A charming new LGBTQIA+ romcom from the bestselling author of BOYFRIEND MATERIAL.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Alexis Hall’s Audrey Lane Stirs The Pot, which releases on December 9th 2025.
Audrey Lane is perfectly fine. Really. So what if she left her high-powered job as a Very Important Journalist―and her even higher-powered long-term girlfriend―to live a quiet life as a reporter for the second-biggest newspaper in Shropshire? And so what if she keeps hearing that same higher-powered long-term now-ex-girlfriend in her head night and day, constantly judging just how small Audrey’s allowed her life to become?
She’s fine. She’s happy. She’s perfectly within her groove. Do not-in-their-groove people get weekday drunk and impulsively apply for the UK’s most beloved baking show?
All right, so maybe she’s not completely fine, but being on Bake Expectations is opening her world again in ways she never anticipated. First through fellow contestant Doris, whose personal story of queer love during WW2 captures Audrey’s heart, imagination and journalistic interest like nothing has in ages. Then through Jennifer Hallet, the most foul-tempered (and fouler-mouthed) producer, woman, and menace Audrey has ever met. Jennifer should be off-limits, but her fire lights something unexpected inside of Audrey, making her want to burn back a million times brighter. A million times hotter. A million times more herself than she’s been in a long, long time.
Reflecting on her life choices was the last thing Audrey wanted to be doing, but the long drive out of Shropshire through Wolverhampton, Birmingham, and the dreaded London to finally reach Surrey and the set of Bake Expectations was, unfortunately, the sort of trip that gave you plenty of time to reflect. Plenty of time to ask six-months-ago Audrey what the fuck she’d been thinking. And for six-months-ago Audrey to sit back and reply, Oh come off it, you know perfectly well.
And she did.
Because this was the biggest thing—so far at least—that was Natalie’s fault.
Six months ago was when Natalie had won the Orwell Prize for a nuanced yet hard-hitting article she’d written in The Guardian about . . . Actually, Audrey couldn’t remember the details, but something worthy: domestic terrorism or climate change or one of the many other ways the world was screwed and getting screweder. She should have known. It was petty of her not to know. A mature, reasonable woman in her thirties was completely capable of acknowledging that her ex-girlfriend was continuing to be brilliant and successful and celebrated without blotting out as many of the details as she could with Lidl wine and competitive baking.
Audrey had not, in that moment, been a mature, reasonable woman. She had instead decided that it was the most important thing in the world to show Natalie—or the gaping judgmental void where Natalie used to be—that she was more than just a technically not failed journalist working for a proudly second-rate local paper. She was also, she could declare with the confidence of a proud LGBTQ+ role model, pretty okay at making buns, too.
It was, in retrospect, a slight point of concern for Audrey that she’d been accepted on Bake Expectations despite being so blitzed out of her skull that she couldn’t actually remember what she’d written on her entry form. Either it meant that she was such a fantastic writer that even completely hammered she could weave an enchanting word picture about how she would be an asset to the show, or—perhaps more likely—she was this year’s joke contestant: a loveable drunk who was going out in week one for putting far too much rum in her baba. Maybe she’d redeemed herself at the follow-up interview.
Or maybe she’d just cemented the idea that she was a charmingly incompetent buffoon, like Bernard from last season.
For about an hour and a half, Audrey let herself stew in insecurity like a plum in a syrup made of disappointment. Then, since an hour and a half only got her halfway to her destination and since she’d seen a lot of statistics about fatigue-related fatalities, she stopped at a service station. Checking her phone on the way to the loo, she found four messages. One was from her dad and said Good luck on BE. The other three were from her mother and said, respectively: Your father keeps telling me you’re filming this week. Then But I’m sure it’s next week. Followed by Good luck in case it isn’t. She sent back a thanks and an actually Dad was right, gave herself ten minutes of not-driving time to grab a coffee and a croissant, and then hopped back in the car.
