On What Cathy Read Next last week
Blog posts
Monday – I shared my review of The Sea Gate by Jane Johnson as part of the blog tour.
Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was Books Added To My TBR.
Wednesday – WWW Wednesday is the opportunity to share what I’ve just read, what I’m currently reading and what I plan to read next…and have a good nose around to see what other bloggers are reading.
Thursday – I published my review of Warriors for the Working Day by Peter Elstob as part of the blog tour.
Friday – I introduced my Buchan of the Month for June – Homilies and Recreations.
Saturday – I published my review of The Bell in the Lakeby Lars Mytting.
As always, thanks to everyone who has liked, commented on or shared my blog posts on social media this week.
New arrivals
Belladonna by Anbara Salam (eARC, courtesy of Fig Tree)
It is summer, 1954, when fifteen-year-old Bridget first meets Isabella. In their conservative Connecticut town, Isabella is a breath of fresh air. She is worldly, alluring and brazen: an enigma.
When they receive an offer to study at the Academy in Italy, Bridget is thrilled. This is her ticket to Europe and – better still – a chance to spend nine whole months with her glamorous and unpredictable best friend.
There, lodged in a convent of nuns who have taken a vow of silence, the two girls move toward a passionate but fragile intimacy. As the year rolls on, Bridget grows increasingly fearful that she will lose Isabella’s affections – and the more desperate she gets, the greater the lengths she will go to keep her.
Belladonna is a hypnotizing coming-of age story set against the stunning and evocative backdrop of rural Northern Italy. Anbara Salam tells a story of friendship and obsession, desire and betrayal, and the lies we tell in order to belong.
The Housing Lark by Sam Selvon (eARC, courtesy of Penguin UK)
Sitting in his cramped basement room in Brixton, Battersby dreams of money, women, a T-bone steak – and a place to call his own.
So he and a group of friends decide to save up and buy a house together. But amid grasping landlords, the temptations of spending money and the less-than-welcoming attitude of the Mother Country, can this motley group of hustlers and schemers, Trinidadians and Jamaicans, men and women make their dreams a reality?
‘Selvon’s meticulously observed narratives of displaced Londoners’ lives created a template for how to write about migrant, and postmigrant, London for countless writers who have followed in his wake, including Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith’ Caryl Phillips.
V for Victory by Lissa Evans (eARC, courtesy of Doubleday)
It’s late 1944. Hitler’s rockets are slamming down on London with vicious regularity and it’s the coldest winter in living memory. Allied victory is on its way, but it’s bloody well dragging its feet.
In a large house next to Hampstead Heath, Vee Sedge is just about scraping by, with a herd of lodgers to feed, and her young charge Noel ( almost fifteen ) to clothe and educate. When she witnesses a road accident and finds herself in court, the repercussions are both unexpectedly marvellous and potentially disastrous – disastrous because Vee is not actually the person she’s pretending to be, and neither is Noel.
The end of the war won’t just mean peace, but discovery…
With caustic wit and artful storytelling, Lissa Evans elegantly summons a time when the world could finally hope to emerge from the chaos of war. As sharply comic as Old Baggage and emotionally poignant as Crooked Heart, V For Victory once again shows Lissa Evans to be one of our most brilliant and subtle writers.
The Young Survivors by Debra Barnes (proof copy courtesy of Duckworth)
What if everyone you loved was suddenly taken away?
When Germany invades France in the Second World War, the five Laskowski children lose everything: their home, their Jewish community and, most devastatingly, their parents who are abducted in the night. There is no safe place left for them to evade the Nazis, but they cling together – never certain when the authorities will come for what is left of them.
Inspired by the poignant, true story of the author’s mother, this moving historical novel conveys the hardship, the uncertainty and the impossible choices the Laskowski children were forced to make to survive the horrors of the Holocaust.
The Englishman by David Gilman (proof copy, courtesy of Head of Zeus and Midas PR)
A clandestine war on the desert border of Mali and Algeria; murder and kidnap on the suburban streets of West London; a Moscow CID police inspector investigating the assassination of four of her fellow officers by the Russian mafia; a young MI6 officer facing the possibility that a long-running operation has been fatally compromised: connecting them all is the Englishman – Dan Raglan, outsider, exile, one-time member of the French Foreign Legion, fully trained killer.
Raglan’s quest for answers will become a quest for vengeance. It will lead him to the winter-ravaged wasteland of the Sverdlovskaya Oblast and Penal Colony #74, a place that holds Russia’s most brutal murderers. A place of death and retribution.
How will he get in? More importantly, how will he get out?
On What Cathy Read Next this week
Currently reading
Planned posts
- Blog Tour/Book Review: One Day in Summer by Shari Low
- Top Ten Tuesday: Books On My Summer 2020 TBR
- Waiting on Wednesday
- Audio Book Review: Then We Take Berlin by John Lawton
What Cathy Read Next... 
I’ve read Belladonna since our last exchange about it, Cathy, and loved it. I hope you do, too. And I couldn’t restrain myself from reading V for Victory as soon as it arrived. Another absolute delight from Lissa Evans. Happy reading!
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Thank you, that’s lovely to hear.
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