On What Cathy Read Next last week
Monday – I made another trip Down the TBR Hole.
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.
Thursday – I reflected on the recently announced longlist for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2023.
Friday – I published my review of Butler to the World by Oliver Bullough.
New arrivals
Since I’ve been on holiday for two weeks, please make yourselves comfortable as this may take some time…
The Drums of War (Thomas Tallant #3) by Michael Ward (Sharpe Books)
London 1642. The King has fled London with the drums of war ringing in his ears. Across the country, lines are being drawn and armies raised.
Influential royalist Lady Carlisle switches sides and presses spice trader Thomas Tallant and his partner Elizabeth Seymour into Parliament’s service.
Soon Thomas faces double-dealing in his hunt for a lethal hoard of gunpowder hidden on the river, while Elizabeth engages in a race against time to locate a hidden sniper picking off Parliamentary officers at will in the city.
The capital also witnesses a vicious gang of jewel thieves take advantage of the city’s chaos to go on the rampage, smashing homes and shops, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. They hand pick their targets but refrain from selling any of their loot. There are more questions than answers.
When war finally erupts, Elizabeth is caught in the brutalising carnage of Edgehill while Thomas joins the Trained Bands in their defence of the city. As he mans the barricades at Brentford, in a desperate rearguard action to repel Prince Rupert’s surprise attack, he realises the future of London rests in the hands of him and a few hundred troopers.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth believes she has identified the jewel thief and goes underground to trace his hoard. But all is not as it seems.
Hokey Pokey by Kate Mascarenhas (eARC, Head of Zeus via NetGalley)
February, 1929. The Regent Hotel in Birmingham is a place of deception and glamour. Behind its six-storeyed façade, guests sip absinthe cocktails on velvet banquettes, spying on their surroundings in the gilt mirrors and perfectly polished tableware, while the hotel’s red-jacketed staff scurry through its lavish corridors to ensure the finest service is always at hand.
In the early evening, a psychoanalyst checks in under a pseudonym: Nora Dickinson. Nora is young, diligent and ambitious. Though she doesn’t see herself as a liar, she is travelling with an agenda. Having followed the famous opera singer, Berenice Oxbow, from Zurich to Birmingham, she’s determined not to let her out of her sight.
But when a terrible snow storm isolates the hotel – and its guests – from the outside world, the lines between nightmare and reality begin to blur and Nora will find herself face to face with a past she thought she had long left behind…
Sepulchre Street (Rachel Savernake #4) by Martin Edwards (eARC, Head of Zeus via NetGalley)
How can you solve a murder before it’s happened?
‘This is my challenge for you,’ the woman in white said. ‘I want you to solve my murder.’
London, 1930s: Rachel Savernake has been invited to a private view of an art exhibition at a fashionable gallery. The artist, Damaris Gethin, known as ‘the Queen of Surrealism’, is debuting a show featuring live models pretending to be waxworks of famous killers. Before her welcoming speech, Damaris asks a haunting favour of the amateur sleuth: she wants Rachel to solve her murder. As Damaris takes to a stage set with a guillotine, the lights go out. There is a cry and the blade falls. Damaris has executed herself.
While Rachel questions why Damaris would take her own life – and just what she meant by ‘solve my murder’ – fellow party guest Jacob Flint is chasing a lead on a glamorous socialite with a sordid background. As their paths merge, this case of false identities, blackmail, and fedora-adorned doppelgängers, will descend upon a grand home on Sepulchre Street, where nothing – and no one – is quite what it seems.
No Place To Hide by J. S. Monroe (eARC, Head of Zeus via NetGalley)
You can shut the doors.
Adam lives a picture-perfect life: happy marriage, two young children, and a flourishing career as a doctor. But Adam also lives with a secret. Hospital CCTV, strangers’ mobile phones, city traffic cameras – he is convinced that they are watching him, recording his every move. All because of something terrible that happened at a drunken party when he was a student.
You can close the blinds.
Only two other people knew what happened that night. Two people he’s long left behind. Until one of them, Clio – Adam’s great unrequited love – turns up on his doorstep, and reignites a sinister pact twenty-four years in the making…
But once it begins, there’ll be no place to hide.
The Letter Reader by Jan Casey (eARC, Head of Zeus via NetGalley)
She read their secrets during the war. Now she cannot forget them…
1941. London. Keen to do her bit in the war, Connie Allinson joins the WRNS and is posted as a letter censor. Her task: to read and alter correspondence to ensure no sensitive information crosses enemy lines. At first, she is not sure she’s up to it, but is soon drawn in by the letters she reads, and their secrets…
1967. Doncaster. Bored of her domestic life, Connie desperately wants a job, but her controlling husband Arthur won’t hear of it. Looking for an escape, and plagued by memories of letters she read during the war, she makes a bid for freedom and starts secretly tracking down their authors. Will uncovering their past give Connie the key to her present? And will she be able to find them all before Arthur discovers what she is keeping from him?
