kind of book I love. The characters start out in a perfectly normal world. Natasha could be us, or someone we know. Then things get darker and darker and before we know it… No spoilers here, but I’m glad I’m not Natasha!

Evadne is near to boiling point. All day things have gone wrong, and now two hours of chemistry, which for Evadne is too boring! She feels it’s time she livened up a chemistry lesson, so with a dash of this and a dash of that… Then a prolonged hiss, followed by an almightly explosion! It reverberated throught the school. Windows shatter, glass crucibles and jars smash. The laboratory is enveloped in black soot and there is an evil smell everywhere.

Just what was that concoction – and even worse, what has happened to Evadne?

This is one of a handful of books I’ve featured here where I had to copy the blurb from the the back of my own copy, as it’s old enough to not be on Amazon – though some secondhand books are. Who wouldn’t have loved to go to the Chalet School? The image above is my own battered paperback, which has accompanied me through several decades and even more house moves.

It’s an ordinary Thursday lunchtime for Arthur Dent until his house gets demolished. The Earth follows shortly afterwards to make way for a new hyperspace express route, and his best friend has just announced that he’s an alien. At this moment, they’re hurtling through space with nothing but their towels and an innocuous-looking book inscribed, in large friendly letters, with the words: DON’T PANIC.

The weekend has only just begun . . .

This book was first published in 1979, but it must have been about 2009 before I read it – and it might have taken me longer if my older son hadn’t given it to me one time. Then I saw what I’d been missing!

Next month it’s the ‘Y’ books, the penultimate post in the series. I’ll be sorry when it ends…