On What Cathy Read Next last week
Monday – I shared my Five Favourite December Reads.
Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was Favourite Books of 2022.
Wednesday – As always WWW Wednesday 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 my review of historical novel The Witches of Vardø by Anya Bergman. I also shared details of a new challenge I’ve set myself for this year, which I’m calling Backlist Burrow.
Saturday – The first Saturday of the month means it’s time for the #6Degrees of Separation meme.
New arrivals
After last week’s ‘nul points‘ this week has seen an influx of NetGalley approvals, an ARC plus a trip to the bookshop for some books for my Backlist Burrow reading challenge.
A Brief History of Living Forever by Jaroslav Kalfař (eARC, Hodder & Stoughton via NetGalley)
When Adela discovers she has a terminal illness, her thoughts turn to Tereza, the American-raised daughter she gave up at birth. Leaving behind her moody, grown son, Roman, in their native Czech village, she flies to the United States to find the long-lost daughter who never knew her. Yet the country, in the year 2029, is steeped in surveillance and has adopted an unapologetic nationalism – a very different place from the open and accepting one Adela experienced decades earlier, when, as a teenager high on the promise of America, she eloped with a filmmaker and starred in his cult sci-fi movie.
Now, in New York City, with time running out, Adela reunites with Tereza, who is working as the star researcher for two suspicious biotech moguls hellbent on developing a “god pill” to extend human life indefinitely. But before Tereza can find a cure for Adela, her mother dies mysteriously. Unbeknownst to Tereza, her body is whisked away by the American government to a mass grave for undocumented immigrants in the swampy wastelands of what was once Florida. Distraught, Tereza travels to the Czech Republic to convince Roman, the brother she’s never met, to join her in rescuing their mother’s remains from oblivion, with the intent of bringing her home to rest in Czech soil.
A Winter Grave by Peter May (eARC, Quercus via NetGalley)
It is the year 2051. Warnings of climate catastrophe have been ignored, and vast areas of the planet are under water, or uninhabitably hot. A quarter of the world’s population has been displaced by hunger and flooding, and immigration wars are breaking out around the globe as refugees pour into neighboring countries.
By contrast, melting ice sheets have brought the Gulf Stream to a halt and northern latitudes, including Scotland, are being hit by snow and ice storms. It is against this backdrop that Addie, a young meteorologist checking a mountain top weather station, discovers the body of a man entombed in ice.
The dead man is investigative reporter, George Younger, missing for three months after vanishing during what he claimed was a hill-walking holiday. But Younger was no hill walker, and his discovery on a mountain-top near the Highland village of Kinlochleven, is inexplicable.
Cameron Brodie, a veteran Glasgow detective, volunteers to be flown north to investigate Younger’s death, but he has more than a murder enquiry on his agenda. He has just been given a devastating medical prognosis by his doctor and knows the time has come to face his estranged daughter who has made her home in the remote Highland village.
Arriving during an ice storm, Brodie and pathologist Dr. Sita Roy, find themselves the sole guests at the inappropriately named International Hotel, where Younger’s body has been kept refrigerated in a cake cabinet. But evidence uncovered during his autopsy places the lives of both Brodie and Roy in extreme jeopardy.
As another storm closes off communications and the possibility of escape, Brodie must face up not only to the ghosts of his past, but to a killer determined to bury forever the chilling secret that George Younger’s investigations had threatened to expose.
The New Life by Tom Crewe (eARC, Chatto & Windus via NetGalley)
After a lifetime spent navigating his desires, John Addington, a married man, has met Frank, a working-class printer.
Meanwhile Henry Ellis’s wife Edith has fallen in love with a woman – who wants Edith all to herself.
When in 1894 John and Henry decide to write a revolutionary book together, intended to challenge convention and the law, they are both caught in relationships stalked by guilt and shame. Yet they share a vision of a better world, one that will expand possibilities for men and women everywhere.
Their daring book threatens to throw John and Henry, and all those around them, into danger. How far should they go to win personal freedoms? And how high a price are they willing to pay for a new way of living?
