On What Cathy Read Next last week
Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was Favourite Audiobook Narrators.
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 shared my review of crime thriller, The Monk by Tim Sullivan.
New arrivals
Quite an influx this week as a result of a trip to Winchester for Winchester Books Festival and some NetGalley approvals.
In Memoriam by Alice Winn (Viking)
It’s 1914, and talk of war feels far away to Henry Gaunt, Sidney Ellwood and the rest of their classmates, safely ensconced in their idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. At seventeen, they’re too young to enlist, and anyway, Gaunt is fighting his own private battle – an all-consuming infatuation with his best friend, the dreamy, poetic Ellwood – not having a clue that Ellwood is in love with him, always has been. When Gaunt’s German mother asks him to enlist as an officer in the British army to protect the family from anti-German attacks, Gaunt signs up immediately, relieved to escape his overwhelming feelings for Ellwood.
The front is horrific, of course, and though Gaunt tries to dissuade Ellwood from joining him on the battlefield, Ellwood soon rushes to join him, spurred on by his love of Greek heroes and romantic poetry. Before long, their classmates have followed suit. Once in the trenches, Ellwood and Gaunt find fleeting moments of solace in one another, but their friends are all dying, right in front of them, and at any moment they could be next.
The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller (Fig Tree)
Neffy is a young woman running away from grief and guilt and the one big mistake that has derailed her career. When she answers the call to volunteer in a controlled vaccine trial, it offers her a way to pay off her many debts and, perhaps, to make up for the past.
But when the London streets below her window fall silent, and all external communications cease, only Neffy and four other volunteers remain in the unit. With food running out, and a growing sense that the strangers she is with may be holding back secrets, Neffy has questions that no-one can answer. Does safety lie inside or beyond the unit? And who, or what is out there?
While she weighs up her choices, she is introduced to a pioneering and controversial technology which allows her to revisit memories from her life before: a childhood divided between her enigmatic mother and her father in his small hotel in Greece. Intoxicated by the freedom of the past and the chance to reunite with those she loves, she increasingly turns away from her perilous present. But in this new world where survival rests on the bonds between strangers, is she jeopardising any chance of a future?
The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane (Sceptre)
In September 1883, a small town in the South Australian outback huddles under strange, vivid sunsets. Six-year-old Denny Wallace has gone missing during a dust storm, and the entire community is caught up in the search for him.
As they scour the desert and mountains for the lost child, the residents of Fairly – newlyweds, landowners, farmers, mothers, artists, Indigenous trackers, cameleers, children, schoolteachers, widows, maids, policemen – confront their relationships with each other and with the ancient landscape they inhabit.
Girl Friends by Alex Dahl (eARC, Head of Zeus via NetGalley)
Rules for the girls’ trip:
1) No kids
2) Out-of-office on
3) Keep the drinks flowing
4) DON’T TELL ANYONE WHAT WE’VE DONE
When Charlotte and Bianka meet, they quickly become inseparable. Wanting to bring fresh energy into her life, Charlotte invites Bianka on her annual girl’s trip to Ibiza with her childhood friends. They arrive wanting to break the routine, to escape the monotony of everyday life. To drink too much, to flirt with strangers, to live life dangerously. To take things too far.
No one could have planned for just how far these women were willing to go… Or how spectacularly this trip will ricochet through their lives back home. They say that what happens in Ibiza, stays in Ibiza – if only that were the case…
Banyan Moon by Thao Thai (eARC, Quercus via NetGalley)
When Ann Tran gets the call that her beloved grandmother, Minh, has passed away, her life is already at a crossroads. Ann has built a seemingly perfect life. She lives in a beautiful lake house and has a charming professor boyfriend, but it all crumbles away with one positive pregnancy test.
With both her relationship and carefully planned future now in question, Ann returns home to Florida to face her estranged mother, Hu’o’ng. Under the same roof for the first time in years, mother and daughter must face the simmering questions of their past, while trying to rebuild their relationship without the one person who’s always held them together.
Running parallel to this is Minh’s story, as she goes from a lovestruck teenager living in the shadow of the Vietnam War to a determined young mother immigrating to America in search of a better life. And when Ann makes a shocking discovery in the Banyan House’s attic, long-buried secrets come to light as it becomes clear how decisions Minh made in her youth affected the rest of her life and her family.
The Bookbinder of Jericho by Pip Williams (ARC, Vintage)
What is lost when knowledge is withheld?
In 1914, when the war draws the young men of Britain away to fight, it is the women who must keep the nation running. Two of those women are Peggy and Maude, twin sisters who work in the bindery at Oxford University Press in Jericho. Peggy is intelligent, ambitious and dreams of going to Oxford University, but for most of her life she has been told her job is to bind the books, not read them. Maude, meanwhile, wants nothing more than what she has. She is extraordinary but vulnerable. Peggy needs to watch over her.
When refugees arrive from the devastated cities of Belgium, it sends ripples through the community and through the sisters’ lives. Peggy begins to see the possibility of another future where she can use her intellect and not just her hands, but as war and illness reshape her world, it is love, and the responsibility that comes with it, that threaten to hold her back.
The Ghost Ship (The Burning Chambers #3) by Kate Mosse (eARC, Mantle via NetGalley)
Piracy. Romance. Revenge. Across the seas of the seventeenth century, two seafarers are forced to fight for their lives
The Barbary Coast, 1621. A mysterious vessel floats silently on the water. It is known only as the Ghost Ship. For months it has hunted pirates to liberate those enslaved by corsairs, manned by a courageous crew of mariners from Italy and France, Holland and the Canary Islands.
But the bravest men on board are not who they seem. And the stakes could not be higher. If arrested, they will be hanged for their crimes. Can they survive the journey and escape their fate?
A sweeping and epic love story, ranging from France in 1610 to Amsterdam and the Canary Islands in the 1620s, The Ghost Ship is a thrilling novel of adventure and buccaneering, love and revenge, stolen fortunes and hidden secrets on the high seas.
On What Cathy Read Next this week
Currently reading
Planned posts
- Book Review: The Chosen by Elizabeth Lowry
- #TopTenTuesday – The First 10 Books I Randomly Grabbed from My Shelf
- Book Review: The Letter Reader by Jan Casey
- My Five Favourite April 2023 Reads
- #6Degrees of Separation
What Cathy Read Next... 
I just got my copy of Pip Williams’ Dictionary of Lost Words, and am looking forward to reading it. This new one also looks good.
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