Bella's Picks for 22nd October!

Word on the street is you all love this little roundup a bit too much, and once a month just wasn't cutting it. Message received. Bella's Picks is officially going biweekly, so from now on, we’ll update on the blog every two weeks instead of every four. Double the gems, half the wait. I've been saving up some real favourites for this one, so let's get into it.

Books

The Host by Stephenie Meyer: Aliens quietly take over Earth by moving into human bodies, except one host refuses to go quietly and keeps living inside her own head. Yes, it's the Twilight author, and yes, it's two minds sharing one body and both somehow falling in love. Odd premise, weirdly tender.

The Girl Before by JP Delaney: A beautiful minimalist house comes with a landlord and a very long list of rules, and two women live there, one after the other, with unsettlingly similar lives. I promised myself one chapter. It was not one chapter.

The Fine Art of Lying by Alexandra Andrews: A young wife slips into New York's glittering art world, falls into an affair with a gallerist, and then he turns up dead, and a painting goes missing. From the Who Is Maud Dixon? author, so the people are gorgeously awful and the twists are sharp.

Northern Spy by Flynn Berry: A producer is at work when she spots her own sister on the news, masked, mid-robbery, with the IRA. It's about sisters, loyalty, and how far you'd go for the people you love. 

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi: Two half-sisters in Ghana, one married into comfort and one sold into slavery, then their descendants traced down the generations. This is the one I'll still be thinking about next month. A must-read!

Series

3 Body Problem (Netflix): Scientists, an impossible countdown, and a distant civilisation that already knows we're here. Big, brainy, occasionally baffling, from the Game of Thrones showrunners. Worth the watch.

1899 (Netflix). A migrant ship crossing the Atlantic finds another vessel that went missing, and everything gets gloriously strange. From the people behind Dark, so being confused is sort of the point.

Girls5eva: A one-hit wonder girl group from the early 2000s reunites in their forties to finally chase the dream properly. Laugh out loud funny, and the songs are lodged in my head against my will.

3% (Netflix): A Brazilian dystopia where young people compete for a spot among the lucky three per cent who get the good life. Tense, smart, and a little too close to home.

Movies

Nemesis (Netflix): A relentless LA detective and a brilliant thief circling each other, heist after heist. People keep calling it Power meets Heat, which is about right. Slick and very easy to binge.

Apex (Netflix): Charlize Theron as an adrenaline junkie whose dream climb turns into being hunted in the wild. Lean, mean, and she is, as always, fully committed.

56 Days (Prime): Two strangers fall fast and hard, and 56 days later, there's a body in the apartment. It jumps between two timelines, so you're piecing it together the whole way. Sexy and sinister in equal measure.

Ladies First (Netflix): A proud chauvinist (Sacha Baron Cohen) wakes up in a world run entirely by women, opposite a wonderfully icy Rosamund Pike. Petty, cathartic, exactly the thing to put on with friends.

Songs

Human Nature by Michael Jackson. Some songs are just permanent furniture in your brain, and this is one of mine.

Sweetest Taboo by Sade. 1985 and still the smoothest thing in any room. Strictly for slow evenings and good lighting.

What's Done Is Done by Jorja Smith. Her newest one, a little clubbier, is all about drawing the line and letting go. 

Janice STFU by Drake. From Iceman, built on a flip of Lykke Li's I Follow Rivers, all autotune and feeling. It's having an absolute moment on the charts, and honestly, I get it.

By the way, almost everything up there is available on Netflix, Spotify, or Prime, and your Raenest card works on all of them. So if any of these made your list too, you're sorted.

That's me for this round. Till next time.

All the love,

Bella 

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