With the caffeine helping her feel slightly more awake and the croissant helping her feel slightly more like she’d eaten a croissant, Audrey set off on the final leg of the journey. Once she’d skirted London courtesy of the M25, she was relieved to find herself back in the countryside. Having been born in it, Audrey had an abiding fondness for rural England, although she privately felt that the South and East couldn’t really compete with the Welsh borders. There was an indefinable Londonishness that radiated out from the capital and made the land for miles around seem regimented and uniform in ways the North and the West never were.
She was barely over the county line into Surrey when she spotted the first sign for Patchley House and Park, which had gone from obscure hotel in a former stately home to a semi-major tourist attraction thanks to the magic of mass media. From its iconic wrought iron gates, it was a short-for-a-road-but-long-for-a-driveway trip up to the gravelly carpark. And then it was a matter of following the contestants this way notices that, in contrast to the homey-but-slick presentation of the on-camera parts of the show, were just A4 paper run off on a printer and taped onto whatever surfaces could support them. These led her, at last, to a bored-looking man who signed her in and told her to make her way down the hill to the Lodge. As a longtime fan of the show—albeit one who’d had to watch it alone while Natalie was out networking or otherwise living the careerist dream—Audrey was still waiting for the moment when it all started to feel real. Or at least to feel unreal in the way that she assumed it would. In that oh-my-God-I-can’t-believe-I’m-actually-here way that other people seemed to get, rather than the “welp” way that she was currently experiencing.
She found her room fairly easily, dumped her things, and checked her phone to see if her parents had resolved their “is our daughter on TV yet” debate. As it turned out, they both had and hadn’t, the response from her dad being see, I told her and the one from her mum saying sorry, I was getting it mixed up with Auntie Beryl’s hemorrhoid appointment. Communication, Audrey had always believed, was the basis of a healthy relationship. But if her parents were anything to go by, it didn’t actually have to be coherent or effective communication.
She texted back to her dad apparently she was thinking of Auntie Beryl’s hemorrhoid appointment (now that’s a week next Tuesday he replied) and to her mum do you often confuse me with Auntie Beryl’s bottom (her response was: only when you act like an arse). Between messages, she sat on the edge of the bed, trying not to have too many thoughts. It had been long enough since the breakup that, theoretically, being alone was something she should have been used to. But at home she had her work and her family and—not to sound too materialistic—her stuff to keep her from dwelling. A hotel room, especially the kind of hotel room you got on a BBC budget, was tailor made to make a person regret every decision they’d ever made in their entire life.
So-called “reality” television, Natalie was explaining in her head, constructs false narratives that pressure people into living up to unrealistic standards. And Audrey tried to push back a little by pointing out that it was just people making cakes in a nice house, but Natalie’s voice, as always, was insistent. It’s a parochial, whitewashed—in both senses of the word—illusion of Britishness for Brexiteers and housewives. I honestly can’t believe you watch it. And she didn’t have an answer to that, any more than she’d had one when the conversation, or conversations very much like it, had originally happened.
She should have brought a project. Audrey was the sort of person who liked to have a project, even if the project was just a jigsaw puzzle on the kitchen table. The bedroom in her new flat was full of bags of yarn and piles of fabric, which were slowly being converted into scarves no one in particular wanted to wear and quilts no one in particular wanted to snuggle under.
Partly, she would be the first to admit, because they weren’t very good scarves or quilts. Just like her hand-painted bowls weren’t very well-painted and her one attempt at kintsugi had left the broken vase looking both worse and still broken. For the first couple of years of their relationship, her fondness for crafting had driven Natalie up the wall, a conflict Audrey had resolved by . . . stopping. Giving up or, in Natalie’s words, acknowledging there were better ways to use her time.
Sitting on the bed, staring at the wall, Audrey stayed lost with her thoughts just long enough to conclude that staying in her room would definitely suck. And while wandering the grounds aimlessly might also suck, it would at least suck in the open air.
Besides, Audrey had always been an explorey sort. And, much as she wanted to pretend it was part of what made her an excellent—well, an adequate; well, a former—investigative journalist, mostly it just meant she’d spent a lot of her childhood increasing her mother’s risk of cardiac arrest. She’d once enlivened a summer picnic by trying to climb up Wenlock Priory. And, in her defence, she’d managed it. The climbing up part, at least. Getting down had been more of a challenge and had, eventually, involved fire engines. To this day, Audrey felt guilty around a National Trust logo.
