I was pleasantly surprised by this reading experience. Although I had some expectations, the reality was quite different. The characters and storyline were written in a feel-good style that brought joy to my reading. It was a thought-provoking read that also had some delightful moments.

This was such a lovely unexpected surprise, I had an idea of what it might be like but the reality was quite different. The characters and story were written in such a feel good style it made for some joyful reading. A thought provoking read with some little moments of pure joy inbetween.

Gwen has been fired and her boring life takes a new meaning when she decides to volunteer in her local charity shop. I was attracted to this book because I see the charity shops blossoming in the uk and the topic is very current. I thought it was a very original storyline to write about. The story, objects, characters definitely give a glimpse into what makes this business strive, what brings people to it and the life and community in and around the charity shop. It is also a great story about the way this community, this work and all its facets help Gwen to put her life back on track. For me, the story was a little slow and the slightly over witty style did not make for a smooth read. So, it did not quite work for me but it is my personal taste and I wish the author all success with her book.

I didn't really get a long with this book, I thought it would be something I would be interested in reading, but found myself quite happily putting it down and never returning sadly. I'm sure others will love this book though! Just wasn't to my taste.

Thanks for giving me the chance to read and I will keep trying and get through it.

Well, what a beautiful surprise of a book. Preloved was a delicious gem of a book.

Lauren Bravo's novel, Preloved, is the story of finding your true self among the rubbish of your life. It focuses on Gwen. Gwen has just lost her job and has decided to volunteer in a charity shop until she can figure things out. Amongst the detritus of other people's lives Gwen finds herself - this is through friends, lovers, and relatives.

Throughout the story is a glorious thread of a story woven through the narrative that is heartwarming and breaking in equal measure. What is evident throughout is the value of other peoples preloved items. What is one person's rubbish is another person's treasure.

I absolutely flipping loved this book. It was such an easy thing to read and it left me with all kinds of warm and fuzzy feelings.

Preloved by Lauren Bravo is available now.

For more information regarding Lauren Bravo (@laurenbravo) please visit her Twitter page.

For more information regarding Simon & Schuster (@simonschusterUK) please visit www.simonandschuster.co.uk.

This is the first book I have read by Lauren. Our main character is Gwen. She decides to volunteer at a charity shop while figuring out what to do with her life. As the chapters progress we learn more about Gwen and her past. Gwen has a lot of unresolved grief and generally feels a bit lost. She’s not at the same life stage as her friends and that can make it hard to maintain friendships. At times I found Gwen hard to bond with but she was a generally likeable character. 

The story is intertwined with snippets about certain items that end up at the charity shop. We get a little of their history and these are cleverly woven into the other characters in the story. These little snippets really make you think about what happens to items after we fill our bags and leave them at the charity shop. I really liked this element of the book. 

For me, this book was quite a slow burner. It is peppered with witty stories, especially the clock one, and heartfelt moments. I found this to be an enjoyable escape from the world around me.

This was my first time reading a book from the author but I am delighted to say I thoroughly enjoyed the story and I look forward to reading more books from the writer in the future

This was such a great read, I loved it and will read it again, which for me is not something I normally do. The characters, writing style and the story was just a feel good tale and I devoured it completely.

Oh how I love the main character Gwen. She is in her mid-thirties and as the blurb describes her "coasting" She has no job, no relationships of sort - either partner and friendships and she starts to work in her local charity shop where she meets the people behind the scenes and also the customers.

The story is told in a way which enthralled me, especially as one of my favourite hobbies (apart from reading) is going to have a mooch around charity shops. I found Preloved to be thought provoking, funny, sometimes sad but most off all a story about a likeable and relatable woman who is looking for something that she does not know what yet.

I really hope that Lauren Bravo may do a couple of follow up books with Gwen in.

Thanks to NetGalley, Laurent Bravo and the publishers for allowing me a copy of this novel in exchange for my honest review.

This is the story of Gwen, a single woman just getting on with life until she’s made redundant. That’s when she realises that she has no plan B. All her friends are busy getting married and doing all the “normal things” that people their age do. Gwen suddenly realises how lonely she is. She decides it’s time to reconfigure her life and so she decides to volunteer in one of the many local charity shops where she feels she too can get a second chance.
This is a lovely story interspersed with tales of how some items find their way onto the shelves. This was for me a little off putting initially but as the story unfolded it began to make sense..
Preloved is a charming tale of life in its many guises. For me this is a 3.5 ⭐️ book.
Many thanks to #NetGalley for my advanced copy of this book.

