Louise Wener

A Novel

The Half Life of Stars

This is a story of an ordinary girl's transformation from awkward 80s suburban pop geek to 90s jet-set pop goddess. It's about the embarrassments of growing up and experimenting with who you are and how pop music is both the comic and life-affirming soundtrack that runs through it all. Different for Girls is for anyone who ever sang into a hairbrush and slow-danced to Spandau Ballet's True. It's about growing up with Look-In and Jackie magazine and daubing your hair with poster paint to look more like Toyah Wilcox. It's about bad perms, bad boyfriends and the nagging feeling that no man will quite measure up to Nick Heyward from Haircut One Hundred. It's also about the journey from bad band to great band, from gigs in toilets to gigs in stadiums with all the mistakes, joys, disappointments and successes in between. It's a journey which starts with a 12-year-old perfecting her dance routine to Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights in front of TOTPs and ends, almost 20 years later, with the same girl having REM's Michael Stipe sing happy birthday to her on a warm summer's evening accompanied by 70,000 strangers.

My True-life Adventures in Pop

Different for Girls

From the author of The Perfect Play comes a charmingly romantic–yet very edgy-novel set in the music industry about friendship, love, growing up, and always following your dreams. Danny McQueen has dreamed of being a pop star since he was thirteen-years-old. Now he's twenty-nine and still dreaming. But he faces a dilemma. His girlfriend Alison wants him to sort his life out. She's given him an ultimatum: Find a record deal by the end of the year or it's find a new girlfriend. When is it time to give up on your childhood ambitions? When is it time to stop watching Columbo in your underpants and get a proper job? Is six months long enough for one last assault on the big time? Is friendship ever more important than love? Is it just your imagination or can your girlfriend always tell when you've been looking at Internet porn? With the help of his boss Kostas, his two best friends, and an eighty-year-old Kung Fu enthusiast called Sheila, Danny McQueen is about to find out.

Goodnight Steve McQueen

Claire's older brother, Daniel, has disappeared. He leaves work one Friday afternoon, shortly before Christmas, and vanishes into thin air. Married, successful, rich, there seems no reason why he would abandon his life. Has he been killed? Has he been kidnapped? Or has he just had enough? Set between London and Miami, this is the story of a family with ghosts to bury. It opens on the day of the Challenger shuttle explosion at Cape Canaveral: a tragic moment that rips this family apart and sets Daniel's disappearance in motion some 18 years later. In the midst of it all sits Claire—divorced, irresponsible, fluent in six foreign languages yet hopeless at interpreting life. It is Claire who knows Daniel best. It is Claire who becomes convinced that she knows where her older brother is and sets off on a journey to find him.

Just For One Day takes you on Louise Wener's musical odyssey from awkward 80s suburban pop geek to 90s jet-set Britpop goddess. Of course, once she's living the dream at the height of Britpop's glory, things aren't quite how they appeared from the other side. With her band Sleeper, Louise goes from doing gigs in toilets to gigs in stadiums, and on to the big interviews, constant touring and endless excess via Top of the Pops. These are the hilarious adventures of a girl's journey through Britpop, from the embarrassments of growing up to trying to remember what on earth it was you really wanted while eating Twiglets backstage and enviously eyeing up Damon Albarn's plate of foreign cheeses. PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED AS DIFFERENT FOR GIRLS

Adventures in Britpop

Just For One Day

A young girl whose family is breaking down finds escape in the life of a woman from the past in this latest novel by ex-Sleeper singer Louise Wener.

Worldwide Adventures in Love

Playing the cards she's been dealt has left Audrey Unger feeling out of control. Her professional poker-playing father walked out of her life when she was eleven. Now in her early thirties -- on the verge of her own midlife crisis -- she's prepared to risk everything to find him. In an attempt to discover what made him gamble and what drove him to give her up, Audrey must immerse herself in her father's world: a world of high-stakes gambling and ego-driven men who never want to lose. Audrey is about to play the biggest game of her life. Who says a woman can't bluff? Those sitting across the table from her are about to realize that Audrey has the spirit of adventure in her blood.

Louise Wener

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