That probably wasn’t going to happen at Patchley House, though. Not unless she got really, really bored. Mostly she was hoping a good, old-fashioned wander would keep the more infuriating parts of her brain quiet. With enquieting in mind, she scoped out the woodlands and, once she’d finished scoping, found her way down to the stream, locating the faux-medieval hermitage that her pre-visit research had told her was located somewhere on the grounds.
Once she’d had all the faux medievalness she could take, she looped back to the Lodge just in time to see a girl coming out of the front door. And she was definitely a girl, probably—if Audrey was any judge—no more than sixteen. Also probably no less than sixteen, unless the show was violating its own terms and conditions, along with a couple of child labour laws. Neither of which, given what she knew of reality TV, she would have ruled out.
“Hi,” Audrey said, discovering as she got closer that, sixteen-ish as she may have been, the newcomer was still a good inch taller than Audrey was. “Are you one of the other contestants?”
The girl nodded and, not being from a handshakey generation, waved. “Alanis.”
“Alanis?”
“Yeah. After this singer my mum likes.”
The realisation that it was perfectly possible for a woman who listened to Jagged Little Pill at a formative age to now have a daughter old enough to be baking on national television rose up in Audrey’s heart, killed a part of her, and went back to sleep. “Audrey,” said Audrey. “After—”
“Audrey Hepburn?” asked Alanis.
“Honestly a bit surprised you know who that is.”
“I’m really into retro stuff.”
Audrey could probably have guessed that for herself, since Alanis’s personal style appeared to have been culled from the greatest hits of the last two centuries: a pleated miniskirt like it was 2001, a chunky black-and-pink cable-knit like it was 2020, tube socks like it was 1974, and ribbons in her hair like she was about to get snubbed by Mr. Darcy at a country dance. “Oh,” she said. “Cool. So kind of cottagecore?”
There was a certain look teenagers got when they felt an adult had been embarrassing in a way that inspired pity rather than loathing. “I don’t really want to put a label on it. But I’m liking your whole thing.”
“I’m not sure I have a thing.”
There was another look teenagers got when they felt you were full of shit. “Sixties glasses? Fifties silhouette? That’s a thing. You just don’t want to admit it.”
Great. Now Audrey was being called out by a child. On the other hand, the child seemed to be enjoying it. Which was probably a win on aggregate. “Fine. You got me. I’m a plus-sized stereotype.”
Alanis looked immediately mortified, like she was cancelling herself. “Oh fuck, sorry. I did not mean that in, like, a shaming way.”
“No, it’s fine. It’s just the reality of a certain height-to-girth ratio. And I’d rather own it than hide.”
“You’re definitely owning it.”
“Okay, now you’re overcompensating.”
“No, no,” protested Alanis, whose limited life experience had yet to teach her the benefits of quitting when you were behind. “You look really good for your age.”
Audrey stared at her. Over the past thirtysomething years she’d got pretty comfortable with her body. Having to be comfortable with her age as well had snuck up on her. “Which you think is . . . what exactly?”
“Like maybe twenty-five?” said Alanis with complete and bewildering sincerity. “Or twenty-eight?”
This was flattering. But also not flattering. “Oh my God, Alanis. How do you think time works?”
“I don’t know. I’m not Einstein.”
“No, I mean, twenty-five isn’t old enough to look good for your age. And, by similar reasoning, in no universe do I look twenty-five.”
“Look”—Alanis spread her hands in a gesture of I give up on everything—“you seem like you’re older than me and younger than my mum. I don’t know what else to do here.”
Tiny twinge of nostalgia aside, Audrey was pretty glad that she no longer lived in a world where the categories of people were yourself, your parents, and everybody else. “How about we leave gerontology for now and talk about baking? Because I’m beginning to sense a generation gap and I really want to get onto a topic that doesn’t make me feel ancient.”
“Works for me.” Cheerfully, Alanis looped her arm through Audrey’s and began to drag her up the hill. “Totally crepuscular.”
