On What Cathy Read Next last week
Monday – I shared my review of Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf, my book club’s choice for last month.
Tuesday – Once again I strayed from this week’s ‘official’ Top Ten Tuesday topic instead sharing a list of the Ten Books by Irish Authors.
Wednesday – I welcomed author Karen Jewell to my blog to talk about her debut novel, In the Garden of Sorrows. And 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 published my review of the first in a new historical adventure series about Roman general Agricola, Invader by Simon Turney.
Friday – I shared my review of Sufferance by Charles Palliser.
New arrivals
Two eARCs and a prize from the Bookmarks team for reaching Emerald level
Under the Banner of Valor by Gary Corbin (eARC courtesy of the author)
When a fanatical sniper takes aim at women entering family planning clinics, Val risks everything to protect her closest friend.
Valorie Dawes and the WAVE Squad get called into action after Clayton’s family planning clinics receive ominous threats: Close the clinics, or else.
Valorie takes this threat personally, as her closest friend since childhood, Beth, discloses that she’s pregnant and is considering an abortion.
Can Val support her friend and keep her safe from the armed madman? Or will Beth’s stubborn recklessness thrust her into harm’s way?
Bonjour, Sophie by Elizabeth Buchan (eARC, Corvus via NetGalley)
It’s 1959 and eighteen-year-old Sophie is determined that now is the time for her real life to start. Her existence in the village of Poynsdean, Sussex, with her austere foster-father, the Reverend Osbert Knox, and his frustrated wife Alice, is stultifying. She finds brief excitement in an illicit love affair, but soon realizes that if she wants to live life on a bigger canvas she must take matters into her own hands.
She dreams of escape to Paris, the Wartime home her mother fled before her birth. Getting there will take spirit and ingenuity, but also offers the chance to discover more about her family background, and perhaps find a place where she can finally belong.
When Sophie eventually arrives in the city of her dreams it’s both everything she imagined, and not at all what she expected.
Burma Sahib by Paul Theroux (Penguin)
Before George Orwell was Orwell – the pen name he took on becoming a writer – he was Eric Blair, an unlikely policeman in Burma. Nineteen years old, unusually tall, highly intelligent, a diffident loner fresh from Eton, Blair stood out amongst his fellow trainees in 1920s Mandalay.
It was here, over five years in the narrow colonial world of the Raj – a decaying system steeped in overt racism and petty class conflict – that Eric Blair became the George Orwell we know: an anti-imperialist, a socialist and a writer of rare commitment.
The inner journey he made in these years is remarkable, but in the absence of letters or diaries from the period, this richly complex transformation can only be told in fiction, as it is here by Paul Theroux in one of his most striking and accomplished novels.
Drawing on all his powers of observation and imagination, Paul Theroux brings Orwell’s Burma years to radiant life, tracing the development of the young man’s consciousness as he confronts both the social, racial and class politics of his colonial colleagues, and the reality of the Burma beyond, which he yearns to grasp.
Through one writer, we come to understand another – and to see how what Orwell called ‘five boring years within the sound of bugles’ were in fact the years that made him.
On What Cathy Read Next this week
Currently reading
Planned posts
- Book Review: Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein
- Book Review: Diva by Daisy Goodwin
- Book Review: Clear by Carys Davies
What Cathy Read Next... 
Oh… I’ve read several of Paul Theroux’s travel books, but only one book of his fiction, the short story collection called The London Embassy. I wasn’t overly impressed by that, so I never got around to reading the other fiction book of his I have on my shelf “My Secret History” (partly because it is LONG). Still, this sounds pretty good.
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Sufferance sounds scary but plausible in this scary day and age. I’m curious how it ends so I’ll see if the library has it. I look forward to your review of Hungry Ghosts.
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