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Dolly Alderton is an award-winning author and freelance journalist. Former Sunday Times columnist Dolly Alderton, has also written for GQ, Red, Marie Claire and Grazia. From 2017 to 2020, she was the former co-host and co-creator of the podcast of the weekly pop-culture and current affairs podcast The High Low alongside journalist Pandora Sykes.
Her first book Everything I Know About Love became a top five Sunday Times best seller in its first week of publication and won a National Book Award for Autobiography of the Year. Her first novel Ghosts was published in October 2020 and was also a top five Sunday Times Bestseller.
Dolly Alderton Books In Order (Publication Date)
Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton
Published 1st February 2018
Format: Paperback, Hardback, Audiobook and Kindle Editions
Pages: 368
When it comes to the trials and triumphs of becoming a grown-up, journalist Dolly Alderton has seen and tried it all. In her memoir, she vividly recounts falling in love, wrestling with self-sabotage, finding a job, throwing a socially disastrous Rod-Stewart-themed house party, getting drunk, getting dumped, and realising that Ivan from the corner shop is the only reliable man, and finding that your best girlfriends are always there at the end of every messy night out. Glittering, with wit and insight, heart and humour, this is a book about the struggles of early adulthood in all its grubby, hopeful uncertainty.
“Nearly everything I know about love, I’ve learnt from my long-term friendships with women.”
I know that love can be loud and jubilant. It can be dancing in the swampy mud and the pouring rain at a festival and shouting “YOU ARE AMAZING” over the band. It’s laughing until you wheeze. It’s walking along the street together on a Saturday night and feeling an entire city is yours.
I also know that love is a pretty quiet thing. It’s lying on the sofa together drinking coffee, talking about where you’re going to go that morning to drink more coffee. It’s folding down pages of books you think they’d find interesting.
I know that love happens under the splendour of fireworks and sunsets, but also happens when you’re lying on blow-up airbeds in a childhood bedroom, sitting in A&E or in the queue for a passport.
Everything I Know About Love is a celebration of our female friendships, of our messy years, and of growing up together. Glittering with wit, heart, and humour, it’s a book to share with every woman you’ve ever been lucky enough to call a friend. Now a BBC One TV series.
Totally Booked UK Review: One that I’d seen a few of my good friends had read and opted to give it a go. A book full of different chapters of a life lived falling in and out of love. Themed parties, getting drunk and the meaning of friendship. One to make you laugh and cry.
“More often than not, the love someone gives you will be a reflection of the love you give yourself. If you can’t treat yourself with kindness, care, and patience, chances are someone else won’t either.”
Ghosts by Dolly Alderton
Published 15th October 2020
Format: Paperback, Hardback, Audiobook and Kindle Editions
Pages: 338
I love this book. It is wise, funny, tender and true, sharply-observed and utterly hilarious. Alderton’s gift is always to give the mundane its beautiful due and in Ghosts, she manages to write a compulsively readable novel. Dolly Alderton’s talent is phenomenal ― Elizabeth Day
Dolly Alderton’s second book is her tender debut novel is funny and tender, filled with white-smart satirical observations about relationships, family, memory, and how we live now.
Nina Dean has arrived at her early thirties as a successful food writer with loving friends and family, plus a new home and neighbourhood. When she meets Max, a beguiling romantic hero who tells her on date one that he’s going to marry her, it feels like all is going to plan.
A new relationship couldn’t have come at a better time – her thirties have not been the liberating, uncomplicated experience she was sold. Everywhere she turns, she is reminded of time passing and opportunities dwindling. Friendships are fading, ex-boyfriends are moving on and, worse, everyone’s moving to the suburbs. There’s no solace to be found in her family, with a mum who’s caught in a baffling mid-life makeover and a beloved dad who is vanishing in slow-motion into dementia.
Dear Dolly: On Love, Life and Friendship by Dolly Alderton
Published 27th October 2022
Format: Paperback, Hardback, Audiobook and Kindle Editions
Pages: 237
‘Alderton is so gifted at making people care’ Marian Keyes
Since early 2020, author Dolly Alderton has been sharing her wisdom, warmth and wit with the countless people who have written into her Dear Dolly agony aunt column in The Sunday Times Style magazine. Their questions range from the painfully – and sometimes hilariously – relatable to the occasionally bizarre. They include breakups and body issues, families, friendships, dating apps, divorce, the pleasures and pitfalls of social media, sex, loneliness, longing, love and everything in between.
Without judgement, and with deep empathy informed by her own, much-chronicled adventures in love, friendship and dating, Dolly leads us by the hand through a collection of her agony aunt columns and the various labyrinths of life, proving that a problem shared is truly a problem halved.
Good Material by Dolly Alderton
Published 9th November 2023
Format: Paperback, Hardback, Audiobook and Kindle Editions
Pages: 352
From the best-selling author of Ghosts and Everything I Know About Love: a sharply funny, beautifully observed and exquisitely relatable story of heartbreak and friendship, and how to survive both.
Every relationship has one beginning.
This one has two endings.
Andy loves Jen. Jen loved Andy.
And he can’t work out why she stopped.
Now he is. . .
1. Without a home
2. Waiting for his stand-up career to take off
3. Wondering why everyone else around him seems to have grown up while he wasn’t looking
Set adrift on the sea of heartbreak at a time when everything he thought he knew about women, and flat-sharing, and his friendships has transformed beyond recognition, Andy clings to the idea of solving the puzzle of their broken relationship. Because if he can find the answer to that, then maybe Jen can find her way back to him.
Andy still has a lot to learn, not least his ex-girlfriend’s side of the story.