My Week in Books – 1st May 2022

On What Cathy Read Next last week

Monday – I published my review of historical crime mystery In Place of Fear by Catriona McPherson.

Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday invited us to choose a book cover feature and I chose boats.  

Wednesday – WWW Wednesday is my 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. 

Thursday – I published my review of memoir The Girl From Lamaha Street by Sharon Maas. 

Friday – I shared my review of psychological thriller Greenwich Park by Katherine Faulkner, my book club’s pick for April. 

Saturday – Indulging my other love – gardening – I took part in the #SixonSaturday meme with a few highlights from my horticultural week.

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New arrivals

Make yourself comfortable; there are quite a few…

Villager by Tom Cox (eARC, Unbound)

There’s so much to know. It will never end, I suspect, even when it does. So much in all these lives, so many stories, even in this small place.

Villages are full of tales: some are forgotten while others become a part of local folklore. But the fortunes of one West Country village are watched over and irreversibly etched into its history as an omniscient, somewhat crabby, presence keeps track of village life.

In the late sixties a Californian musician blows through Underhill where he writes a set of haunting folk songs that will earn him a group of obsessive fans and a cult following. Two decades later, a couple of teenagers disturb a body on the local golf course. In 2019, a pair of lodgers discover a one-eyed rag doll hidden in the walls of their crumbling and neglected home. Connections are forged and broken across generations, but only the landscape itself can link them together. A landscape threatened by property development and superfast train corridors and speckled by the pylons whose feet have been buried across the moor. 

Young Women by Jessica Moor (eARC, Zaffre via NetGalley)

Everyone’s got that history, I guess. Everyone’s got a story.

When Emily meets the enigmatic and dazzling actress Tamsin, her life changes. Drawn into Tamsin’s world of Soho living, boozy dinners, and cocktails at impossibly expensive bars, Emily’s life shifts from black and white to technicolour and the two women become inseparable. Tamsin is the friend Emily has always longed for; beautiful, fun, intelligent and mysterious and soon Emily is neglecting her previous life – her work assisting vulnerable women, her old friend Lucy – to bask in her glow.

But when a bombshell news article about a decades-old sexual assault case breaks, Emily realises that Tamsin has been hiding a secret about her own past. Something that threatens to unravel everything . . . Young Women is a razor sharp novel that slices to the heart of our most important relationships, and asks how complicit we all are in this world built for men. 

Outcast by Chris Ryan (eARC, Zaffre via NetGalley)

A Regiment legend is missing. Only one man can track him down. 

After single-handedly intervening in a deadly terrorist attack in Mali, SAS Warrant Officer Jamie ‘Geordie’ Carter is denounced as a lone wolf by jealous superiors. Now a Regiment outcast, Carter is given a second chance with a deniable mission: locate SAS hero-gone-rogue, David Vann.

Vann had been sent into Afghanistan to train local rebels to fight the Taliban. But he’s since gone silent and expected attacks on key targets have not happened. Tracking Vann through Afghanistan and Tajikistan, Carter not only discovers the rogue soldier’s involvement in a conspiracy that stretches far beyond the Middle East – but an imminent attack that will have deadly consequences the world over . . .

Tomboy by Shelley Blanton-Stroud (eARC, She Writes Press)

It’s 1939. On the brink of World War II, Jane Benjamin wants to have it all. By day she hustles as a scruffy, tomboy cub reporter. By night she secretly struggles to raise her toddler sister, Elsie, and protect her from their mother. But Jane’s got a plan: she’ll become the San Francisco Prospect’s first gossip columnist and make enough money to care for Elsie.

Jane finagles her way to the women’s championship at Wimbledon, starring her hometown’s tennis phenom and cover girl Tommie O’Rourke. She plans to write her first column there. But then she witnesses Edith “Coach” Carlson, Tommie’s closest companion, drop dead in the stands of apparent heart attack, and her plan is thrown off track.

While sailing home on the RMS Queen Mary, Jane veers between competing instincts: Should she write a social bombshell column, personally damaging her new friend Tommie’s persona and career? Or should she work to uncover the truth of Coach’s death, which she now knows was a murder, and its connection to a larger conspiracy involving US participation in the coming war?