Audrey was not falling for that one. “Crepuscular?”
“Yeah, it means good.”
“No it doesn’t. It means of or relating to twilight. This is because I said there was a generation gap, isn’t it?”
“Don’t be such a zymurgy.”
“Study of fermentation. You’re not going to get me on this. I’m old and uncool but I know a lot of weird words.”
“How?” By a process of contrarian logic known only to the young, Alanis sounded almost impressed.
“I told you,” said Audrey. “I’m old and uncool.”
“You’re not uncool. You’re peripatetic.”
“Wandering. Which we actually are. So I think one of us has won but I can’t tell which.”
Alanis flashed an Instagrammable smile. “How about both of us?”
Which—damningly—was the most mature thing Audrey had heard all week.
The lights of Patchley House were golden against the darkening sky, almost magical and, funnily enough, crepuscular. Had she not been getting yoinked along by an overenthusiastic teenager, Audrey might have stopped to take it in. The problem with living somewhere beautiful—and she’d lived in beautiful places for much of her life—was that you got inured to the specifics of it. And sometimes a new, hitherto unnoticed, specific would sneak up on you, and it would be like you were seeing the world for the first time all over again. Except that feeling got rarer the longer you stuck around. And, for a while, especially living in London, Audrey thought she’d lost it entirely. That it had just faded away, like so many other things.
Coming back to Shropshire had taught her that it hadn’t, and moments like this—looking up a hill at a stately home in the twilight—reinforced the lesson. But that sense of wonder still felt fragile enough that she regretted having to let it go. Unfortunately the alternative was to turn to her teenage companion and say, Hey can we just stop and appreciate some quiet beauty because we might never see it again, which might just have pushed her, in Alanis’s eyes, from uncool into irredeemably sad.
“I’m starving,” declared Alanis, substantially less concerned with the ache of the transient and ephemeral than with the buffet, which was being served al fresco outside the main dining hall.
They were making their way over to join the other contestants when a weaselly looking man with a clipboard descended on them from somewhere in the small city-state of technical vehicles and trailers that were parked on the less conspicuous side of the grounds.
“I’m terribly sorry to bother you,” he began in the tones of a man who was always sorry to bother you but would never allow his sorrow to detract from his bothersomeness. “Are you the journalist?”
He was looking directly at Alanis when he said it, which Audrey tried to blame on the light but which she suspected was more to do with the fact that serious reporters weren’t meant to get yanked around country estates by actual children.
“I’m the journalist,” Audrey clarified.
“Jennifer wants to see you.”
It had been an abrupt introduction, and Audrey wasn’t sure she wanted to reward abruptness. “Sorry, who are you?”
The man winced as though he’d accidentally taken a vegan to a restaurant that served nothing but veal and foie gras. Then he held out a shaky hand and said, “Thrimp. Colin Thrimp. Jennifer’s assistant. Jennifer Hallet. She’s in charge of”—he made an expansive gesture—“well, everything really. And she wants to talk to you especially because of your . . . you know . . .”
Audrey should have seen something like this coming. Nobody trusted media people, especially other media people. “Job?”
He nodded.
“Does she think I’m going to write some kind of searing exposé?”
Alanis grinned in a way that Audrey didn’t think she’d have had the confidence to grin, even at sixteen. “You should. That’d be effervescent.”
“Stop it,” said Audrey, trying to sound playful rather than snappish and mostly succeeding.
Colin wrung his hands. “Can you just go to see her? She said I had to bring you to her yesterday, which normally means soon and it’s already been a bit longer than soon and she’ll be in a fearful mood if you don’t go and speak to her.”
“How fearful, exactly?” asked Audrey. It had been a long day and an executive in a fearful mood—or really any kind of mood—fell pretty close to last on her list of things she wanted to deal with.
“Fearfully fearful.”
It wasn’t the most helpful of answers, but Audrey had met several Colin Thrimps in her life and didn’t think there was much point protesting further. After taking a responsible but obviously futile moment to make certain that Alanis would be okay on her own (she was, she was probably okayer than most adults would have been by a long way), Audrey set off in search of the fearfully fearful producer.
