Hosted by Taking on a World of Words, this meme is all about the three Ws:
- What are you currently reading?
- What did you recently finish reading?
- What do you think you’ll read next?
Why not join in too? Leave a comment with your link at Taking on a World of Words and then go blog hopping!
What I’m Currently Reading
Switzy by Emma Cline (Vintage via NetGalley) Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2026
A private plane cuts through the winter night, somewhere over Greenland. David, a retired executive, sits back in his leather seat, playing solitaire on his phone. Click. Click. Drag. Click. In his pocket is a notebook filled with urgent reminders — but he can no longer read his own handwriting.
He’s travelling with his assistant. There will be a stopover in London, dinner with his adult daughter, a meeting in France with an old friend. His final destination: a clinic in Zurich.
As David glides through hotel rooms, airports and foreign cities, his grasp on the present slips away and the past rushes in.
With David’s arrival in Zurich looming, an exquisitely rendered portrait of an unravelling mind emerges. Hypnotic and moving, Switzy probes the depths of human consciousness, revealing what a man is left with when the accomplishments and compromises that have defined him, and the illusions he’s relied on, vanish.
V is for Venom: Agatha Christie’s Chemicals of Death by Kathryn Harkup (ARC, Bloomsbury Sigma)
Fourteen stories. Fourteen more poisons. Just because it’s fiction doesn’t mean it’s all made-up …
Agatha Christie is renowned for her captivating plots and creative ways of killing off ill-fated victims. And what better way to add intrigue to a story than poison? The surreptitious ways they can be administered and the characteristic symptoms they produce make these killer chemicals the ideal method of murder in a ‘whodunit’.
Christie perfected the use of poisons in her plots; her deft and varied use of toxic substances is one of her great strengths as a writer. But how is it that some compounds prove so fatal, and in such tiny amounts?
What I’ve Just Read
Miss Veal and Miss Ham by Vicki Heywood (Muswell Press)
Public companions, private lovers…
It is 1951 and behind the counter of a modest post office in a leafy Buckinghamshire village Miss Dora Ham and Miss Beatrix Veal maintain their careful facade as respected local spinsters. But true story is one of passion: suffragist activists who fell in love in the 1900s, danced in London’s secret gay clubs between the wars, and comforted one another during the Blitz. Together they have built a life of quiet dignity and service in rural England.
But now the harsh realities of the post-war world are encroaching, as over the course of one pivotal day their carefully constructed world begins to fracture, forcing Miss Veal and Miss Ham to face heart-breaking decisions. (Review to follow)
The Newer World by Sebastian Barry (Faber & Faber)
I knew as I made my way home that there was no home. All the old things . . . were gone forever.
Against the rapidly shifting landscape of post Civil War America, Tennyson Bouguereau – freed man, devoted brother, nascent singer, conflicted soldier and wanted man – journeys to find meaning and belonging.
From the relative safety of home in Tennessee with his sister Rosalee, he is offered the possibility of a whole new life in Nashville, until a surprising trip to Victorian England changes everything. (Review to follow)
What I’ll Be Reading Next
May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry (Granta)
She is a curator, who spends her time dressing the rooms of historic buildings to bring them to life. But in the lush private quarters of a medieval palace, she finds herself so transfixed by the reign of an almost-forgotten King that the edges of her life begin to blur.
He is a reluctant ruler with no hunger for power, rushed to the throne after the untimely deaths of his older brothers. But it isn’t long before whispers begin to fly around the court. And with the growing belief that the King is not fit for the throne comes the idea that another might rule in his stead.
What Cathy Read Next... 