Putting away her menswear and donning first-class ballgowns, Jane discovers what upper-class status hides, protects, and destroys. Ultimately – like nations around the globe in 1939 – she must choose what she’ll give up in order to do what’s right.

Vincent van Gogh: The Healing Power of Nature (ARC, September Publishing)

‘One thing I tell you, that this countryside has the effect on me of bringing me peace, faith, courage . . .’

The Healing Power of Nature is testament to the immense influence the natural world had on Vincent van Gogh; from the restorative, calming effect of rural landscapes to the stimulation and joy he found in natural beauty. Each image is accompanied by an insightful quote from his letters, showing how nature is a source of great healing and inspiration to us all, connecting us with the peace and beauty of our surroundings and with a sense of something even greater. ‘. . . I console myself by reconsidering the sunflowers.’

Notes of Change (The Sam Plank Mysteries #7) by Susan Grossey (ebook, courtesy of the author)

In the autumn of 1829, the body of a wealthy young man is found dumped in a dust-pit behind one of London’s most exciting new venues. Constable Sam Plank’s enquiries lead him from horse auctions to houses of correction, and from the rarefied atmosphere of the Bank of England to the German-speaking streets of Whitechapel. And when he comes face to face with an old foe, he finds himself considering shocking compromises…

The new and highly organised Metropolitan Police are taking to the streets, calling into question the future of the magistrates’ constables. Sam’s junior constable, William Wilson, is keen, but what is an old campaigner like Sam to do when faced with the new force and its little black book of instructions?

Twenty-Eight Pounds Ten Shillings: A Windrush Story by Tony Fairweather (eARC, Hope Road)

After World War Two England was on her knees, so the call went out to the British Empire for volunteers to help rebuild the ‘Mother Country’. Young men and women from different Caribbean islands were quick to respond, paying the considerable sum of £28.10s to board HMT Empire Windrush – the ‘ship of dreams’ that would take them to their new lives. The motives and back-stories of these West Indian people is a key part of the Windrush story, one that has never been fully told.

This powerful narrative reveals what happened on board that ship, which was packed with young, excited people who had never before left their parents, their parishes – let alone their islands. In the course of the memorable two-week voyage there were parties, friendships made and broken, fights, gambling, racism, sex – and discussions of God and love.

Portable Magic: A History of Books and their Readers by Emma Smith (ARC, Allen Lane via Readers First)

Most of what we say about books is really about their contents: the rosy nostalgic glow for childhood reading, the lifetime companionship of a much-loved novel. But books are things as well as words, objects in our lives as well as worlds in our heads. And just as we crack their spines, loosen their leaves and write in their margins, so they disrupt and disorder us in turn. All books are, as Stephen King put it, ‘a uniquely portable magic’. In this thrilling new history, Emma Smith shows us why.

Portable Magic unfurls an exciting, iconoclastic and ambitious new story of the book in human hands, exploring when, why and how it acquired its particular hold over humankind. Gathering together a millennium’s worth of pivotal encounters with volumes big and small, Smith compellingly argues that, as much as their contents, it is books’ physical form – their ‘bookhood’ – that lends them their distinctive and sometimes dangerous magic. From the Diamond Sutra to Jilly Cooper’s Riders, to a book made of wrapped slices of cheese, Smith uncovers how this composite artisanal object has, for centuries, embodied and extended relationships between readers, nations, ideologies and cultures, in significant and unpredictable ways. She celebrates the rise of the mass-market paperback, and dismantles the myth that print began with Gutenberg; she reveals how our reading habits have been shaped by American soldiers, and proposes a new definition of a ‘classic’. Ultimately, Smith illuminates the ways in which our relationship with the written word is more reciprocal – and more turbulent – than we tend to imagine: for better or worse, books do not simply reflect humankind, but have also defined who we are, turning us into the readers they would like to have.

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On What Cathy Read Next this week

Currently reading

Planned posts

• Book Review: The Birdcage by Eve Chase 
• My Five Favourite April Reads
• #6Degrees of Separation 
• Book Review: Elektra by Jennifer Saint