***
Jennifer Hallet’s trailer was unmarked, which made it mildly awkward for Audrey to find, but only mildly. Her keen investigative instincts told her to try the biggest, swankiest one, and the biggest, swankiest one it was.
She knocked on the door and then stood outside waiting. When she’d been waiting for just long enough that she was about to give up, a voice from within called out, “Who the fuck is it?”
“It’s Audrey?” she tried. “Audrey Lane.”
There was the sound of movement and then the door was thrown open by the most intimidating woman Audrey had ever seen. Jennifer was tall and cold-eyed, with lips that curled into a permanent frown. There was something arresting about the sheer concentrated hostility of her, almost a challenge—the most undirected, universal kind of challenge, as if she was telling the entire world to come and have a go if it thought it was hard enough. And Audrey only realised she’d been staring when Jennifer asked her, quite pointedly, what she was staring at.
“Sorry, I—you wanted to see me. I’m the journalist.”
“Oh that. Took you long enough.”
“Your assistant only just found me.”
“Then it took him long enough.” Jennifer went back inside the trailer and, suspecting that waiting for an invitation would be an exercise in futility, Audrey followed her.
Inside, she found a setup that looked one step more supervillain than was strictly necessary. While the wall of constantly shifting monitors was probably a legitimate necessity of the job, and the various keyboards, microphones, and panels of miscellaneous switches likely had their uses, the enormous black swivel chair was a Persian cat away from full Blofeld. Right in the middle of the functionality to evil spectrum were the two smaller seats that had been set up at optimal bollocking distance.
“I just thought,” Jennifer said in a voice as smooth and pleasant as honey over razor blades, “that we should have a nice, polite, face-to-face conversation so that we can both be crystal fucking clear how our relationship is going to work.”
Settling herself onto a bollocking chair, Audrey did her best to remain composed. “If you like, but I’m not sure what there is to—”
“I’ve got your number, sunshine.”
“Which number, exactly?”
“Seventy-nine thousand, four hundred and six.”
To anybody else, the number would have been meaningless. But to Audrey it had a very clear, very specific meaning. It was the circulation of the Shropshire Echo. “We get over half a million unique visits on our website as well.”
“And do you know what I do with half a million unique visits?” asked Jennifer.
Audrey was pretty sure she could tell where this was going, and how this particular TV big shot liked to express herself. “Do you, perhaps, wipe your arse with them?”
“I do fucking not. Because they’re a fucking ephemeral concept, and if I tried to wipe my arse with an ephemeral concept I’d wind up with shit on my fingers.” Jennifer paused, definitely more for effect than for breath. “What I do is I look at them and I say, Well gosh, what a tiny pissing number of unique visits, then I go back to my job making one of the biggest shows on television and then I say to myself, I hope no miserable little spunkstain—”
“Please don’t call me a spunkstain,” replied Audrey with a professional calm that she was, in the circumstances, pretty fucking proud of.
“I’m sorry.” Jennifer didn’t even blink. “Am I being demeaning? Let’s try again. I hope no miserable little sack of piss-drenched baby wipes comes crawling up here from fucking Shropshire to try to wank her ten minutes of relevance out of my years of back-breaking work. But oh look, it seems Satan has jizzed in my cornflakes again, because here you are.”
Well wasn’t this the beginning of a beautiful friendship? Clearly the politely-set-boundaries plan had failed, so Audrey shifted to the be-visibly-unfazed plan. “You knew where I worked when I applied.”
“I did. You ticked some boxes and we needed a quirky rural one for this season so I thought I’d take the risk. But I know journalists”—Here it comes, said Audrey’s inner cynic—“You’re like the fucking police.”
“Never off duty?” Audrey finished.
“Pricks.”
“I don’t suppose”—Audrey shifted slightly in a chair she was sure had been deliberately chosen to be as buttock aggravating as possible—“you have a less sweary mode of communication you could fall back on?”
“Fuck off.”
“Thought so.” She adjusted her position again to stop her arse from falling asleep. “In that case, let me just reassure you that I work for a local paper, about local things, and so unless you happen to have a contestant from Cleobury Mortimer, there’s nothing here for me to write about.”
