Queenie Is Working On It by Candice Carty-Williams review – a smart sequel to a breakout bestseller

 

Candice Carty-Williams; the cover of 'Queenie Is Working on It'.Credit : 

Emil Huseynzade; Gallery/Scout Press

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Queenie Is Working On It by Candice Carty-Williams review – a smart sequel to a breakout bestseller

Queenie’s ticking biological clock drives her chaotic misadventures in this sage and funny follow-up

Shahidha Bari

Tuesday 30 June 2026

Agynaecological examination is a good analogy for the kind of painful self-inspection at which Queenie Jenkins excels. The heroine of Candice Carty-Williams’s 2019 debut Queenie memorable begins that novel with a medical appointment for a mystery ailment that turns out to be a miscarriage. The sequel, Queenie Is Working on It, picks up the story eight years on, with the now 33-year-old Queenie back on the gurney, this time for a fertility checkup. “I didn’t realise they did condoms for anything other than … penises,” Queenie observes lamely as the unsmiling doctor sheaths a probe. Life has changed, but in many ways, Queenie has not.