My Week in Books – 19th July 2020

On What Cathy Read Next last week

Blog posts

Monday –  I shared my review of  The Horseman by Tim Pears, the first book in the author’s West Country trilogy and longlisted for The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2018.

Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was Books That Make Me Smile.

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 – As part of the blog tour, I published my review of The Rags of Time by Michael Ward. 

Friday –  I introduced my Buchan of the Month for July – The Gap in the Curtain by John Buchan.

As always, thanks to everyone who has liked, commented on or shared my blog posts on social media this week.

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New arrivals

The Museum Makers by Rachel Morris (proof copy, courtesy of September Publishing)

Museum expert Rachel Morris had been ignoring the boxes of family belongings for decades.

When she finally opened them, an entire bohemian family history was laid bare. The experience was revelatory – searching for her absent father in the archives of the Tate; understanding the loss and longings of the grandmother who raised her – and transported her back to the museums that had enriched her lonely childhood.

By teasing out the stories of those early museum makers, and the unsung daughters and wives behind them, and seeing the same passions and mistakes reflected in her own family, Morris digs deep into the human instinct for collection and curation.

Part memoir, part detective story, part untold history of museums – this is a fascinating and moving family story.

Miss Graham’s Cold War Cookbook by Celia Rees (review copy, courtesy of HarperCollins and Random Things Tours)

An ordinary woman. A book of recipes. The perfect cover for spying…

Sent to Germany in the chaotic aftermath of World War II, Edith Graham is finally getting the chance to do her bit. Having taught at a girls’ school during the conflict, she leaps at the opportunity to escape an ordinary life – but Edith is not everything she seems to be.

Under the guise of her innocent cover story, Edith has been recruited to root out Nazis who are trying to escape prosecution. Secretly, she is sending coding messages back to the UK, hidden inside innocuous recipes sent to a friend – after all, who would expect notes on sauerkraut to contain the clues that would crack a criminal underground network?

But the closer she gets to the truth, the muddier the line becomes between good and evil. In a dangerous world of shifting loyalties, when the enemy wears the face of a friend, who do you trust?

The Girl from the Hermitage by Molly Gartland (eARC, courtesy of Lightning Books and Rachel’s Random Resources)

Galina was born into a world of horrors. So why does she mourn its passing?

It is December 1941, and eight-year-old Galina and her friend Vera are caught in the siege of Leningrad, eating wallpaper soup and dead rats. Galina’s artist father Mikhail has been kept away from the front to help save the treasures of the Hermitage. Its cellars could provide a safe haven, as long as Mikhail can survive the perils of a commission from one of Stalin’s colonels.

Three decades on, Galina is a teacher at the Leningrad Art Institute. What ought to be a celebratory weekend at her forest dacha turns sour when she makes an unwelcome discovery. The painting she starts that day will hold a grim significance for the rest of her life, as the old Soviet Union makes way for the new Russia and her world changes out of all recognition.

The Night of the Flood by Zoe Somerville (proof copy, courtesy of Head of Zeus)

Summer, 1952. Verity Frost, stranded on her family farm on the Norfolk coast, is caught between two worlds: the devotion of her childhood friend Arthur, just returned from National Service, and a strange new desire to escape it all. Arthur longs to escape too, but only with Verity by his side.

Into their world steps Jack, a charismatic American pilot flying secret reconnaissance missions off the North Sea coast. But where Verity sees adventure and glamour, Arthur sees only deception.

As the water levels rise to breaking point, this tangled web of secrets, lies and passion will bring about a crime that will change all their lives.

Taking the epic real-life North Sea flood as its focus, The Night of the Flood is at once a passionate love story, an atmospheric thriller, and a portrait of a distinctive place in a time of radical social change.

The Scarlet Code by C.S. Quinn (hardcover, courtesy of Corvus and Readers First)

1789. The Bastille has fallen…

As Parisians pick souvenirs from the rubble, a killer stalks the lawless streets. His victims are female aristocrats. His executions use the most terrible methods of the ancient regime.

English spy Attica Morgan is laying low in Paris, helping nobles escape. When her next charge falls victim to the killer’s twisted machinations, Attica realises she alone can unmask him. But now it seems his deadly sights are set on her.

As the city prisons empty, and a mob mobilises to storm Versailles, finding a dangerous criminal is never going to be easy. Attica’s only hope is to enlist her old ally, reformed pirate Jemmy Avery, to track the killer though his revolutionary haunts. But even with a pirate and her fast knife, it seems Attica might not manage to stay alive.

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On What Cathy Read Next this week

Currently reading

 

Planned posts

• Blog Tour/Book Review: Paris Savages by Katherine Johnson
• Top Ten Tuesday
• Waiting on Wednesday
• Blog Tour/Book Review: The Young Survivors by Debra Barnes
• Book Review: Munich by Robert Harris
• Book Review: Belladonna by Anbara Salam