#TopTenTuesday Most Anticipated Books Releasing July to December 2023 #TuesdayBookBlog

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl.

The rules are simple:

• Each Tuesday, Jana assigns a new topic. Create your own Top Ten list that fits that topic – putting your unique spin on it if you want.
• Everyone is welcome to join but please link back to That Artsy Reader Girl in your own Top Ten Tuesday post.
• Add your name to the Linky widget on that day’s post so that everyone can check out other bloggers’ lists.
• Or if you don’t have a blog, just post your answers as a comment.

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This week’s topic is Most Anticipated Books Releasing During the Second Half of 2023. This topic is both a blessing and a curse: a blessing because it offers me the opportunity to find out what bookish bounty is on its way, and a curse because it means I end up adding even more books to my wishlist. Links from the title will take you to the book on Goodreads in case you want to add it to your To-Read shelf. All titles are available to request on NetGalley.

The Well of Saint Nobody by Neil Jordan (Apollo, 3rd August)

William Barrow finds himself in lonely retirement in West Cork. Once an internationally renowned pianist, a terrible skin disease has attacked his hands and made it impossible for him to perform.

Tara is a piano teacher with barely enough pupils to pay the month’s rent. In the local café, the elegant writing of a job advertisement catches her ‘WANTED. HOUSEKEEPER.’

She begins to work in William’s house, keeping to herself the knowledge that they have met three times before, encounters that have changed her life. He is oblivious to this, while she spins tales of the well discovered in his back garden and of a mythical saint, of the healing powers of the water and the moss that surrounds it.

But as the moss begins to heal William’s troubled hands, the lines between legend and reality begin to blur, secrets resurface, and past and present collide in unexpected ways.

Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo (Canongate, 10th August)  

Flor has a gift: she can predict, to the day, when someone will die. So when she decides to host her own living wake – bringing together her family and community to celebrate her long life – her sisters Matilde, Pastora and Camila are concerned. What has she foreseen?

But Flor isn’t the only one with a secret. Matilde has tried to hide the extent of her husband’s infidelity for years, and now must confront the true state of her marriage. Pastora – always on a mission to solve her sisters’ problems – needs to come to terms with her past. And Camila, the youngest sibling, has decided she no longer wants to be taken for granted. Alongside their struggles, the next generation of Marte women face their own tumult of family obligations, infertility, and heartache.

Spanning the three days prior to the wake, Family Lore traces the intertwining stories of these sisters and cousins, mothers and daughters, aunts and nieces, to ask the ultimate question: what does it take to live a good life, for yourself and those you love?

North Woods by Daniel Mason (John Murray, 19th September)

A single house deep in the woods of New England. Over 400 years, it will be home to… a young Puritan couple on the run, an English soldier with a dream, inseparable twin sisters, a lovelorn painter, a lusty beetle, a desperate mother, a haunted son, a ruthless conman, and a stalking panther.

Buried secrets and inevitable fates. Madness, dreams, and hope. The dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive . . .

A Day of Reckoning (A Time For Swords #3) by Matthew Harffy (Head of Zeus, 5th October)

AD 796. The high seas are a deadly place full of foes. Sailing in search of an object of great power, Hunlaf and his comrades are far from home when they are caught up in a violent skirmish against pirates.

After the bloody onslaught, an encounter with ships from Islamic Spain soon sees them escorted under guard to the city of Qadis: one of the jewels of the Emirate of Al-Andalus, the true destination of their voyage.

Al-Andalus is a realm of learning and incredible wealth. Hunlaf believes the Emir’s lands hold the key to his search, but his task is not a simple one. There are dangerous games at play, and to achieve his goal, Hunlaf and his allies must walk a difficult path where friends and enemies alike are not always what they seem – and where a weapon deadlier than any yet seen could change the future of all the kingdoms in Europe.

Byron and Shelley by Glenn Haybittle (Cheyne Walk, 9th October)

The characters in Glenn Haybittle’s first collection of short stories are all caught in moments of life that bring about a revelation of identity. A young woman who after the war catches sight of the guard who knocked to the ground her blind grandfather on the platform at Auschwitz. The backstory of the man accused of murdering Martin Luther King. The experience of a young girl on Kristallnacht and the subsequent tragic upheavals in her life. A dance teacher accused of sexually abusing one of his young female students. A man constrained to return to his mother and look after her while she goes through dementia. A CIA operative grooming a patsy to take the blame for an assassination.

Beautiful, moving and humorous, the stories are set all around the globe – spinning from Kansas City, Jerusalem, London, Venice, Prague and Hamburg to Florence, Memphis, Rome, Paris and Provence.  

Wolves of Winter (Essex Dogs #2) by Dan Jones (Head of Zeus, 12th October)

For the Dogs, the war has only just begun.

Caught up in the siege of Calais, in the midst of a brutal eleven-month blockade of a small port on the French coast, they are no longer blindly walking into the unknown. But the men still have more questions than answers about what faces them – and why.

What are they really fighting for? And why does the king care so much about taking such a small French town? The Dogs aren’t paid to ask questions but in their work, they have the means to make people talk.

Soon, their journey will reveal who really wants this war to last for a hundred years. And as the battle rages, they hear the first, faint, chesty rattle of a natural disaster that is sweeping towards the Dogs and their world . . .

The Socialite Spy by Sarah Sigal (Lume Books, 19th October)

London, 1936. Socialite and journalist Lady Pamela More pens the popular ‘Agent of Influence’ column, writing wittily about fashion and high society. For her latest piece, she interviews Wallis Simpson, the newly crowned king’s American mistress. That’s when she’s approached by MI5. Her mission: spy on the royal couple and report on their connections with Nazi Germany.

As she navigates the treacherous world of international espionage, Pamela uses her skills of observation and intuition to infiltrate Wallis’ inner circle. But Europe is unstable, and international spies lurk on every corner.

Does Pamela have what it takes to survive the currents of espionage? Or is she in over her head?

Run to the Western Shore by Tim Pears (Swift Press, 3rd November)

Britain, AD 75.  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…

The Unspeakable Acts of Zina Pavlou by Eleni Kyriacou (Head of Zeus, 9th November)

They say she’s killed. They say she’s guilty. She says nothing.

London, 1954. Eva Georgiou has just returned from her shift at the glamorous Café de Paris, when she’s summoned to her second job: Greek interpreter for the Metropolitan Police. There, she is tasked with representing Zina Pavlou, a Cypriot woman who has been accused of the brutal murder of her daughter-in-law who has been bludgeoned, strangled and then set alight.

As Eva works on the case as Zina’s translator, her concern grows that the case may be more complicated than it seems. Then Zina drops a bombshell: she’s been accused of murder once before, years ago in Cyprus.

While Eva’s obsession with the case deepens, so does her bond with Zina. And soon she will discover that when you lend your voice to an accused murderer, it comes at a devastating cost.

Held by Anne Michaels (Bloomsbury, 9th November)

1917. On a battlefield near the River Aisne, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory – a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night, his childhood on a faraway coast – as the snow falls.

1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near another river – alive, but not still whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and endeavours to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures: ghosts whose messages he cannot understand.

So begins a narrative that spans four generations, moments of connection and consequence igniting and re-igniting as the century unfolds. In luminous moments of desire, comprehension, longing, transcendence, the sparks fly upward, working their transformations decades later.

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