This is a very enjoyable read and one of those books where you immediately feel connected to the main characters. Gwen is relatable and well written. The story builds gently and predictably. This is a comfortable read which gives a huge hug but doesn't necessarily present any immediate challenges, instead thoughts and reflections that present themselves gently through the story.

An uplifting tale revolving around volunteers in a charity shop. Mainly focusing on Gwen, who ends up there after being made redundant from her corporate job, it is the other characters who really bring the narrative alive and bring warmth to the pages.

At first, while I enjoyed the stories behind the items that ended up in the shop, it did feel like there were a lot of them and a little superfluous to the story. However I loved how they all came together in a way I hadn't anticipated, so if you find them interrupting the flow of the story at first (something I didn't mind but it would be understandable if you did), hold out & don't skip over them!

An enjoyable read, particularly if you're the sort of person who wonders about the past lives of second hand items or are prone to making up stories about those you encounter. Was it a little too neat? Maybe. Does that matter? Not really. it's a good read anyway.

My thanks to Netgalley for my copy of Preloved. I liked Gwen and enjoyed the detail of her life but I have to say it did drag on a bit at times, The intermittent chapters relating to items donated to the charity shop were often a welcome relief.
Although the book ended on a high note I was pleased that not all the loose ends were tied up, merely tidied.

What I loved about reading this is how the potent poignancy just snuck up on me, latching in whilst I was totally unawareness, until I hit the end of the book and was a total mess.
This is a story of trauma, of being lost and disillusioned, which - for personal reasons - really resonated with me. I really appreciated that Gwen was in her mid/late 30s and was trying to contend with her past so she could enjoy her present and finally begin to look forward with some semblance of hope.
Gwen's chapters are interjected with short asides about various people and objects which are interlinked to the charity shop she ends up working in - pay close attention to them as it'll pay off.
All in all, a much-needed reminder of the iceberg nature of 21st Century life. How rarely we know the depth and struggle someone is experiencing under the surface.

What's not to love, a book about a charity shop volunteer. I love a charity shop and could definitely relate to it.

I've been thinking a lot about the current cultural zeitgeist and how it is shaping up around stories from disillusioned twenty-somethings who have lost sight of what they really want from life. I do really appreciate it, this new-fangled openness to the reassuring fact that many of us – seemingly most of us – are navigating our worlds feeling a little lost, a lot untethered. At the same time, the literary landscape seems rather saturated with these stories of anger, hunger, and youthful languishing, and I often find myself comparing it to how having lived through the worst of the pandemic, I feel no motivation to read fictional narratives about it. What I haven't yet lived through are my late-thirties, and I suspect that even those who are already there will find detaching from that tide and picking up this debut novel – which features the mid-life shambles of a 38-year-old Gwen – somewhat refreshing.

We first meet Gwen at her birthday dinner-by-herself, making a To-Do list while assessing the deliciousness of the sticky toffee pudding she is finishing off the night with. Newly made redundant from her PR job after having stuck out for her clients at a meeting, she feels quite a bit redundant herself – what with her fading friendships, her lack of a love life, and an increasingly strained, standoffish relationship with her parents that wouldn't see any improvements with this new development.

Plagued with the standard milennial package of unhappy, tortuous questions – Should she have stayed in that long-ago relationship? Can people see through her loneliness and consider it a failure? Are all her friends (married, cooped-up, privy to a life she doesn't care for or have access to) secretly having fun without her? – and overly conscious of all this time she now has on her hands, Gwen finds herself inclined to do some spring cleaning, to pack up the sad reminders of her unfulfilling life-so-far and drop them all off to a place where they can begin again. But the empty hours continue to stretch out ahead of her as she drops her donations off at the local charity shop, and so she – surprisingly, unexpectedly – signs up to volunteer there instead. What she hitherto perceived as a place where cast-offs turn to fly soon becomes a point of renewal, a space bereft of judgement where the hidden lives of other volunteers and preloved objects reveal themselves to her in all their richness, and where she, too, can find herself beginning to transform.

Engagingly written with sensitivity and humour, Preloved is a love letter to the so-called 'second-chance saloons' of London, and an honest exploration of that nagging state of rejection that comes with being aimless and alone. Here, Gwen's personal developments (which are, in a case of considerable annoyance to me, written in the third-to-first person point of view), are interspersed with vignettes about the stories behind the various items that find their way into charity shops, and the deeply personal histories that lead them there. Though touched, I initially found these stories rather gimmicky, stand-alone snippets that were mere emotional punctuations for Gwen's story. However, reading on, the delicate, poignant connections between the objects, their donors, and the characters in the book revealed themselves to me, bringing a sense of cohension to the narrative and strengthening its message of the inherent connectedness of our lives, which I greatly admired.

