#WWWWednesday – 14th June 2023

Hosted by Taking on a World of Words, this meme is all about the three Ws:

• What are you currently reading?
• What did you recently finish reading?
• What do you think you’ll read next?

Why not join in too?  Leave a comment with your link at Taking on a World of Words and then go blog hopping!

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Currently reading

The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane (Sceptre) Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2023

In September 1883, a small town in the South Australian outback huddles under strange, vivid sunsets. After a dust storm, a dreadful discovery is made: six-year-old Denny Wallace has gone missing.

As they scour the desert and mountains for the lost boy, the residents of Fairly – newlyweds, landowners, farmers, mothers, artists, Aboriginal trackers, cameleers, children, schoolteachers, widows, maids, policemen – confront their relationships with one another and with the ancient landscape they inhabit.

The colonial Australia of The Sun Walks Down is unfamiliar, multicultural and noisy with opinions, arguments, longings and terrors. It’s haunted by many gods – the sun among them, rising and falling on each day in which Denny could be found, or lost forever.

The Wall (City of Victory #3) by Adrian Goldsworthy (eARC, Aries via NetGalley)

Britannia, AD 117: Roman centurion Flavius Ferox is trying to live a quiet life of dignified leisure, overseeing his wife’s estate and doing his best to resist the urge to murder an annoying neighbour – until someone else does it for him. Dragged back into a life of violence, Ferox finds himself chasing raiders, fighting chieftains and negotiating with kings, journeying far into the north just as war breaks out.

With the new emperor, Hadrian, sending agents from Rome, the whole world seems to be changing: old friends become enemies, enemies claim they are friends, and new and deadly threats lurk in the shadows.

When, five years later, Hadrian himself comes to Britannia to inspect his great wall, a new war erupts suddenly, dividing tribes and families. Ferox is the only one who can save the emperor – but with his family, and his own life, in danger, Ferox must first decide whose side he is on…

The Voluble Topsy, 1928-1947 by A. P. Herbert (ARC, Handheld Press)

The Voluble Topsy collects A P Herbert’s The Trials of Topsy (1928), Topsy MP (1929) and Topsy Turvy (1947) in one volume for the pleasure and admiration of a new generation.

It is the late 1920s. Topsy is a girl about town, a society deb, a dashing flapper. She writes breathless, exuberant letters to her best friend Trix about her life, her parties, her intrigues, and the men in her life. She deploys her native acumen and remarkable talent for kindness as well as being a doughty fighter for what she thinks is right (she hides a fox from the Hunt in her car). Then Topsy is unexpectedly drawn into politics, and to her amazement, she is elected as a member of Parliament.

Topsy’s extensive social life, her adventures in and out of the House of Commons (and her audacious attempts to legislate for the Enjoyment of the People), and her wartime activity as the mother of twins were recorded faithfully by the great comic writer A P Herbert as a series of satires in Punch.

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Recently finished

The Geometer Lobachevsky by Adrian Duncan (Tuskar Rock Press) 

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What Cathy (will) Read Next

Voices of the Dead (Raven, Fisher & Simpson #4) by Ambrose Parry (eARC, Canongate via NetGalley)

Edinburgh, 1854, and a killer stalks the streets.

Body parts have been found across the city – a foot in the Surgeon’s Hall, another beneath a debtor’s floorboards, more pieces in the soil of a freshly filled grave – and Will Raven, assistant to the great Dr Simpson, is being asked questions about the crime.

His day job is demanding enough, striving to make his name as an obstetrician, and his home life with a second child on the way is exhausting. But Will usually finds the company of his colleague Sarah Fisher, a young widow and fellow-trainee, reviving. She is unrepentantly curious about all things: medicine, upcoming scientific advances like mesmerism, and details of this strange crime. So what is it about this killing that is beginning to turn Will into a man he doesn’t recognise?

As the clues converge and all the evidence begins to point towards a dark connection between Will’s past and Sarah’s own investigations, both must use their full skills to prevent the most terrible crime of all . . .