On the blog last week
Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday was a Halloween freebie and my take on it was Things You Wouldn’t Want To Encounter On Halloween.
Wednesday – As always #WWWWednesday is a weekly opportunity to share what I’ve just read, what I’m currently reading and what I plan to read next… and to take a peek at what others are reading.
Friday – I published a guest post by author Alireza Hazareh about his reasons for writing his novel, She Is Just A Kid.
Saturday – I joined other gardeners for #SixonSaturday sharing six things from my garden this week.
New on my shelves
Two ARCs, two paired January book club picks, a Classics Club title and a ‘couldn’t resist’ purchase..
Adder Stone by Clare Clark (ARC, Wilton Square)
It is 1963 and in north Wales the Jones family are being forcibly ejected from the land they have farmed for generations. Their valley is to be drowned, turned into a reservoir for the people of Liverpool.
While her husband Dai is grief-stricken, Olwen Jones privately sees it as a blessing, an unforeseen chance to escape the narrow confines of the valley. But for her teenage son Emyr, Liverpool’s careless arrogance is proof that Wales will never be free to decide its own future until, like Ireland, it breaks the shackles of English imperialism.
Based on true events, Adder Stone is an exploration of personal identity and the possibilities and limits of love. How far will we go for our child or for our country? Who are we when we lose the places and the people that define us? And how much, in the end, is it possible to forgive?
Serious Music by Percival Everett (Mantle via NetGalley)
It turned out that my music had never left me. It had been stolen, yes, but not stolen away. I had simply never been free to play it . . .
When Arthur Champion, a gifted young music scholar, is sent away to war, he experiences the horrors of the Somme trenches. Surviving the slaughter, he begins to forge a new life for himself, discovering the profound, subversive power of his own musical voice.
His extraordinary odyssey takes him from playing in the jazz clubs of Paris to performing for Woodrow Wilson in the White House, and back again, his only constant companions his humour, his abiding love for music, and the racism of the age.
The Outsider by Albert Camus, translated by Sandra Smith (Penguin)
‘The sky seemed to rip apart from end to end to pour fire down upon me’
Meursault will not conform. When his mother dies, he refuses to show his emotions simply to satisfy the expectations of others. And when he commits a random act of violence on a sun-drenched beach, his lack of remorse only compounds his guilt in the eyes of society and law.
Albert Camus’ portrayal of a man confronting the absurdity of human life became an existentialist classic. Yet it is also a dreamlike sensual book filled with quiet joy in the “tender indifference” of the physical world.
The Mersault Investigation by Kamel Daoud, translated by John Cullen (Oneworld)
He was the brother of ‘the Arab’ killed by Meursault, the antihero of Camus’s classic novel The Outsider. Seventy years after that event, Harun, who has lived since childhood in the shadow of his sibling’s memory, resolves to bring his brother out of obscurity by giving him a name – Musa – and a voice, as he describes the events that led to his senseless murder on a dazzlingly sunny beach in Algeria.
In a bar in Oran, night after night, he ruminates on his solitude, on his broken heart, on Musa’s murder and on his disarray when faced with a country that has so disappointed him. A strange among his own people, he wants to be granted, finally, the right to die.
A worthy complement to its great predecessor, The Meursault Investigation is not only a profound meditation on Arab identity and the disastrous effects of colonialism in Algeria, but also a stunning work of literature in its own right, told in a unique and affecting voice.
Quartet by Jean Rhys (Penguin)
Living in Paris with her reckless, vagabond husband Stephan, Marya is very near to being happy. She enjoys their haphazard existence, never questioning how he lives, never wanting to know the truth. When Stephan is suddenly imprisoned she is left penniless and alone. Taken up by a sophisticated English couple, the Heidlers, who gradually overwhelm her with their own desires, Marya finds her sense of reality slipping further and further away.
Set against a background of winter-wet streets and smoke-filled cafés, Jean Rhys’s first novel is both poignant and disturbingly intimate in its vivid depiction of a woman on her own.
The Visit by Neil Tully (Eriu)
“The lad is a bit like a stray dog. I keep an eye on him and throw him a few scraps. There are plenty of people in this town who’d just as soon drop him off in the wilderness and hope there’s no scent to follow home. The problem is that Patrick could find his way out of any wilderness and they wouldn’t like whatever starved thing came back.”
Sergeant Jim Field feels a guilty paternalism for Patrick Hatten, a young man struggling to find a job, a life and a purpose in a small-town Wexford community. Both are used to being on the fringes but while Jim is a romantic with bad health and regret, Patrick is full of anger and action, and his actions could have devastating effects.
What I’m currently reading
I’m reading The Bohemian Queen by Jean Findlay for a blog tour, a digital review copy of Julia Wakes by Zoe Caryl and I’m listening to the audiobook of The Weight of Angels by John Boyne.
Look out for…
- October 2026 Wrap-Up
- Q&A with Itay Koh, author of Ernest and Samuel
- Book Review: The Taper Man by Nick Harkaway
- Book Review: The Bohemian Queen by Jean Findlay
- #6Degrees of Separation
