My Week in Books – 8th October 2023

On What Cathy Read Next last week

Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was Reading Goals I Still Want to Accomplish Before the End of the Year.

Wednesday – I published my review of historical novel, Adama by Lavie Tidhar. 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 shared my Five Favourite September 2023 Reads.

Saturday – I took part in the monthly #6Degrees of Separation meme, forging a chain from I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith to A Wake of Crows by Kate Evans. 

---

New arrivals

A bumper week thanks to a trip to Henley Literary Festival and Henley’s excellent Oxfam Bookshop. 

Mrs Quinn’s Rise to Fame by Olivia Ford (ARC, Michael Joseph)

Jennifer Quinn has a secret. Her love of baking has just won her a spot as a contestant on a primetime TV show. It’s only the second time in fifty-nine years that she’s kept something from her beloved husband Bernard.

She’s about to be whisked into an unfamiliar world of cameras, timed challenges and celebrity judges. She could be in with a chance of being crowned the best baker in Britain.

But, as Mrs Quinn’s quiet ambitions turn into unexpected stardom, the other secret she’s been keeping is in danger of resurfacing. It was supposed to stay hidden forever.

Will Mrs Quinn rise to the challenge? Or, will her success become a recipe for disaster?

Sweetness in the Skin by Ishi Robinson (ARC, Michael Joseph)

Fourteen-year-old Pumkin Patterson lives in a two-room house in Kingston Jamaica with her devoted grandmother, her beloved Aunt Sophie, and a mother who could not care less about her. When her conniving estranged father shows up Pumkin’s only real escape is baking – while making sweet potato pudding and apple turnovers she can forget the fighting at home.

When Aunt Sophie is offered the chance to move to France, she promises to send for Pumkin as soon as she can afford to. But when things take a turn for the worse in Pumkin’s household, she’s determined to raise the money herself. Her mother is determined to make her stay, but will her friends, neighbours and talent for baking be her escape?

Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín (Viking)

It is Ireland in the early 1950s and for Eilis Lacey, as for so many young Irish girls, opportunities are scarce. So when her sister arranges for her to emigrate to New York, Eilis knows she must go, leaving behind her family and her home for the first time.

Arriving in a crowded lodging house in Brooklyn, Eilis can only be reminded of what she has sacrificed. She is far from home – and homesick. And just as she takes tentative steps towards friendship, and perhaps something more, Eilis receives news which sends her back to Ireland. There she will be confronted by a terrible dilemma – a devastating choice between duty and one great love.

Trespasses by Louise Kennedy (Bloomsbury)

There is nothing special about the day Cushla meets Michael, a married man from Belfast, in the pub owned by her family. But here, love is never far from violence, and this encounter will change both of their lives forever.

As people get up each morning and go to work, school, church or the pub, the daily news rolls in of another car bomb exploded, another man beaten, killed or left for dead. In the class Cushla teaches, the vocabulary of seven-year-old children now includes phrases like ‘petrol bomb’ and ‘rubber bullets’. And as she is forced to tread lines she never thought she would cross, tensions in the town are escalating, threatening to destroy all she is working to hold together.

Pure by Andrew Miller (Sceptre)

A year of bones, of grave-dirt, relentless work. Of mummified corpses and chanting priests. A year of rape, suicide, sudden death. Of friendship too. Of desire. Of love . . . A year unlike any other he has lived.

Deep in the heart of Paris, its oldest cemetery is, by 1785, overflowing, tainting the very breath of those who live nearby. Into their midst comes Jean-Baptiste Baratte, a young, provincial engineer charged by the king with demolishing it. At first Baratte sees this as a chance to clear the burden of history, a fitting task for a modern man of reason. But before long, he begins to suspect that the destruction of the cemetery might be a prelude to his own.

Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller (Penguin)

1976: Peggy Hillcoat is eight. She spends her summer camping with her father, playing her beloved record of The Railway Children and listening to her mother’s grand piano, but her pretty life is about to change.

Her survivalist father, who has been stockpiling provisions for the end which is surely coming soon, takes her from London to a cabin in a remote European forest. There he tells Peggy the rest of the world has disappeared.

Her life is reduced to a piano which makes music but no sound, a forest where all that grows is a means of survival. And a tiny wooden hut that is Everything.

---

On What Cathy Read Next this week

Currently reading

---

Planned posts

• Book Review: Byron and Shelley: Stories by Glenn Haybittle
• Blog Tour/Book Review: Wolves of Winter by Dan Jones
• Blog Tour/Book Review: The Murder Wheel by Tom Mead
• Book Review: Sanctuary Motel by Alan Orloff