Bonnie's next chapter 'QUEEN CAMILLA MADE ME CONFESS!'

The bestselling author's next project is top secret... to everyone but Her Majesty

- Nicky Pellegrino

If it hadn’t been for a really bad day at work, Bonnie Garmus may never have written her hit novel Lessons in Chemistry. She’d been in a meeting where all her ideas were ignored, then a male colleague stole those ideas and took credit for them. It wasn’t the first time she had experienced sexism, but still she was furious.

“As I was walking back to my desk, the frustration in me was overwhelming,” recalls Bonnie, now 67. “I started thinking about how many other women in the world must have been through similar meetings. When I sat down, I was still angry, so instead of getting on with my job, I wrote the first chapter of Lessons in Chemistry. Believe it or not, that first chapter is unchanged, minus one sentence. It’s exactly what I wrote.”

Right from the beginning, the book’s main character Elizabeth Zott felt very real to her. “It was like she was sitting there in the room with me and saying, ‘Oh, you’ve had a bad day, well I’ve had a bad decade.’”

Set in the late 1950s, Lessons in Chemistry is the bittersweet tale of a brilliant young woman who dreams of being a scientist but instead reluctantly becomes a TV cook. So far, it has sold more than six million copies, been translated into 42 languages and was adapted for television by Apple TV.