Published By: Bantam
Pages: 320
Released On: 29/01/2026
You have one new follower.
Esther first sees Ted walking in a park in London. They lock eyes and for a fraction of a second, she feels something she’s never felt before.
She starts by reading up about his life in Canada and his work as an actor. Then she watches every interview with him online. It isn’t long before she’s joined Ted’s fan site online where her and the ‘Tedettes’ stalk his every move.
When Ted gets a new celebrity girlfriend, Esther decides that things have gone far enough. She leaves her husband, takes all their savings, and buys a one-way ticket to Canada.
After all, Ted might not know it yet, but they are meant to be together – he just needs a little bit of persuading
*****
Thanks to Bantam for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review. I was lucky enough to receive a proof of this at the Theakston Old Peculiar Crime Festival 2025.
This is a tale of two books. The cover has bright colours, a funny design, and it suggests a funny, quirky, dark humour. But the story itself is less comic thriller and more thriller thriller, it’s dark and really quite worrying at times.
My first thought was that Esther was wonderful. She’d been through some tough times and I loved her all the more for that. I feel I shouldn’t feel that way given her obsessive nature but I did. I wanted her to have her happily ever after. However, my love for her dwindled and it dwindled quickly. I found myself feeling a bit disgusted and uncomfortable with her. It’s obvious what Tanya wanted her to be as a character and she has achieve that creepy, obsessive nature, but I think it was too much too quickly. There was little build-up from uninterested to stalker, and I think it would have been more organic if it had been paced a bit slower.
It was said that it was a funny thriller but I can’t say I found it funny in any aspect – I was a bit lost there trying to find the humour.
Whilst I am not a prude in any way, I felt there was too many mentions of sex in this. I have absolutely no issue with there being sex in books, I welcome it in a lot of books, and I do understand she’s using it to represent the health of the marriage, but sometimes it felt like she had shoehorned it in because she felt it wouldn’t be a grown-up novel if it didn’t have it in.
The ending was flat. It got going really quickly and full-on almost instantly, and then there was this huge build-up only for it to end quite disappointingly.
It isn’t an overly long book and I am someone who can read a book in a matter of hours, but this took me about 3 or 4 days because I just couldn’t stay with it for long periods of times. I admit I did consider DNF-ing several times but I wanted to know what happened in the end, even if I wasn’t keen on reading the rest to get there.
I enjoyed parts of it, but I felt very uncomfortable reading it. I’m sure that was probably the aim of it, but it wasn’t a pleasant experience. I don’t mind feeling uncomfortable about books or characters, but this was too much and it took me out of the story.
I’ve seen five star reviews and I’ve seen two star reviews, and even some DNFs. I think it’ll definitely be a book to split the readers.
It is an interesting debut and there is promise there. Even though I didn’t enjoy it as much as I wanted, and I felt it was flat at times, I do think it’s a promising debut and it will be interesting to see what comes next.
Books By Your Bedside 