The Spy Across the Water by James Naughtie (ARC, Head of Zeus)
Will Flemyng, originally trained as a spy, is now British ambassador to Washington. Meanwhile, his older brother Mungo is recuperating from a heart attack in their beloved Scottish highland family home, and Abel, the youngest of the three, has died mysteriously in America. Abel’s unexplained death sets in motion an unstoppable chain of events, beginning with an unexpected glimpse of a face at his funeral.
Soon Will finds himself on a dangerous journey into his clandestine past, from conflict in Ireland to the long shadows of the Cold War. Will possesses a silky veneer, but he often doesn’t know who to trust, nor who trusts him. Now he finds himself alone once again as duty forces him to risk everything…
Why has the past come back to haunt him now?
Three Gifts by Mark A. Ratcliffe (eARC, époque press)
If you could save the life of a loved one by trading in years of your own life, how many years would you give? How many lives could you save? Would you know when to stop?
Francis Broad has done just that and has negotiated the day of his death, now he must come to terms with the decisions he has made.
Three Gifts explores one man’s attempt to live a good life, his sense of responsibility, gratitude and what it means to love.
The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng (eARC, Canongate via NetGalley)
It is 1921 and at Cassowary House in the Straits Settlements of Penang, Robert Hamlyn is a well-to-do lawyer and his steey wife Lesley a society hostess. Their lives are invigorated when Willie, an old friend of Robert’s, comes to stay.
Willie Somerset Maugham is one of the greatest writers of his day. But he is beleaguered by an unhappy marriage, ill-health and business interests that have gone badly awry. He is also struggling to write. The more Lesley’s friendship with Willie grows, the more clearly she sees him as he is – a man who has no choice but to mask his true self.
Run to the Western Shore by Tim Pears (eARC, Swift Press via NetGalley)
Set in Britain in AD 72, Run to the Western Shore tells the story of a young Roman slave, Quintus, and Olwen, daughter of the chief of a local tribe. Quintus, long exiled from his people, has travelled great odysseys in the retinue of a powerful man, and although a citizen of nowhere, is a man of reason, fluent in many languages. Olwen, imperious tribal royalty, is rooted in her native land – a volatile warrior, fiercely attached to the natural world.
Promised to a powerful Roman by her father as part of a peace treaty, Olwen flees during the night, taking Quintus with her. Hunted by an army, the two make their way across the country, living off the land, heading for the western shore…
Written in spare but evocative language, Run to the Western Shore is a tale of quest and struggle, but also an ode to the land and a love story about the reconciliation of opposites in times of need.
The Sinner’s Mark (Nicholas Shelby #6) by S. W. Perry (eARC, Corvus via NetGalley)
Treason, heresy and revolt in Queen Elizabeth’s England . . .
The year is 1600. With a dying queen on the throne, war raging on the high seas and famine on the rise, England is on the brink of chaos. And in London’s dark alleyways, a conspiracy is brewing. In the court’s desperate bid to silence it, an innocent man is found guilty – the father of Nicholas Shelby, physician and spy. As Nicholas races against time to save his father, he and his wife Bianca are drawn into the centre of a treacherous plot against the queen.
When one of Shakespeare’s boy actors goes missing, and Bianca discovers a disturbing painting that could be a clue, she embarks on her own investigation. Meanwhile, as Nicholas comes closer to unveiling the real conspirator, the men who wish to silence him are multiplying. When he stumbles on a plan to overthrow the state and replace it with a terrifying new order, he may be forced to make a decision between his country and his heart . . .
The Romantic by William Boyd (Viking) Longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2023
Born in 1799, Cashel Greville Ross experiences myriad lives: joyous and devastating, years of luck and unexpected loss.
Moving from County Cork to London, from Waterloo to Zanzibar, Cashel seeks his fortune across continents in war and in peace. He faces a terrible moral choice in a village in Sri Lanka as part of the East Indian Army. He enters the world of the Romantic Poets in Pisa. In Ravenna he meets a woman who will live in his heart for the rest of his days. As he travels the world as a soldier, a farmer, a felon, a writer, a father, a lover, he experiences all the vicissitudes of life and, through the accelerating turbulence of the nineteenth century, he discovers who he truly is.
This is the romance of life itself, and the beating heart of The Romantic.
On What Cathy Read Next this week
Currently reading
Planned posts
- Book Review: The Paris Sister by Adrienne Chinn
- Blog Tour/Book Review: Cut Adrift (Jen Shaw #2) by Camilla Bruce
- Book Review: Ponti by Sharlene Teo
- #6Degrees of Separation
- Book Review: Nothing Special by Nicole Flattery
What Cathy Read Next... 