I also presumed that this book was going in the realm of light-reading, and was pleasantly surprised to see how meaningfully it engaged with trauma, the anxieties of ageing, and the way these often tie together with a growing alienation from friends and family. I felt like I saw some of the more emotional aspects of the plot– such as the likelihood of Gwen was suppressing grief from a big personal loss – coming from miles away, but I was stunned by how smoothly and beautifully the author arrived at those points, revealed them to us, and engaged her characters with them. The resolution of the book was staggered and brilliant – less like the feel-good, made-for-TV-movie vibe I had been pinning it as, but more of a gentle, realistic story made memorable by its ostensible simplicity and tactfully revealed layers, and its well-crafted, multidimensional characters whose arcs played out against the backdrop of an accurately observed and authentic portrait of present-day London.

Overall, I quite enjoyed this book. It did not shake up my world, but not every novel has to. I was content to be living within its pages for a while.

a new author for me and one i will look out for in future, this is a funny but heartwarming book that pulls you in.

This is a perceptive read of navigating life and grief in your thirties. Gwen is recently unemployed and finds herself working in a charity shop while she figures out what to do with her life. I really liked the short chapters focusing on the back stories behind different objects and how they’ve found themselves in the charity shop. I found this to be a bit of a slow burner at times, but still a generally enjoyable read.

*Thanks to Netgalley and Simon & Schuster UK for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.*

I started reading this at about half eight this morning and finished it at lunchtime.

I saw Lauren read from it at the BATC event last December and thought it sounded very funny, which it is, extremely, I laughed out loud more than once and that doesn't happen very often. I also cried at the sad bits so there we are. A very witty and well-judged novel.

The little stories about the objects in the charity shop where Gwen works after being 'made redundant' (or sacked for saying something she shouldn't) are really done and I liked the way they tied back into the story, neat and clever. It was good to read about someone who's in her late thirties, an elder Millennial, whose childhood refs are not mine but recogniseable as things I was probably paying no attention to in my twenties. Gwen is a good protagonist, her wobbles and confusion are convincing, and the people who work in the charity shop are all clearly whole people in their own right, not just bit parts in her life (although they are that as well).

Did I say it was funny? It's very funny.

Genuinely one of the best things I've read for ages.

I loved this book and was so glad to be approved it on Netgalley. I cannot rave enough about it and would say go buy this tomorrow when it’s out and read it. You won’t be disappointed.

I liked Gwen from the beginning, she had a sadness about her that really made me want to get to know her more and understand her. I had real empathy for her.

I enjoyed getting to know all the characters. The friendships that were made. And I loved how each person who had given things in the charity shop had a story behind item.

It has made me want to go charity shopping and see what goodies are there and think about where they have come from.

I thought it was sweet but sad, yet funny, and heartwarming all at the same time.

I will be honest and hold my hands up; I was trying not to cry my little heart out near the ending of this. It was bittersweet.

It’s a book that will make you forget about the world and get completely lost in. My advice grab a cuppa and enjoy this.

I also loved the Book Reccos podcast where Jess and Lauren discussed with Lauren about the book, fast fashion and charity shopping. It really got me thinking. I would also recommend listening to that as I found it interesting and great. @bookreccos

Side note - The book mentioned point horror books, I remember those books growing up 🥰

A gentle, truly enjoyable tale.

Gwen, mid-thirties, lives alone and only when she's made redundant realises that she is lonely. Like so many, her work has become her life and now she finds herself rudderless. Does she want another job, doing the same? Or will she choose a different path? In the meantime, her redundancy money will let her take some time out to decide, and she opts for volunteering in a local charity shop to fill the time.

I can't say I've ever really thought about the workings of charity shops; like most, I fill bags to donate from time to time but no more than that. I never considered the 'rotating' items which go back time and time again and the stories attached to them certainly opened my eyes. Gwen is a well-crafted character; like most of us she has her good points and her bad ones and struggles through life the best she can. An enjoyable read - it didn't set my world on fire, but not every novel does. 4*.

My thanks to the publisher for my copy via NetGalley; this is - as always - my honest, original and unbiased review.