This Bird Has Flown
by Susanna Hoffs
Little, Brown, £9.99

One-time pop star writes romance novel is not necessarily the most promising starting point for a book.

Yet Bangles singer Susanna Hoffs’ This Bird Has Flown surpasses expectation.

It never fails to entertain, even if it appears to be set inside the mind of someone whose understanding of Britain seemingly comes entirely by way of Jilly Cooper and Richard Curtis.

This Bird Has Flown is apparently not about Hoffs at all, even though the protagonist is, like her, a Los Angeles-born Jewish singer-songwriter.

Hoffs’s heroine Jane became internationally famous after covering a song by a music Svengali called Jonesy with a sexually-charged video, then crashed with her second album.

A decade on and now on the wrong side of 30, she meets a mysterious stranger on a transatlantic flight. While staying in Britain with her loyal manager ostensibly to write songs for a comeback album and prepare for a major comeback show, romance blossoms.

The stranger — an Oxford academic and specialist in the Romantics — seems perfect to Jane.

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Susanna Hoffs new book This Bird Has Flown (Photo: Bookcover)

Despite not being posh, he has foppish hair, hangs out with upper-crust blokes called Freddy, goes riding, and has a high-society ex.

He and his elite chums seem to do very little work amidst their endless bedhopping and exist in a fantasy Rutshire-esque version of England full of cute pubs and kindly eccentrics. Oh, and he’s called Tom Hardy, obviously.

All this wouldn’t matter, except that Hoffs has set the book in the present day and interspersed the story with references to Instagram, TikTok and the like.

So it’s slightly jarring to read about a music industry that bears more resemblance to the one in which Hoffs was a star than the one that exists today, not to mention a university lecturer preoccupied by neither culture war issues nor falling pay.

Add to that the low stakes — some minor catastrophes, but no one is truly terrible, not even the mysterious Jonesy — and what you have is pure light froth.

Yes, the prose is occasionally cringe-inducing, but there’s something to be said for an in-the-moment read that is resolutely upbeat, written by someone who really has been there and done that in the rock music world.

If you’re willing to accept the fantasy, then this will keep you more than hooked on a long flight; assuming, that is, you’re not travelling first class with a handsome stranger.