Birthright by Charles Lambert (ARC, Gallic Books)
Sixteen-year-old Fiona wants for nothing: hers is a life of comfort and privilege. But not of happiness. Her already distant relationship with her mother is stretched further by the sudden death of her beloved father. When she discovers an old newspaper clipping of an unknown woman with a little girl who looks exactly like her, she sees her chance to escape and find her true family.
Aided by Patrick, her charming but manipulative boyfriend, she tracks down her sister Maddy, in Rome. And with her, the mother she always dreamed of.
But to Maddy this strange girl wearing her face seems to want more than to reconnect. She seems to be stalking her every move and wants to claim Maddy’s life for her own. Maddy wants nothing to do with this unsettingly familiar stranger. Unfortunately, those around her have other ideas.
Caught in a game of cat and mouse, Fiona and Maddy are both fascinated and repulsed by one another. But they aren’t the only ones playing and soon the girls must decide who to trust, and who to protect. Will blood prove thicker than water?
The Echo Chamber by John Boyne (Penguin)
What a thing of wonder a mobile phone is. Six ounces of metal, glass and plastic, fashioned into a sleek, shiny, precious object. At once, a gateway to other worlds – and a treacherous weapon in the hands of the unwary, the unwitting, the inept.
The Cleverley family live a gilded life, little realising how precarious their privilege is, just one tweet away from disaster. George, the patriarch, is a stalwart of television interviewing, a ‘national treasure’ (his words), his wife Beverley, a celebrated novelist (although not as celebrated as she would like), and their children, Nelson, Elizabeth, Achilles, various degrees of catastrophe waiting to happen.
Together they will go on a journey of discovery through the Hogarthian jungle of the modern living where past presumptions count for nothing and carefully curated reputations can be destroyed in an instant. Along the way they will learn how volatile, how outraged, how unforgiving the world can be when you step from the proscribed path.
Perfume River by Robert Olen Butler (No Exit Press)
Robert Quinlan is a seventy-year-old historian, teaching at Florida State University, where his wife Darla is also tenured. Their marriage, forged in the fervor of anti-Vietnam-war protests, now bears the fractures of time, both personal and historical, with the couple trapped in an existence of morning coffee and solitary jogging and separate offices.
For Robert and Darla, the cracks remain under the surface, whereas the divisions in Robert’s own family are more apparent: he has almost no relationship with his brother Jimmy, who became estranged from the family as the Vietnam War intensified.
Robert and Jimmy’s father, a veteran of WWII, is coming to the end of his life, and aftershocks of war ripple across their lives once again, when Jimmy refuses to appear at his father’s bedside.
And an unstable homeless man whom Robert at first takes to be a fellow Vietnam veteran turns out to have a deep impact not just on Robert, but on his entire family.
The Coldest Warrior by Paul Vidich (No Exit Press)
In 1953, Dr. Charles Wilson, a government scientist, died when he “jumped or fell” from the ninth floor of a Washington hotel. As his wife and children grieve, the details of the incident remain buried for twenty-two years.
With the release of the Rockefeller Commission report on illegal CIA activities in 1975, the Wilson case suddenly becomes news again. Wilson’s family and the public are demanding answers, especially as some come to suspect the CIA of foul play, and agents in the CIA, FBI, and White House will do anything to make sure the truth doesn’t get out.
Enter agent Jack Gabriel, an old friend of the Wilson family who is instructed by the CIA director to find out what really happened to Wilson. It’s Gabriel’s last mission before he retires from the agency, and his most perilous. Key witnesses connected to the case die from suspicious causes, and Gabriel realizes that the closer he gets to the truth, the more his entire family is at risk.
On What Cathy Read Next this week
Currently reading
Planned posts
- Blog Tour/Book Review: Bellatrix by Simon Turney
- Top Ten Tuesday: Most Anticipated Books Releasing in the First Half of 2023
- Book Review: My Father’s House by Joseph O’Connor
- Book Review: The New Life by Tom Crewe
- Book Review: My Mother’s Shadow by Nikola Scott
What Cathy Read Next... 