Jennifer folded her arms like a statue of Stalin. “That’s what you say. But I know what you people are like. You get one sniff of—”
Despite not having been told she could go, Audrey stood up. “Look, you’ve warned me not to mess with your program. I’ve told you I have no intention of messing with your program. I’m not sure what more you want me to say.”
It seemed like there was more Jennifer could have said, but it also seemed the get-up-and-agree combo had taken the wind out of her sails.
“So I think we’re on the same page?” Audrey confirmed.
Jennifer looked like she was about to nod and couldn’t quite bring herself to. “Hang on, there’s no we here.”
The sensible thing to do was to get out. Because while Jennifer had a number of qualities that made sticking around a very tempting prospect—like legs for days and dark eyes that felt like they could look right through you if they didn’t always seem to be looking at something else—her temperament wasn’t one of them. And maybe it was the journey, or just being in a strange stately home, but Audrey wasn’t in a sensible mood. So she lingered a moment, and pushed her luck. “We’re having a conversation. That’s a we.”
“This isn’t a conversation. This is a—”
“A what? A scolding? I’ve not really done anything scold-worthy, so from where I’m standing this is either a conversation or it’s you inviting me onto your show—something you didn’t have to do in the first place—then preemptively deciding I’m going to screw you and hauling me into your office to be a dick for no reason.”
“Is that how you see it?” Unexpectedly, the producer sounded almost defensive. In fact if Audrey let herself use her optimistic ears, it might even have been defensiveness with an undertone of grudging respect.
Deciding words had done their job, Audrey nodded precisely once.
“I will admit,” conceded Jennifer in a tone like she was revealing state secrets, “that I could have blocked your application if I wanted to, and I didn’t.”
“Because?” asked Audrey, aware that if she came across as too curious she’d confirm all of Jennifer’s worst suspicions.
“Because this season needs to be perfect and you—from a certain perspective—are perfect.”
Audrey knew better than to be flattered by people in positions of authority saying things that seemed superficially positive. Even if they meant it, they didn’t mean what you wanted them to mean. “Perfect how?”
“Memorable look, interesting job, ticks a diversity box.”
“The gay box or the heavy box?” asked Audrey, determined not to let Jennifer’s tone affect her in any way.
“Both, but mostly body positivity. Honestly the gay thing counts against you—ginger and sparkly from last season are still looking cute all over fucking TikTok, so the allies”—she almost spat the word—“are in the bag. We go too queer this year and we’ll lose the Middle England Tory voter market.”
This was still feeling like bait. “Is that a market you want to keep?”
“Do they have money? Then yes. Plus the fuckers run the country and that includes BBC funding, so we need to reflect the rich and beautiful diversity of these islands while also pretending that we hate immigrants and are very concerned about trans people. That’s public service broadcasting.”
It was a deathly cynical attitude, but one Audrey recognised even if wasn’t usually stated so openly. “You’re meant to be apolitical, which in practice means agreeing with the home secretary?”
Jennifer nodded. “Would you look at that, she gets it. Welcome to the magical world where Brexit wasn’t a shitshow, the only minorities who exist are charmingly nonthreatening, and you can only be fat if you’re also pretty.”
Pretty wasn’t an adjective Audrey would have used to describe herself. Although that did make her fatally susceptible to its use by other people. “Fuck, am I here to be one of the good ones?”
To that, Jennifer offered a frankly wicked grin. “How’s it feel?”
“Fine,” replied Audrey, still defiantly unperturbed.
A look of genuine dismay crept across Jennifer’s face. “I hope you’re not going to make me like you, sunshine. I can’t think of anything worse. Now if we’re done, perhaps you could be so kind as to get the fuck out of my sight.”
It was, Audrey thought, about the most literal example of mixed messages she could possibly imagine. And it left her with the nagging sense that this wasn’t the last time she was going to run afoul of Jennifer’s highly specific worldview. Along with the still more nagging suspicion that she couldn’t quite tell if she was dreading their next run-in or looking forward to it.
